I’m not sure how to spell exhilarate. Or weird.

When my children don’t answer me for the fifth time, I’m not certain whether it’s best to yell, laugh, cry, explain to them in detail my descent into madness, or throw a pillow at their heads. (I do however know that the “Jessica” phenomenon, where parents of tantruming toddlers suddenly mention a Jessica and watch the tantrum halt in its tracks, IS applicable for older children and can be used during a backseat car-fight.)

I haven’t the foggiest how you’re supposed to care enough to clean candlesticks when they’re gobbed with wax. Warm water + self-hate? No thank you. I’ll go with “butterknife + project discontinued by rage” the way god intended.

Speaking of, if pressed, I could fake an answer, but I really don’t know what a Higher Power is. Today, candidates include wildflowers, peanut butter, the red lantern, a game of charades, and our long-suffering guinea pig, Albert, whose love for the world is such that his face remains apparently open and bright in spite of everything.

I’m so deeply uncertain in the appointment making arts that I forget my own name and why I am calling immediately when someone picks up. “Actually, Kevin, you don’t happen to have any idea why I called, do you? WAIT— it’s something about a car. Or an echocardiogram. Look around. Are you in a mechanic’s or a doctor’s office right now?”

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I am daily uncertain whether screen-time is the ruination of the world or the salvation of the family.

Rice. I have never once felt any kind of certainty about how to cook rice, in spite of having read hundreds of instruction panels on boxes and bags. The mysteries of rice raze my brain every time they enter my eyes and heart.

Does anyone know what a tablespoon of peanut butter looks like? I have a sinking fear that this particular uncertainty in me is important to uphold. It may be a structural uncertainty. As in: there is perhaps a very good reason I am unable to be certain of this thing.

Guinea pig genitals are FAR more complicated to tell apart than one would imagine. I’m telling you, these pigs have spent hours of their life upside down while I puzzle, and I don’t believe I’m actually stupid. It’s not fair to them, or to me. We may be running an accidental pet store soon. No lemonade stand for us.

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And these are just a few in my ceaseless parade of uncertainties. (It does not throw candy.)

When you add in the issues on which I have multiple and conflicting certainties, we’re really off to the races.

Regarding physical violence among children, for example, I am of so many minds I should be awarded my own post office. One of these certainties is that if they touch each other one more time I’m going to set something on fire. Another is that it’s incidental, a nothingburger, let them sort it out, natural part of life and largely to be ignored if no one’s bleeding uncontrollably. Another is that the perp should apologize. Another is that there’s never a clear perp if you get enough back story. And a particularly rich pairing of certainties I apparently have is that a) it’s entirely impossible to prevent physical violence among children and b) it’s entirely possible to prevent physical violence among children if you’re a good enough mom. THAT ONE’S FUN.

On the topic of seeing people, a) I would rather die, and b) I will die if I don’t.

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Regarding writing a novel, a) I am doing just fine, b) I am a complete idiot, c) I am AMAZING at this what are you talking about, d) I will take the disastrous secret of this book to the grave, and e) I think I’ll have it ready to send out before the end of the year.

Regarding the best way to support what remains of my mental health on any given day, I am absolutely certain BOTH that I should REST and also GET UP AND MOVE. (In both cases, IMMEDIATELY.) Sometimes this mashup results in trying to clean the garage and napping on a pile of old boat cushions I’m trying to restack. Other times it results in going out for a walk and sitting down on the shoulder of the road with my feet in the ditch to micro-nap while I look at watercress and someone’s toppled recycling.

Oh, and that, too: recycling. It’s clearly a moral imperative. It’s also obviously a complete racket. The dissonance between the intensity of these two certainties sometimes means the item in question, say, a yogurt container, which I’ve just washed very poorly, gets lobbed towards the trash and recycling corner of the kitchen and lands between the garbage and the recycling bag, forcing me to REMAKE the torturous assessment at a later time. This whole process is also known as the twelfth circle of hell.

So, that’s all a thing. I’ll just never have a talent for certainty.

If, however, we remove the attendant feature of having to be right about the outcome, when it happens, in order to ratify the certainty as certainty, and speak instead of the feeling of the process of knowing something to be true and good and beautiful and correct, then I believe we’re talking about something more like conviction.

And that I am eminently capable of.

I have a deep and abiding conviction, for example, that this cannot be, and will never be, a tablespoon of peanut butter.

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Even when I can’t stand my kids and they can’t stand me, and we are all 100% correct about the assholes around us, I think we do pretty well.

Because at the very least that’s the truth. It is true that we all periodically escalate from unwitting Muppets to dust devils of rage, butthurtness, selfishness, and/or incapacity, whether we can tie our shoes or not.

What is less forgivable than allowing this slide from ok to not ok (and, it’s worth pointing out here, therefore back again) is to hide it, or any other truth about who and what we are, from ourselves or others.

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I’m not talking about going around with my sword blazing, being cruel in the name of honesty. I’m a skilled fibber when it’s kind. And I’m not talking about beating skeletons out of the closet with a broom to clack around in the town square. Privacy is an important option.

There is a kindness that has to do with allowing the truth to stand, irrespective of what’s palatable or how anyone may respond, even and maybe especially when it feels less than awesome.

When we try to skip over an experience, by not acknowledging it or by duct taping it and stuffing it in the trunk of the car, it does seem to go away, for a while, but generally speaking, gremlins are not satisfied with going gentle into that good night. An experience denied is usually merely an experience delayed or attenuated. (And, often, amplified.) But there is also reason beyond trying to avoid getting bitten in the butt to welcome all types of experience, not just the ones that feel good or easy.

We tend to think that what is good is to only be good. That what is desirable is to only be desirable.

I think what is good is to be true. And what is desirable is to be.

So can I just go out there and start shrugging and being a constant mess?

Yes.

Because in the manure of the compost pile is where things get their giddyup for growing. And I didn’t show up to remain what I was when I arrived. It’s the transit that’s true.

Annie Dillard writes,

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

In the longer context of the quote, it’s clear that part of what Dillard is talking about is the schedule, the tenacity and regularity with which we can attend to our lives, the invented thing between whose ribs our moments hang.

And that’s useful for the writer, or other kind of artist, or anyone.

But something else I see in this quote is the “this hour, and that one,” which I’m naming as the desirable and the undesirable. If we don’t allow both, there is no dimension at all.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but to get the great stuff, you gotta do the shit stuff.

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Dillard says of these many different hours of our lives, later in that same paragraph,

Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

What she’s pointing to is how sameness creates heft and power, how repetition grows the backbone of a life.

What I also find to be true, inside of this truth, is its opposite: note that there are articulations between the vertebrae, that each knob of bone needs to be different, distinct, in order to make the joinings, and become the miraculous invention that keeps the most fully sentient beings on the planet ambulating.

So I tell you:

Over the course of 35 minutes, I just assisted two humanoids in their transit from sleep to school bus, by way of crooning, open curtains, fans turned off. By way of gentle encouragement, loud encouragement, and barking. By way of brushing tangles and sniffing unders to assess for clean-enoughness. By way of oatmeal and waffles, made to order and mostly uneaten.

I asked one to go find the towel in the front seat of the car (it is wet-n-wild day, the last day of school), whereupon she exited the house, leaving the door open, to spend the remainder of her morning pulling sweet pea flower heads off their necks and arranging them in wilting mosaic on the driveway behind my car.

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I asked the other to put his shorts on, whereupon he exited the kitchen naked to go find his guinea pig, get it out of the cage, spraying pissed-on pine shavings across the floor in the process of the animal’s retrieval, and then return to the kitchen with the pig to not-eat his oatmeal.

I wrote barely legible cards for their teachers and jammed them under reused, kinked ribbons wrapped around compost bags (we didn’t have any nice gift bags) stuffed with paper towels, shipping cold-packs, and un-sterilized jars of strawberry jam, which itself is runny (I guess I didn’t have enough Cert-o powder), but which the children really did pick some of the berries for, and stir the jam, maybe, and lick the pot, certainly.

I wrote pick-up notes that did not contain any of the necessary information (child’s full name, date, time, teacher name, retrieval person, signature)— just “this kid will be pickup today” with a smiley face and what passes for my signature I suppose but looks more like a misguided “OMG.”

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IF my children had listened, it would have felt quite nice. IF I had prepared better for the last day of school prior to their final first grade departure, I would have felt less frantic.

And also:

I would not have a wilting mosaic, evidence of my daughter’s sweet and deeply odd mind, made by her delicate and sure fingers, tucked between driveway stones.

I would not have gotten to watch the guinea pig’s lips doing their little shuffle-off-to-Buffalo around a celery stalk while noting the grease-slick of my son’s head and opting not to deal with it.

I would not have made the ill-fitting, chilled lumps of gift for the teachers, adorned with used ribbon, and then had to rush through their thank you cards, the frantic process of which actually freed more truthful writing from my meatbag-mind matrix, and allowed me to write Love instead of Thanks for the sign-off.

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I think what makes Dillard’s pattern of life “blurred,” which I think is also to say layered in, accreted, and dimensional over time, is, yes, the repetition and relative sameness of the daily living.

I think what makes it “powerful,” though, is the variation, the departures from what’s intended, or wished, or held as standard. It’s in our movement between these—the same and the different, the expected and the unexpected, the wished for and the undesirable, the great stuff and the shit stuff— that we move beyond living, into aliveness.

So I’d say definitely be responsible and kind and refrain from yelling obscenities. Definitely get your shit together before the last day of school. Definitely try to shape children who respond to your requests and demands. Have nice gift bags ready, work on a signature that looks like a name instead of an explosion, wash your kids’ hair, encourage focused meal consumption, use enough pectin in your jam, and sterilize the jars.

And also, I would say this: don’t.

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I was prepared not to write this. Because I’m not a genius. Also, lack of clean laundry, having to pee, CHILDREN.

Also there is no time, and I’m so flattened by the mess of life I left the car trunk open in the dark driveway last night standing through the storm like a kid with a giant mouth that was trying to eat rain. And also I’m supposed to lead a field trip today about a thing I care about (birds) in a place I care about (The Cornell Lab of Ornithology) for first graders—to be clear, because I volunteered— which is all together maybe one of my worst nightmares.

So I was going to skip.

And then I thought a few things, including

—we’re all going to die

—maybe just do what might be good, a little

Namely, today, to read a poem and take it with me like a raindrop to the eyeball: quick and clean, startling reminder of whatever-it-is we need to remember.

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But we forgive them for several reasons. One: they are cute. Another: they forget every year, so at this point it’s actually getting very funny.

It was fun to get the Happy Anniversary text from my father that made us both freeze like cartoon villains where we stood (I out on a walk and the male specimen back at the house doing the two- to three-hour preparation to decide to go for a run). We were happy idiots, receiving the good news from the Land of Wits, as we paddled in Amnesiac Harbor, completely unsuspecting of the happy day it was. And then we were gifted with it.

Would it have been as fun if we’d remembered? Some planned flowers and cards? Maybe. And also, no. It was as if the day handed us our own forgetting as a cuddly offering: silly goose, here ya go! And we got to hold our flat palms to our chests and gasp a little, looking around at the ditch weeds and messy house with many shy blinks, as we accepted an award we didn’t expect to win and breathlessly thanked anyone and everyone for getting us where we are today.

We got to receive our life like a sweet-tempered guinea pig to the lap—hapless, unassuming, and ready for celery— rather than chase it around trying to get it to do something it clearly has no aptitude for.

It all puts me in mind, as I often am, to wonder why we do things the way we do, on repeat. Which also puts me in mind of one of the better questions I’ve heard in my life:

“Why is everyone always looking for the right word all the time? Why isn’t anyone looking for the wrong word?”

This was one of my poetry teachers in graduate school, Dean Young. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this question, both on the page while writing poetry books and a novel, and also, interestingly, elsewhere.

Recently, on a walk, I was trying to learn more of the names of the ditch weeds (ditch weeds feel important to me) and I was beginning by naming all that I did know or might know, and there was one little errant tuft I was staring at and thinking I know that one, somewhere in here, but I could not dredge up any information except a rhythm, a sound pattern, in my brain.

“Well, give me whatever you do have on this sucker, then,” I said to myself, and the reply was “OK, but remember, you asked for it.” [Drumroll] And then the answer I got: “Cornered Mugwump.”

Reader, it was a “Wild Parsnip.” But “Cornered Mugwump” is better. It is not in any way the right word combo; it is very clearly the wrong one, and also, better.

Which begs the question: what all are we missing when we’re trying to get it right? Well, for one thing, surprise wedding anniversaries. And for another, cornered mugwumps.

The question is also adaptable to many situations. For instance, it can be adapted to:

“Why is everyone always looking for a bed to sleep on? Why isn’t anyone looking for a nice garage floor?”

Or “Why bring the right grilling supplies? Why not bring the wrong ones?”

Or “Why play catch with a ball? Why not with an owl?”

Or “Why make every single snack for the kids yourself? Why not let them figure it out once in a hot while?”

Or “Why have an adult put the new pine shavings in the guinea pig cage? Why not let the kids do it?”

Friends, it is almost summer, and I have many, many questions.

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Namely, here are just a few things that took me three or more tries:

—Learning that if a pig’s name is supposed to be Peanut, you will not be able to make it Pickle (this actually took me three weeks)

—Getting the pediatric dental surgery scheduler to call me back (six tries and three voice messages)

—Cutting a chapter of my novel down from 12k to 8k words (five work sessions)

—Getting my husband to start using emojis (two decades)

—Putting up a makeshift curtain over the kitchen sink where the sun has burned out all adult retinas in the house (three weeks)

—Getting my children to respond on the first or second request rather than the tenth or not at all (seven years and the concerted elimination of the words “please”, “let’s”, “could we”, “how about”, and “I need you to”)

—Starting to treat incoming butt-dials not as disappointments or inconveniences but surprise communications from an old friend (“aww, butts like me!”) (about 25 years)

—Giving up on adding too many healthy things to my kids’ smoothies and making them significantly grosser than they need to be and consequently having to eventually throw most of it out (just kidding I will never do that hahahaha)

—Figuring out that it’s actually better and moves our lives more smoothly to let my son go straight to the weedwhacker after school than to try and put him off until after “the fun things I have planned” (two weeks of fights)

—Learning to JUST SAY YES ONCE IN A GODDAMN WHILE to things that have been hard NOs, like can we have ice cream for snack / wanna hang out / can we meet up / would you like to try doing anything at all outside your house and routine (a lifetime)

—Asking people who are a way bigger deal than I am if they would be willing to help me out (turns out some are! I scored a total reach of a blurb for my next poetry book, Flesh & Language, which will be out in early 2027!) (also a lifetime)

—Doing what feels good and right for a book cover (this took me three books. The first, although I did end up loving the cover, was a process the press achieved independently of my input and I didn’t argue even though that felt awful; the second felt fine but I also did the easiest thing to do, which was to use a picture I already had rights to; the third has been a surprising and lovely process of reaching out to an artist in Mexico whose work I imprinted on while writing the book, and conversing with him in Spanish cough ok google translate to purchase rights to an image of his for use by a designer at the press in the making of my cover)

I realize I am late to the game here but because I am terminally shy and tend to either DO IT SELF or RUN AWAY, I didn’t know how amazing it can feel to put money in another artist’s hands to place your two arts in conversation, and to achieve a meaningful meeting of selves in the process (also a lifetime)

So. With no further ado, I give you the cover reveal for my upcoming poetry book, with the reminder that I was terrified the whole time, both writing the book and securing the art for the cover, and it was absolutely worth doing all of that to learn that I didn’t need to be terrified, and I could in fact be very excited:

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44: Um… that’s three miles and 500 feet of climbing.

7: MOM WE NEED TO

44: It would take us probably two hours.

7: WE’RE GOING TO CATCH A CHIT-MUNK

44 : Sure, go ahead and try!

7: WE WILL KEEP THE CHIT-MUNK

44: You have guinea pigs

7: WE WILL KEEP IT IN A CAGE IN OUR ROOM

44: How many donut holes can I fit in my purse

*
—Mile 0.5, 300 feet elevation gained—

7: CAN WE JUST GO HOME

44: No

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*

—Mile 0.75, 350 feet of elevation gained—

7: HOW MUCH MOSS AM I ALLOWED TO TAKE WITH ME

44: You’re not

7: I PEELED IT UP ALREADY CAN YOU PUT IT IN YOUR PURSE

44: No

7: THEN WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO LIE ON IT FOR A WHILE

44: ok

*

—Mile 1, 400 feet of elevation gained—

44: That’s a hemlock. Look at the needles, all flat and sort of lacey.

7: PUT IT IN YOUR POCKET

44: ok. That’s called a specimen.

7: WILL YOU CARRY MY SHOES

44: No.

7: WHY AREN’T YOU HELPING US CATCH THE CHIT-MUNK

44: They’re too fast.

7: THIS IS THE MOST BORING DAY EVER

44: Walk around the puddles please.

*

—Mile 1.5, 500 feet of elevation gained—

7: MY SHOES ARE TOO MUDDY WILL YOU CARRY MY SHOES

44: No

7: I’M GETTING BACK PROBLEMS FROM CARRYING THESE HEAVY SHOES

44: That sounds serious

7: CAN I GET A FERN SPECIMEN

44: Yes

*

—Mile 1.75, top of trail—

44: I found a fern specimen—

7: THAT IS THE WRONG KIND OF FERN

44: Oh.

7: WHEN HE GETS HIS TOOTH SURGERY IS HE GOING TO STAY HOME FROM SCHOOL

44: Probably for a day, maybe two.

7: THAT IS NOT FAIR

44: The rule is that when you’re sick you stay home and when you’re not you go to school.

7: I’M NOT WALKING ANOTHER STEP

44: It’s fine to be mad but we don’t get split up in the woods.

7: THEN I WILL WALK AHEAD OF YOU MEAN HORRIBLE PEOPLE

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*

—Mile 2, 200 feet of elevation lost—

7: MY TOOTH HURTS

44: I’m sorry, it was probably the donut holes

7: WHY DID YOU GIVE ME JUNK YOU SHOULDN’T GIVE ME JUNK

44: Maybe if you eat this Pirate’s Booty it will clear the sugar

7: YOU HAVE PIRATE’S BOOTY FOR HIM AND NOT FOR ME??

44: I had popcorn for you and you already ate it

7: THAT’S NOT FAIR

44: I have this orange

7: I DON’T WANT AN ORANGE

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*

—Mile 2.5, 300 feet of elevation lost—

7: THIS IS THE WORST DAY EVER

44: You’ve almost made it 3 miles! You’re like professional hikers!

7: CAN WE BRING THIS PYRAMID SHAPED ROCK WITH US

44: That’s a twenty pound rock

7: PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE

—Mile 3, trail complete—

7: HERE’S THE THING IS WE’RE GOING TO NEED SEPARATE TVS WHEN WE GET HOME

44: Dinner first then TV

7: THAT’S NOT FAIR

44: You can tell your teachers tomorrow that you did the whole rim trail!

7: WENDELL MAKES FUN OF MY ROTTEN TEETH I’M GOING TO FEED HIM SUGAR FOR BREAKFAST LUNCH AND DINNER

*

—Home, bedtime—

7: CAN WE DO THE RIM TRAIL AGAIN TOMORROW?

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1. People can wait. For me, moving out of the way as if I’m radioactive is as strong a reflex as the thing your shin does when the doctor hits your knee with the little plastic triangle on a stick. My children: “enjoy the back of the top of my head while I stand in this doorway and survey the land of kerosene in the far hills, mouthing lyrics to a song I’m writing about poop and how stupid my sibling is.”

2. People need invitations. “Would you like to play with me?” is not enough. They have to know you really mean it, and be clear on what you have to offer. Try: “Will you play with me? We’re ghost cats. And you’re saving us from the most dangerous lab in the world, founded in 1817, on Rat Pangea.” When that doesn’t work, start meowing.

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3. Dress up or down, as desired. Everything is made up and no one’s going to the police station for wearing a white, ermine-trimmed tunic with antique brooches on it to first grade. Likewise, there are seasons for the lacy dress, and these are shaped inside the mind, not given on the calendar. When it is not lacy dress season today, go with the bat wings. Also: a gaucho hat is the best hat, with many purposes such as cowboy, king, farmer, superhero, fisherman, bad guy, and antique dealer.

4. Old things are beautiful. They tell me, over and over, “new stuff is junk, Mom. We need to go to the antique store.” And I keep finding that even when it smells like mothballs or is doomed to fall apart within hours, I still feel better bringing an item home from an antique or second-hand store than anywhere else. I feel like I’m getting some version of other people’s stories, too, almost like asynchronous friends, even if I don’t know who they are. It’s like the ghost of company. Company that doesn’t eat any of my cheese platter.

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5. An obsession with bathing is just one more way humans are brainwashed. If you stink, or are going to put buckets of sand into your bed upon entry, yes, it’s worth the psychic and physical wrestling match with your mother. Otherwise, the hair does fine in cool weather for a month at a time, looks quite nice when left alone and merely brushed, actually, and hands and feet and face etc. can easily be attended to by a passing, swiping, desperate mother while you play. Cut down on worries by throwing bathing out the window, following your own and other people’s noses for major course corrections as needed.

6. Rocks are always permissible. See a rock? A good one? That is your birthright. If you can carry it, and no one stops you from putting it in the trunk, it’s yours.

7. Make sure you have a lot of uncles to talk about, and if you don’t, make some up. Telling people about the uncle who gave you the Shelby Cobra before he died can have a great conversational effect, even if there is no such car and no such uncle. This is a way to make friends and followers.

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8. When no one is responding to your invitations and uncle stories, you can just yell CATS UNITE with your arm in the air and begin running. You will get a few followers on surprise factor alone— those who are willing to do a few hundred yards before knowing what the reason for the stampede is, and by then you’ll have them anyway.

9. Assume the world is a safe place. You will, yes, be incorrect much of the time, but a) Mom will fix it, and b) the number of times it will work out fine means you’ve saved yourself a lot of thinking and worrying. Go ahead and leave your most prized items in random, unsecured locations, walk into a room assuming the best about everyone’s intentions towards you, and treat people as if you’re already old friends. Everyone can just keep up. Forget good intentions: go for leaving a swath of good assumptions like a wide wake behind you. People are often shocked into benignity by its passing embrace.

10. Holding hands is one of the most underrated activities on the planet. Grab some paws nearby and find out how much better a walk gets, how much more deeply people listen to you, and how much more willing they will be to follow you to an unscheduled important thing. Simple, effective, daring. Like you.

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Soon there will be a major motion picture of the Odyssey. No shade on whatever they’re cranking out, I’m sure it’s impressive, but good lord, do they not KNOW about Madeline Miller’s book Circe? OK, the Odyssey is arguably, like, one of the biggest stories known to humankind, but come on, declining to do it Madeline Miller’s way is like saying no thanks I don’t want to eat the best meal I’ve ever had / just hand me that very good sandwich with chips*.”

*I know there are those among my sometimes readers who would scold me for comparing the Odyssey to a very good sandwich with chips, but I believe they aren’t looking right now, so I suppose we’ll just see whether I get away with it in the comments.

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My husband, off duty from ferrying people through the sky in aluminum tubes for a week, has been checking daily for more information on the upcoming film— specifically which actor is to play the role of the sorceress Circe, a book we both read and were hopelessly enchanted by while our children were marinating, and so we lifted the title name and offered it to our infant daughter on the day of her birth and she took it with obviously magical miniature hands.

Part of what the book offers, other than pitch-perfect concepts, characters, structure, sentences, and an audiobook performer (Perdita Weeks, OMG, how??) who could woo a hunk of granite, is that every page is a poem. The Odyssey is a narrative that used a poetic structure for becoming, and Circe is a poem that used narrative structure for becoming.

What this means is that whereas if you take any (poetic) line of the Odyssey you can feel the pulse of action and the flow of narrative moving through it, when you take any page of narrative movement from Circe you can feel the distilled heart of… um… everything in it. I could devote every remaining Substack I have in me to a page of this book and always come out richer. While I don’t plan to do so, of all the wormholes I could topple into, that might be one of the best.

Anyway, today’s gospel comes from page eighty-five:

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(Editor’s note: the expression “for the birds” is used here solely because it sounds good. The saying itself is a bad one because I would give even good stuff to birds. I once had birds I arranged breakfast plates for on antique saucers to fit their moods, but that was another life. Now I toss frozen waffles at children and pray.)

We the people were unaware that we had wanted prizes from Agway. Until we fell out of their good graces. Now the absence of positive regard stings like a nettle to the naked shin.

It is customary in spring for our household to tithe to Agway for mulch, compost (ours stinks because we don’t care for it), seeds, transplants, mower rehabilitation, and replacements for the gloves and shovels we lost in the fall.

But this year the urgency to get to Agway began several weeks before average date of last frost because my daughter has discovered her personal Plant Acquisition Mania— an organ that comes into maturity in people of my lineage long before and sometimes exclusively from the organ for Tending Said Plants. This revelation about my daughter in combination with her brother’s cart fanaticism persuaded their simpleton mother that the after-school activity should indeed be Visiting Agway as the mob-of-two suggested. No problemo.

In my defense, the day before, when we had accidentally stopped by Agway, no one was in the outdoor Garden Center area except the acre of fool’s bait (tender annual transplants before June 1) and a fleet of flaked and bent garden carts. It had been a matter of course to allow the children to use the gloriously various and happily fenced-in property as a country of flowering and utilitarian riches.

The chiminea and large flower pot section was a great city of the west; the rangy native tree section a ghostly forest; the watering can area a friendly village brimming with local commerce. “Welcome to my kingdom,” my son had said, from behind his caster-wheeled best friend, also called a cart. (For a while when he was three or four he had an emotional support rototiller. I think it may have gone to bed with him once.) Yesterday, you see, the children had stayed busy, easily, in and around these landmarks and at the great Oversized Adirondack Chair Monolith.

(Please, by the way, do tell me, what is the purpose of a great Oversized Adirondack Chair Monolith if it is not to be climbed upon? Is it for adults merely to look at and think, “yes, that would be fun, if fun were a thing”?)

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This next day, however, there were several very busy workers in the Garden Center. One was watering plants, another was walking around looking darkly resentful, and one was clearly feeling deeply fraught about a forklift delivery process but trying to make up for her blooming anxiety with an extra telegraphing of Know-how/Capacity involving hands-on-hips and pacing.

I made an audible performance of mothering, as an offering to these variously sour-and/or-bothered looking folk: “Remember, we want to give other people enough space and quiet to do their jobs and enjoy their shopping.”

This was a Level One announcement, and I know now I should have gone straight to Level Three, which would have been “No running or enjoying yourself in any way.” For the wandering resentful one, I should have gone to Level Four, which would have been “sit in the car and do not exist until I get back.”

(Oddly, though, it’s the wandering resentful ones who will also call the cops on you for leaving your kids locked in the car where you can see them for three and a half minutes with the windows cracked, fresh food and water, and an audiobook playing.)

Now, lest you think me to be what I think me to be, which is a Doormat Parent, let me include the tidbit that there were not one but two sets of Other People’s Grandparents shopping at the Garden Center as well, and these individuals all smiled and made appreciative, wry, delighted-anyway, bobble-head-nodding remarks regarding my small village of ruffian wonderment engaging in its rather active wonderment-ing.

Let me also say that Child B is so deft with wheeled items that he was driving a garden cart axle-and-wheels by eighteen months old* in such a way that he could thread the needle between our parked cars at speed with an inch or two to spare on either side, never once dinging any doors with rusty cotter pins. So I am acclimatized to his cart-steering in crowded places and do not fear a collision when other parents might do well to. AND, he had not to my knowledge made contact with any item in the entire realm of his kingdom at the time of his First Great Reprimand.

*

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I felt, before it happened, that perhaps the specter of a nominally engaged Doormat Parent loosely tailing this kid, with her other child in tow, adding transplants to her own cart, transplants she was going to be tithing to the institution with, would perhaps ease the Resentful One’s disconcertment. It did not. RO turned and locked down on the child only, no reference to or acknowledgement of the drifting Doormat, stabbed a finger at the air between them, and said, “NO RUNNING WITH CARTS. THAT IS THE SECOND TIME I HAVE TOLD YOU.”

Lady, I wanted to say, if you think that is running, you have been raised among snails. This child has gears your eyeballs’ capture rate would struggle to process in anything but a lean stack of still-frames. What you have just witnessed is a deeply mild and uncommitted warm-up speed-walk.

The contentious definition of “running” notwithstanding, I let this First Great Reprimand ride, and said nothing, since I have seen enough evolutionary-mismatch parenting reels on Instagram (same smart & sane author on Substack here) to know that what we lack so guttingly in this country is the Village, and in other countries, a more communal approach to the vectoring and caring and shaping of children in public is seen as a support rather than an affront to the parents’ good sense or a criticism. Good, maybe he’ll listen to you. He doesn’t listen to me. Clearly. Have at it, Grumpy Helpful Friend.

We moved on, and my daughter continued to shuttle six-packs of tender annuals to our cart (which we can’t plant because it was twenty degrees a few days ago, and she can’t quite seem to hear my reasoning on this point above the roar of her internal delight). I continued to quietly place the tender annuals back on the shelves each time we went by their Agway-assigned locations, so the overall effect of our opposing tasks was to create a sort of rotating door of plant visitors to the rolling land of our cart. The Grandparents of Others seemed to understand the project, and stood aside in the narrow aisles smiling so we could pass. Again, and again.

Meanwhile, my son returned to the Chiminea and Flower Pot City of the West and began narrating aloud about Criminals and Hot-rods. He engaged partial participation from me over the Native Tree forest, wherefrom he would intermittently emerge, at a barely-lawful speed-walk, with his cart, announcing that I was the police and I should say “there goes that greatest criminal of all!”

I don’t think it helped that he kept introducing his cart loudly as a “tricked out ’64 Dodge Charger I got from my uncle before he died.”

Perhaps what people find even more disconcerting than the physical vitality of the child is his deeply textured narrations, which, if you aren’t used to imaginary dead uncles’ hot-rods doing sudden and allegedly criminal things in the garden center, might cause some vertigo in your reality processing. It might seem that there actually is criminal activity going on.

Editor’s note: to my knowledge, not a single plant was harmed in my children’s wanderings; nothing but the ’64 Dodge Charger itself was displaced. The only item that was bumped and went a little sideways was a rather stupid metal lawn-duck that my daughter accidentally unbalanced while admiring with signature earnest respect. After which event, by the way, she looked unsettled, stroked it with one apologetic hand, and looked to me for whether all was well. I telegraphed full wellness of things and went on.

The problem, I suppose, is that I assessed the situation as stable. I informed the hot-rod criminal that we needed to go in to pay for our items (to which I had added a flower pot, in good faith with the capitalist system, hoping that the sourness I was still somehow noting on the workers’ faces would be mitigated, if by nothing else I’d done so far, by the knowledge that I was about to drop a silly amount of money). I let him know, audibly to anyone near, that he was welcome to stay out here as long as he remained at a walk and did not leave the fenced area. He agreed cheerfully and my daughter and I went inside for all of five minutes to stand in line and pay and come out to the car.

By the time I’d loaded the bags of compost (which even the loading guy looked sour about— maybe the Garden Center workers had radioed in that Doormat Parent was on her way while they were being forced to babysit a dangerous criminal), my daughter had gone back into the Garden Center, as I’d asked her to, in order to tell the hot-rod criminal that we were ready to go. But she didn’t return with him right away, so I wandered across the twenty or so yards between my car and the gaggle of Workers and Children assembled near the Adirondack Chair Monolith.

The Second Great Reprimand must have been serious, indeed, because it was quiet, and the worker was bent over towards my son, and it concluded with the confiscation of the cart. To be fair, I do not know exactly what transpired while I was paying and loading mulch a few yards away, but from where I was, I would have heard any large collisions, and I could see no upended lawn decorations or suffering plants. I assumed whatever transgression had occurred was somewhere in between egregious and nonexistent. Once again, the worker made no acknowledgment that Doormat Parent was in fact now present, and offered no information.

Because I do not want my children to think the first order of business is to control or shape other people’s behavior, especially when I don’t know what it is they themselves have done, I called them to the car without engaging the worker who issued the Second Great Reprimand and confiscated the cart (it was the one who was anxious about the forklift delivery and still compensating with arms-akimbo pacing).

I told my daughter, who was now sobbing in her seat and saying she didn’t like people she doesn’t know, that I was sorry I hadn’t walked over with her, and that she was not in trouble. I said that everyone has different ways of being, and our way of being is probably louder and more active than these people are used to, and they were probably just doing their job of trying to keep things neat and quiet for the store. I asked briefly if they wanted to tell me what the worker said, if they thought that might help them feel better (my son was in an extra-nonchalant disposition in order to defend against his shock and shame at having had his very best prize of the week taken away without ceremony). They declined, deeply shocked and chagrinned, and I said OK, don’t worry, Mama should have been there, and this is not your fault.

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We moved on and went home to fill boxes and pots and plant seeds, which led to a whole other disaster story. I will leave that one where it is.

I suppose what I want to say is I get it— oh lordy do I get it— you poor, dear, Grumpy Workers: yes, my children are entirely too vibrant and errant to be set loose in capitalist society.

And also:

Where else am I supposed to take them?

Where else am I supposed to allow them to interface with what has got to somehow pass for their village?

Yes, we can go to sciencenter and playgrounds, and the kiddie section at the library, But after five or six years of that— friends, the exile, for both parents and children, begins to foment absolute madness.

None of us is meant to go into a silo of one way of being. None of us is meant to stay with only the others who are in the exact same predicament as us. If you want my children to become citizens of the world, they cannot learn it exclusively upon a swing set. If you want anyone’s children to become balanced adults in society, they cannot get there by sitting in a padded room with plastic toys and people their own age. If we contain ourselves within the perimeters of what we already are, then that is what we will continue to be.

Also: couldn’t you use a little ’64 Dodge Charger by the lupines in your life? Given that we are all going to die one day?

I know that it’s likely everything you said was perfectly warranted, and that you were just doing your job.

And also, what if your job was about more than getting it right, though? What if everyone’s job included tolerance for mostly-harmless deviation from norms, or even an appreciation that what’s causing the disruption in the first place is often the great and ungovernable heart?

While I appreciate your stewardship of the cart, I wonder how we can also be stewards of the heart.

I know this sounds like new-age passive-aggressive holier-than-thou gentle-parenting disavowed-scold drivel, but I mean it as an earnest, genuine question. And I do get that there really have to be guardrails in place. I know better than anyone that societal norms also help preserve much needed order and sanity, since my kids run roughshod over them all the time and I am keenly aware that we mostly have access to neither much order nor much sanity.

And still, necessary guardrails acknowledged, I want to know: how can we be better stewards of the heart in a culture meant to dominate it?

I will go to the great Oversized Adirondack Chair Monolith and offer my Prayer of Village to the strung-out, dissociated god of capitalism.

If no answers come, at least we will have gotten some fairly rad static-hair out of the deal. You know, for the wonderment of it.

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BUDGE: Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

MOONY: Hi.

BUDGE: Is it OK if I hug you?

There is a tiny nod and a brief mashed face into Budge’s coat.

MOONY: Sparkle rocks.

Moony points at the ground, backs away to scratch at mildly reflective debris near the sidewalk.

BUDGE: Cool! Sparkle rocks!

LEVITT: MAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Levitt cranks out of his handler’s grasp at the school doors and sprints. The handler issues fragments of responsible speech for a few meters and then peters out. Budge waves to indicate reception of Levitt, who is wearing a fluorescent orange backpack about ten years too big for him. It hits his heels as he runs.

LEVITT: CAN I GET A FINGER LOCK

BUDGE: Hi! We’re going to Sciencenter!

LEVITT: A FINGER LOCK

BUDGE: I don’t think Sciencenter has fingerprint locks but they might have something cool. Did you do any chores this week to earn your allowance?

MOONY: He did not.

BUDGE: Did you?

MOONY: The toilet. As usual.

LEVITT: WHERE ARE MY TREATS

BUDGE: I have a few good snacks! Cider! Popcorn the good stuff! Fruit leather! Triscuits and a banana!

LEVITT: I DONT WANT ANY OF THAT

BUDGE: Well maybe you should get in anyway.

Everyone gets in the car. The rest of the pickup line and the buses have all departed. Moony and Levitt take several more minutes to buckle their seatbelts, pausing to hit each other, throw debris, and argue whether it is allowable to LOOK AT SOMEONE LIKE THAT. Budge pulls out of the now-empty lot. There is some relative quiet while Levitt eats the popcorn he DOES NOT WANT.

MOONY: Thank you for the food but I don’t like any of those snacks.

BUDGE: What are you talking about. You loved them yesterday. Yesterday.

MOONY: Well, see, I didn’t feel very good after eating them. It might be the ingredients.

LEVITT (mouth full): YOU SHOULDN’T GIVE US JUNK

MOONY: Can we listen to an audiobook?

LEVITT: DUDE LOOKS LIKE A LADY

BUDGE: We can do a bit of both. We’ll start with Dude because it’s shorter.

MOONY: [noises of disgust]

LEVITT: WHERE ARE WE GOING

BUDGE: Sciencenter! We haven’t been in a while!

LEVITT: I AM NOT GOING THERE WE GO THERE ALL THE TIME WE’VE BEEN A MILLION TIMES I AM NOT GOING

BUDGE: Yelling in the car isn’t allowed.

MOONY: I have to poop.

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LEVITT: I AM NOT GOING THAT’S FINAL

BUDGE: That’s not how we talk to Mama. We’re almost there so we will go to Sciencenter to get to a bathroom and then see how we feel. Can you please get some more food into you.

LEVITT: I NEED HELP OPENING THIS

MOONY: I really have to poop.

BUDGE: We’re almost there. [parks car] OK, run in!

MOONY: I want to finish the chapter though

LEVITT: I AM NOT GOING TO THIS STUPID PLACE [gets out of car, runs towards Sciencenter] LOOK HOW HUGE I AM IN THE WINDOW I AM HUGE

MOONY: Can you help me open this cider

BUDGE: I thought you had to poop

MOONY: I just need a little help Mom. It’s not a big deal.

Eventually everyone is inside the Sciencenter.

LEVITT [from gift shop]: THERE ARE NO FINGER LOCKS IN THIS PLACE

BUDGE: Right. They might have something else though.

MOONY: I want this fox

BUDGE: You got a fox two days ago. A brand new fox. For Easter. From Grandmeg.

MOONY: That’s a borrow.

BUDGE: Nope that was a gift. It’s yours.

MOONY [to Levitt]: Look, they have snakes!

LEVITT: I DO NOT WANT A SNAKE WHERE ARE THE FINGER LOCKS

BUDGE: Remember I said they don’t have locks here, but they might have something else cool. Did you look around?

LEVITT: [Lies in front of registration desk and gift shop] I HATE IT HEEEEERRRRREEEE

BUDGE: Let’s go out to the playground.

STAFF MEMBER: The playground is unfortunately closed. There is still some ice out there.

LEVITT: I HAAAAAATE THIIIIIIIIISSSSSS

BUDGE: Maybe we better go.

MOONY: My fox!!

BUDGE: I thought you had to poop. That’s why we came in in the first place.

MOONY: [shrugs] Not anymore.

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Budge turns to leave. Moony and Levitt follow, Levitt still wailing. Everyone gets back in car.

LEVITT: I NEED A FINNNNGERRRRRRR LOCCCCCCKKKKKK

BUDGE: I really do not understand the finger lock thing. Can you explain the vision to me.

LEVITT: A LOCK FOR MY TREASURE CHESSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTT

BUDGE: Like, a padlock?

LEVITT: YES

BUDGE: OK. Did you do any chores this week to earn your allowance?

MOONY: He did not.

LEVITT: I DIIIIIIID

BUDGE: What did you do?

LEVITT: [……..]

BUDGE: OK, can you do a chore when we get home? If you promise you’ll do a chore when we get home we can go to Agway and get a combination lock with your allowance money.

MOONY: Agway? Ugh. There’s nothing I want there.

BUDGE: There might be.

LEVITT: I PROMISE I’LL DO CHORES I’LL DO ALL THE CHORES

Budge drives the car to Agway.

BUDGE: OK, let’s go get a lock.

MOONY: We want to listen to the audiobook.

BUDGE: Fine. I’ll lock you in and be right back.

MOONY: But what are you going to get for me?

BUDGE: We may have to go to a different place for that.

LEVITT: CAN WE GO TO SKATE PARK

BUDGE: [Goes inside, gets a two-pack of small gold combination locks]

MOONY: Ugh. I don’t want one of those.

LEVITT: CAN YOU PUT IN THE NUMBERS NOW

BUDGE: We can do the programming later.

LEVITT: I WANT IT NOW

BUDGE: Before skate park? Can’t you just ride with them in your pockets? There’s nothing to lock there.

LEVITT: NOW NOW NOW

MOONY: I don’t want to go to skate park.

BUDGE: What if your friend Jonathan is there?

MOONY: [grudgingly reconsiders]

BUDGE: OK what do you want the combination to be?

LEVITT: SEVEN TWO SIX

BUDGE: You need four numbers.

LEVITT: SIX NINE FIVE

BUDGE: Four numbers, buddy.

LEVITT: SIX NINE FIVE SIX

BUDGE: OK, here you go.

LEVITT: WHAT AN AWESOME GOLD LOCK

MOONY: When will we get MY treat? Will we go to Barnes and Noble to get a stuffie?

BUDGE: You have a thousand stuffies.

MOONY: You don’t understand. It’s really special.

BUDGE: Did you do your chores?

MOONY: I did. The toilet, all week, as usual.

BUDGE: We can go after skate park.

They arrive at skate park. Budge sets about trying to get the front wheel back on the bike. The children go climb too high in an ornamental tree.

BUDGE: Here’s your bike and scooter!

MOONY: I won’t be as fast on the scooter.

BUDGE: That’s why we need to do more practice on your bike.

MOONY: I’m not used to it yet.

BUDGE: Correct.

LEVITT: [running past] I’M TAKING MY LOCK TO THE PLAYGROUND

BUDGE: We’re here so you can ride your bike— here’s your bike—

LEVITT: [keeps running to the end of the block. Moony follows]

BUDGE: [yelling after them] I’ll be here with the vehicles! Don’t go past the playground!

There is a small interlude during which Budge can see Moony’s feet flashing over the playground at the top of each swing arc, which seems to indicate Levitt must be somewhere around, since Moony wouldn’t stay if Levitt left. Budge keeps an intermittent eye on the flashing feet while engaging some semblance of correspondence with a friend.

MOONY: [whose head has suddenly appeared at the driver’s side window] I have to go to the bathroom.

BUDGE: Oh come on.

MOONY: Not poop this time!

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BUDGE: [wearily] OK. [Budge gets out of car slowly, grabs long winter coat for a “screen” to do the illegal thing they are accustomed to doing, which is tucking into a ditch on the perimeter of the bathroom-less skate park and letting the kid pee in the ditch behind the curtain of the winter coat. It is a cumbersome process and relies heavily on strangers continuing their long streak of not noticing anything]

MOONY: [working hard behind the coat-screen to hold herself up] Mom I’ve peed all over my pants.

BUDGE: It doesn’t look that bad. It’s what we’ve got, anyway. Pull them up. Let’s go.

MOONY: [Sighs, pulls up leggings too slowly as she emerges from the partial curtain. Someday they are all going to go to jail for this stuff.]

LEVITT: I LOST MY LOOOOOOOCK

BUDGE: Where?

LEVITT: ON THE PLAYGROUUUUUUUUNNNNNDDDDD

BUDGE: What were you doing at the playground?

LEVITT: PLAYYYYYYINNNNNNNNNGGGGG

BUDGE: [Looks at playground, where there are three enormous piles of mulch dumped] I’ll go find it.

MOONY: When can we go to Barnes and Noble?

BUDGE: We are here for skate park. You can ride your scooter. We will go when we’re done. I’ve put in an order for dinner and we will stop by Barnes and Noble on the way to pick it up. We have half an hour. Can you do half an hour on the scooter?

MOONY: [accusingly] Jonathan’s not even here.

BUDGE: I know. Some days he’s not. But we can still have fun.

LEVITT: MYYYYYY LOOOOOOOOOCCCCCCCKKKKKK

BUDGE: I’m going. You guys ride.

MOONY: My helmet pinches my hair.

BUDGE: You’ll work it out. You’re very clever.

Budge goes to look for the small gold lock in the piles of wood chips. Just as she is about to give up because the pickup order notification is about to flash “ready” at her, two things happen: 1) she sees the lock lying on its side on the grass, and 2) Jonathan’s parents pull up.

BUDGE: Hi Jonathan

JONATHAN: ??

BUDGE: My kids play with you. Remember the twins?

JONATHAN: Oh yeah!! You look different.

BUDGE: I haven’t showered.

JONATHAN: […]

BUDGE: They’re right over there.

Jonathan bombs over towards Levitt on his bike, roaring a greeting. The boys exchange snippets of excited language including the words PONTIAC DRAG RACER and FIRE BUTT 2000. They race off on their bikes.

MOONY: They don’t even want to play with me.

BUDGE: It’s just a vehicle issue. It’s hard to go slower on bikes because there’s a scooter too if you’re so excited to see someone and have been waiting all week to play. [Budge looks at phone notification, which has just dinged that the order is being made and will be ready for pickup in ten minutes]

MOONY: Can we go to Barnes & Noble?

BUDGE: We will stop by on our way to pick up dinner in a few minutes. Why don’t you try again with the boys.

MOONY: They don’t even see me.

BUDGE: They’re just excited. You have to make sure they see you.

Moony leaves slump-shouldered to try. Returns crying.

BUDGE: OK, we will walk over to Barnes and Noble quickly and Jonathan’s parents can do the caretaking while we’re gone.

Budge notifies the boys. Then she and Moony run to Barnes and Noble, trying to be as quick as possible. Moony selects some egg-thing that will open into a surprise. Fine fine yes ok let’s go says Budge. They purchase the egg-thing and leave, hurrying. The notification says dinner is ready. They run back to the skate park.

BUDGE: We’ve go to go!

LEVITT: BUT THIS KID IS LETTING ME TRY HIS BIKE

BUDGE: Two minutes!! [Scribbles on a piece of paper yanked from a journal in her purse, addresses Jonathan] This is for your parents, Jonathan. It’s my phone number. We came here all week to find you and we’re so glad to finally see you today but we have to go! If you give your parents this note maybe we can coordinate next time.

JONATHAN: OK. [Leaves, slumping.]

The phone dings again that the order is ready. They’ve lost orders to scavengers before, so Budge agitates, whips a hand in the air to Levitt to indicate leaving-ness, makes loud noises with car doors, prepares trunk to receive scooter and bike.

MOONY: [finally gets the egg-surprise thing from Barnes and Noble open, gasps] It’s just a stupid elephant! [begins to cry loudly]

Levitt miraculously gets into the car somehow. The bike takes more work, with the auto-trunk declining to latch because some sensor is sure it’s not in all the way and is actually a child’s head. Moony is sobbing now.

BUDGE: Listen, sometimes we get disappointed. I’m really sorry it’s not what you expected, but sometimes we choose something that doesn’t work out.

MOONY: [sobbing] I didn’t knowwwww it was going to be a stupid elllleeeeephhhhhaaaaanttttt. The picture on the front was of a tiiiiiiigerrrrrrr. It is a bad idea to trick people! It is mean and unfair!!

LEVITT: I NEED YOU TO PROGRAM THE OTHER LOCK

BUDGE: Not now buddy, I’m driving.

MOONY: [still wailing] Pleaaaaaase just give me anotherrrrr chaaaaaaaancccceeeeee

The phone flashes another notification. Probably that scavengers are dragging the dinner order across the parking lot into the crosswalk to be obliterated. There is no food Budge can think to make at home. She’s desperate now.

BUDGE: OK!!!! If you want to spend all the rest of your allowance money you can try again. But I want you both to know that it makes me absolutely insane that we’re going straight to little kid tantrums whenever something isn’t exactly what we want it to be. Sometimes things aren’t going to be your absolute favorite.

LEVITT: THE NEW LOCK’S NUMBER WILL BE SEVEN FIVE EIGHT

BUDGE: You need four numbers buddy.

LEVITT: SEVEN FIVE EIGHT SIX

BUDGE: We will do it when we get home

LEVITT: NO NOW IT’S IMPORTANT

PHONE: Hi, this is Glen, Jonathan’s Mom. Thanks for the number. He was so excited to play. He’s crying since you had to go!

LEVITT: SEVEN FIVE NINE FOUR

MOONY: [sobbing] Pleaaaaaaase another chaaaaaaaance

BUDGE: Fine. But please don’t pick another egg-thing.

MOONY: I won’t. I am learning.

LEVITT: SIX NINE FIVE SIX

BUDGE: Got it buddy. Thanks.

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What I mean is that as old as this body is, with a neck that has receded into its tenure as heartwood, whatever lives inside it can still be astounded. Gobsmacked. Titillated into near-oblivion in the April fools’ ditch-grass on another goddamn gray-sky, idiotic-wind kind of walk.

I thought it was a Fox Sparrow, not gonna lie. There’s this thing where no matter how nerd-begone you are, it’s not actually the perimenopause cooking up the havoc in your identifier cells when the avian migrants return; it really is just that you haven’t heard the damn thing in a year or two or ten. I frankly don’t expect anyone to remember a sound that dusty on the brain-shelf the second it shows up in the middle of a pine tree where you can’t even see it.

In other words, I forgive me. For the starter misidentification. Even though it irks me. And I accept it as a good donkey accepts her rattling panniers. Birders have got to allow occasional or even frequent mistakenness, or else they become assholes rather than the dearest geeks you can call when something from the sky hits your window and you need encouragement not to put it in a shoebox and try to feed it worms. No, Stephanie, the stunned American Goldfinch doesn’t want your tweezered nightcrawlers; you’re just scaring the bejeezus out of it while it’s already deathly addled.

Anyway the thing in the conifer was not at all a Fox Sparrow. That was an idiot moment. One I have accepted, as detailed.

Next I will disclose another embarrassing thing (this is why you pay me the big bucks) (that’s a joke) which is that I whipped out my phone. The Merlin app is utter witchcraft, and I have betrayed my puritan roots by embracing such devilry. In case you don’t know it, it listens to birds and tells you what they are. Sound in, name out. it’s complete balderdash that an electronic device can do this, but I’m a goner, totally crushed out, that it exists.

Here’s an interlude where I will boast, similarly disrobed in an ungodly way: reader, I am better than the Merlin app1. I am faster, and can hear farther.

Nonetheless, I rely on it when bamboozled. So, reader, I did whip. Opened that app with a thumb on fire.

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Within seconds (if I had been in my right mind—which really I guess is generally a fiction, but whatever— I’d have identified it faster) the app booped up a dry little knowing: the thing was a damned Purple Finch.

Don’t get me wrong, also a nice find, satisfying morsel, but for one thing, it was, like, a tenor Purple Finch or something, like, out busking with a sax bigger than its torso, and for another, well… I forgot, but there was a list in there. A righteous one.

I stood for a good long time, while gravel bits climbed up the heels of my shoes and nestled down in around my socks, laughing at me meanly. They do that, and to spite them, I regularly prove my mettle by balancing on one foot, sock swinging in the winter awfulness, while I dump those fuckers out.

Anway I stood and listened while the wind did the most stupid things. I stood with my mouth open (why do I do this? Somehow it makes me hear better? Something about nose breathing liabilities and intra-head audio interference? Whatever, I was looking dumb, is the point) and I tried to track what this little dude was saying.

He did the thing he was supposed to do, albeit weirdly low-pitched— that happy burbling, gossipy syrup-chatter, and then… I heard a few notes from an American Robin, one that had to be smushed inside the evergreen right next to this little booger. Like, in his lap. I know birds don’t have laps but that’s how close, OK?

It’s true that humans and other large mammalian predators are absolutely miserable at echolocation, what with our stupid symmetrical ears and a pitiful hearing range, but I’m still pretty stinking sure these two sounds— the busking Purple Finch and the chup-chupping American Robin— were issuing from the same tiny slash in spacetime. Wherefore?

Before I could remove my glove and incur the obligatory Reynaud’s while scratching my noggin, another birdsong slipped from this black hole of nonsense: a short fragment of an Eastern Bluebird song. OK, so, now we either had the weirdest invisible interspecies birthday party ever happening in a pine tree not ten yards from me, or something else equally astonishing was happening. I waited and the phenomenon proved itself repeatable. Repeating. I was really starting to get frothy about this, almost snarling with confusion.

Then the little turd gifted me with the one thing, the only thing, that could solve the great mystery: it flew out of the dense pine into a deciduous skeleton immediately above my head. I watched, in relevant danger of getting finch-poop dropped directly into my yawp, while the insouciant magician issued more and more finchy gossip. I tracked its quiver and thrust: yep, that’s him, for sure, the one singing.

And then I watched. While. He. Robined.

I watched As. He. Bluebirded.

Friend, I saw the Purple Finch body squeeze itself to make these other species’ sounds, and I witnessed as the Merlin app was duped. Utterly had. It pronounced confidently, without even the little half-moon icon that indicates some measure of doubt, that it was hearing first an American Robin and then an Eastern Bluebird. Oh the scallywag finch! I am such a fan I would send mail!

There is only one thing I like better than being right and that is being wrong. My god it’s fun. NO ONE TOLD ME IN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF BIRDING THAT PURPLE FINCHES CAN MIMIC. Yet there it was, plain as day in a sleazebag AI round-up summary: “Yes, Purple Finches can mimic the sounds of other birds.”

I would have skipped the rest of the way home if it weren’t for needing the gravel not to win in the long fight over my sad heels. So I walked measuredly. But I let my face do some absurd foray into the upturned stretch, that thing we do in summer maybe? I’ve forgotten. It’s something like the glowing orb in the sky whose name I can’t remember.

The point, I guess, is that they will all come back, the facial calisthenics and the light-blasting sky-thing, and I have living proof that any and all of what returns to us might say things we had thought impossible.

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And for those of you who, like me, will roll your eyes and vow undying hatred of the writer at the paywall that’s coming up, just think of it as getting a poetry class once a month for $5 —because this is pretty much exactly what I do when actually in front of a poetry class— but with no grades, and you can quit anytime. xo, Prof.

PS: anyone and everyone can join the paid list, no questions asked, so if your budget isn’t working in this godforsaken economy in a way that makes signing up for another gd substack possible, just send me an email saying Hey, I’d like to be on that list. Great, I’ll say, and add you.

PPS Thank you, as always, to those who take the moment to click the heart button and tell the beast of the algorithm a thing or two. Go ahead, tell it you want this, not more cellulite dissolver ads.

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Once I figured out what this meant, I had cause to wonder if perhaps I make use of the “if [undesired behavior], then [undesired outcome]” figure a little too often.

As in: “if you keep hitting each other, I will take away TV time,” or “if you keep yelling, we’re leaving the restaurant,” or “if you can’t clean up your toys, I will give them to Mr. Tom” (The neighbor with whom they love to be in cartoonish antagonism, including trips across the field to deliver mason jars of “dangerous potions” to his porch.)

The message my “if you do this, I will do a thing you don’t like” figure delivers is basically “persevere at your own peril.” “Refrain from what you wish to do, or ells.”

Don’t get me wrong, natural consequences are important for kids to encounter so that they don’t become reality tv stars and/or malignant-narcissist/arbitrary-destroyers-of-the-world.

But what I’m seeing, with the icsploding butt, is that I’m reinforcing some things I don’t actually want to reinforce. (Including but not limited to a fear-based sense of the world and a binary take on causality.)

The alternative, unfortunately, is to encourage desired behaviors instead. This is harder to do and takes more time. It is also more effective. But it means you have to live with a lot of bullshit in the meantime. Here’s the secret though: you were living with said bullshit anyway. You were just doing it in a more pissed-off way.

When we concentrate on ending the undesired thing as quickly as possible, we focus on stopping the behavior without considering its source. Sometimes that source is simply that children are assholes. But more often, it is that they need something they’re not getting.

Womp womp. Oops, something they’re not getting. That’s my department. See how that works?

When I’m trying to stop a thing from happening, ASAP, I’m working to change the world around me, that world which is patently stupid and requires my meddling, my control. When I’m trying to encourage the things I need and love in the world, on the other hand, I have to look at myself and how I can support these changes, while appreciating that the world is not, ultimately, under my control.

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More responsibility and less control sounds about as fun as vacuuming out the car. It is also, actually, oddly preferable. Much like a car freed from the cheeto dust that is forming a type of sedimentary food-rock on the pleather.

Once, in graduate school, I used an anonymous student poem in my thesis essay to illustrate a point about language choice, so that I had some material to demonstrate what it looks like when someone does the “wrong” thing. My then-advisor wrote a short note next to this move, one that stuck with me: “It is usually worth showing us the thing, rather than the not-thing.” His mild and understated admonition had the effect of making me feel immediately skanky for throwing a student under the bus.

Why? Because I didn’t have to. It wasn’t necessary. Was my point incorrect? No, it was fine, and well argued. But did I have to cut something down in order to make the thing I desired? Undo one thing to create another? I did not. I did not need to use time and energy speaking judgment or enforcing my view. I could have used that time and giddyup to build, validate, and celebrate the thing I desired instead.

Would that approach stop the student from making a boring poem? No. But neither would cutting them down. And that’s my point: either way, whether we try to stop the undesired outcome or try to redirect toward a desired one, we don’t prevent the undesired outcomes from happening. We only spend more time in the world of the undesired.

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I’m not saying children’s behavior is a beautiful perfect poem and we should look the other way while they draw on furniture and punch each other in the head. I’m saying that to move away from these behaviors, we are in more need of a positive force leading us away from them than a pissed-off one stomping things out in situ.

Most of the time, kids are either already aware that the behavior is undesired or the behavior will resolve/fade into the west on its own in time. Or both. So by spending time on site, stomping things out, I’m actually kind of reinforcing the bad behavior, in a way, by spending time and attention on it, all of which sort of paradoxically dignifies its presence, and gives them attention from Mama, even if it’s… kind of curdled attention.

Because there is no negative in the unconscious, according to Freud. (Dude got a lot of things wrong, but so many things right or mostly right that we should probably be listening. I mean, given how the world is going and all.)

If you want to know what “no negative in the unconscious” means, take a lesson from elementary school teachers and try dealing with a kid running in the hall when they’re not supposed to.

First, yell NO RUNNING (a negative) and see how effective it is. There is usually no or little result, except in the most workable kids. Then, try yelling WALKING BODIES, and see something probably different: the kid’s body gets the message that there is a desired alternative, and can use their own momentum, their underway-ness, to transform towards that thing, rather than having to fall off the cliff of disapproval into a nothingness of guidance.

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If we accept as given that the world is going to contain behaviors and realities we find undesirable, rather than taking the position that we must patrol and enforce the “right” way, we free up some of our inner resources to move into generativity instead of destruction or disallowance.

Will we feel like doormats, and failed parents? Yes. Usually. Mostly. But that shit was going to happen anyway.

So let’s make sure some of our one wild and precious life was spent moving not just away from what frightens or harms or annoys, all of these things we are certain of already, but also towards what we desire, which may also be to say towards all we cannot yet know.

Do it. Or ells yor butt will icsplod.

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I’m not one to sensationalize, but we stayed at the empty farmers’ market until almost six pm.

(Anyone knows it’s important to get home for the dessert tantrum at least half an hour before the bed tantrum so you have time for the diminuendos. But we stuck it out.)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We also stole two chunks of broken marble slab from a heap in the grass under one of the stalls. Could barely carry them. I don’t think anyone saw, luckily, it being the case that no one was around.

Things were thrown onto the pavilion roof. I was pretty sure that was not ok, on account of the clattering. I said please no more of that. They did it a few more times.

A shoe was temporarily lost. I found it, but there was a pretty big dangling question mark about what one of them was going to have on its feet at school tomorrow, since it grows out of everything I buy within a few hours, and, for a while there, for all I knew, one of its two remaining fitting shoes was on the roof of the market somewhere.

Listen, bicycles were put on display in places they should not have been. Honestly, I don’t know how they got them up there. It was impressive. I’d have taken a picture but I didn’t want any evidence on my mobile device in case we were stopped. We do dabble in things like J-walking, right on red during prohibited hours, and heads-out-windows farther than seatbelts should allow.

Dead flowers were picked. And put in places they did not belong.

It brought me back to the year they were even smaller and more impossible and would not leave the field of daffodils at the Children’s Garden, just kept squashing them and wreaking havoc on tender stems, and that car slowed and stopped and I thought this is it, we’re going to the clink, and then the guy who got out was just a professional photographer who wanted to take some portraits of my contrarian goblins to use as promos and give us for free, and sure, I said, so relieved I could have peed myself.

Anyway, there were other scandalous features as well. Several stalls at the empty market yesterday bore the weight of rather dense children on their highest shelving without supervision. I had to get my steps in, see, so while I was on the south end, marching towards morally righteous immortality, they were still somewhere in the middle mucking about, and shit happens. I am good at not noticing as I pass if there is no blood.

An adult rode a child’s bike. Maybe more than was necessary. Knees hitting the handlebars et cetera. But there was a dinger bell, and good tires, and it was red, a new red bike, and the kid wasn’t riding it, so.

The two dudes who were the only ones to come through the pavilion while we were there, friends or lovers or business partners who arrived in different cars and passed through on their way out to the picnic table on the dock to sit for a very long and peaceful-looking meet-up, did not necessarily see that there were children at least tangentially involved in what was going down, just that there was this middle-aged person with tangled hair on a tiny red bike with good tires and a dinger bell traversing the pavilion floor.

A child’s watercolor was left behind in a stall that will be used again after a long winter in just a few weeks. The painting is of a cat, and some mountains, and it is unsigned. The vendor who resumes habitation of the stall will have an anonymous watercolor and about forty stems of dead flowers sticking out of all of the holes in their woodwork to contend with. A confused beauty-bomb without attribution will start that person’s April. What I wish to emphasize is that no one knows whither their judgment upon such subjects may travel.

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And that’s just it: it is the great unknown-ness of the incident, the prolonged phenomenon of ostensibly bike riding at the empty market long past dinner time (damn the time change to a special hell), that really lofts it up and over some of our previous scandals: there were, besides the two dudes, no witnesses.

We are free, therefore, to know it all as we will, without corroboration. Free to paint the stolen marble with maps, to know silently where the mud on the bike wrench came from, to sit at the traffic light upon our late exit with the satisfied silence of people who did not know what would happen when the chucked rocks clattered down the roof of the pavilion, or the stall shelves bore the weight of the seven-year muscle, or the folded-up parent wheeled by, dinging— we did not know.

And we did these things anyway. Maybe, in fact, because.

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The capacity of my children’s minds and bodies— to be still and to refrain from harming each other or issuing extraordinary jungle sound blasts for no reason right in my ear— has run critically low.

One of them glitches out regularly: his body goes into micro-spasms of pent up whatever, and he makes Tasmanian devil noises while flailing like a portable chipper-shredder at anything in his path. The other will be walking as slowly as is humanly possible, as usual, and then look up for no reason and issue a blast of completely unrecognizable noise at the top of her lungs. She sustains it long enough for me to wonder if I’ll just expire right there on the spot from having to endure the purity and decibels of the sound. Asking her to stop is futile because she can’t hear you. She’s become a toucan or something.

“What the—” I manage to mutter, disorientedly, through my stunned and trembling haze.

“Opera,” she says, matter-of-factly, and resumes her sloth-trudge towards more art supplies to scatter to the corners of the earth. (The other day I found her on top of our car with hair-cutting scissors. I really, really just don’t know. She was extremely salty that I took them, though.)

Some kind of deep-brain genetic memory is released into the bloodstreams of people of my husband’s genetic persuasion this time of year. Mud, sleet, confused avian life singing its guts out through the foreboding east wind, and the critical atrophy of hope and sanity all cue them. When they start to throw their bodies against the wall and howl into each other’s faces, when every place we go during the winter to get out of the house has become another grim endurance spectacle, the chemical memory tells them how to keep people of his genetic lineage from chipper-shredding their worlds at the ass-end of winter: light things on fire.

It is my daughter who hears the call of her lineage first. “Can we have a cookout?” she says on a 28-degree, windy, sleeting day.

No one hesitates. The insane toucan opera and the chipper-shredder have been trying to kill each other for forty-five minutes, when they are not complaining bitterly about the really excellent after school snacks I’ve arranged for them on beautiful plates with lots of panache (my own dim genetic memory of how to survive, involving cheese and beauty maybe? Anyway it doesn’t do it for them, not this deep into winter). I pop one of the artisan cheese cubes they have spurned and head for the tinder. Newspaper, egg cartons, kindling that’s had a chance to dry by our woodstove.

I SAW A WAY TO MAKE A GREAT FIRE YOU JUST STACK THINGS LIKE THIS CH CH CH CH CH the other one says, taking his parallel karate-chop hands and “laying” them at right angles to each other all the way up an imaginary stack. He likes to watch survival skills videos on YouTube. Yes, excellent, I say, and point out they will need boots. Before I have finished my sentence, he is gone, outdoors in the wind and sleet in a single layer of cotton. I grab a lighter and wonder where we’re going to get wood dry enough on the frozen swamp of a woodpile. Now both kids have made it to the sleet-covered mulberry tree next to the fire pit, mad with glee at the thought of flames.

I put on the nine layers of clothing I can grab, stuff hand warmers in my pockets (I get reynaud’s if my fingers are exposed for more than six seconds, and this fire is going to take more than that long to persuade into being under the windy ice-drool the sky is spitting).

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I bring my son’s jacket out and have to chase him with it for a while before the fire attempt can start. Then I remember certain knowledge of what it is that mom wants you to do is the death-knell of all compliance, and I leave the coat hanging off the dripping mulberry and turn to the fire pit.

In the disused pit, all the campfire wood from the fall is still stacked. Big rounds of downed yard wood, stacked waist-high, coated in ice. I toss the smallest ones off, examining them for viability. Some might burn, if we can get the fire hot enough. I get down to the bottom and the biggest heaviest rounds are frozen solid to the ground. I make the mistake of kicking one. I nurse my toe while I begin to build my son’s log-cabin gesture-specifications, LIKE THIS MOM, CH CH CH CH CH. On some of the CHs, the smaller rounds roll off each other into the charcoal mud, and he is irate about this, believing, I think, as usual, that I am plotting against him. But we keep at it and eventually have a lopsided, frozen chimney structure into which we can stuff the now only sort-of dry kindling material.

Newspaper and ripped up egg carton and the smallest of our sticks go down into the center, also knocking a few more ribs out of joint and incurring the irate reaction of the child who is now wearing the hood only of his coat, with it trailing out behind him through the half-frozen precipitation, arms flapping as though doing my job of chasing him disbelievingly. Very well, let the jacket do that job; I have a fire to start.

The wood hisses and spits and leaks steam and water and winter sadness. The lichen around its edges gives up slowly the moisture of its sad ice while thick stinking smoke erupts sideways somehow. The child is beyond delighted and begins stuffing wet leaves down the hole. Thus we begin, and thus we continue for several hours.

The crazed opera bird is thrilled, sets up wood rounds as jumps for racing kitties to do “through the worst of the smoke.” She has an imaginary game aesthetic that delights in the braiding of emergency situations, sporting skill, and the cuteness of small furry entities. For a moment she is able to goad her brother into racing around the smoke-pit, leaping in winter boots over the round-wood jumps she’s set up, but very soon he is drawn back to his god-given duty of stuffing wet leaves on top of my fire, trying to douse the very thing that is to save our lives until dinner.

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“Combustion chamber,” he mutters, at different locations in jumbled sentences, as he stuffs the sodden oak leaves through a hole in a cinder block we have next to the fire and pokes them onto the flames with a long stick, very nearly tipping the block over onto the fire. I mention that he may not want to unseat the sort of leaning concrete, and how it could squash our fire and send sparks up that burn people. He hears zero of my words and sprints to get more leaves. I NEED TO FILL MY COMBUSTION CHAMBER.

His sister is sitting in a folding chair we’ve dragged out, which she has placed directly in the plume of smoke. She’s coughing and looking miserable. I ask if she wants to move. She is committed to her vacation spot. The knees of her stretch-pants are all muddy and icing over. She has made a “table” out of a wood round and one of the few pine board scraps I managed to find in the garage. She has placed the hot chai I made for the kids and brought out on top of this table, and if she forgets to put it directly in the center, it’ll go over.

Her brother stops making stinky wet smoke finally to sip the chai, which is excellent, because he specializes in hangriness and tends to refuse nutrient precisely when his brain most desperately requires it. He sits on his own folding chair and knocks the chai over. Then, instead of grabbing it, he watches it drain onto the frozen mud with outrage. MAMA he yells. THAT WAS NOT A GOOD PLACE TO PUT IT.

Soon their father comes out with what he’s been cooking up for our “cookout” back in the kitchen (he’s gone to the store while we’ve been working our smoke factory)— he’s brought onions and mushrooms to brown on a cast iron grill top, lamb burgers, and a blistered cherry tomato sauce with rosemary. This is the kind of meal our children are used to him making, over whatever fire we manage to conjure (likewise, they are used to snap peas and yogurt for dinner when I’m the chef). DAD LOOK AT MY COMBUSTION CHAMBER CAN WE ALWAYS KEEP THIS HERE LOOK ITS A COMBUSTION CHAMBER

Dad does his magic and we have a gourmet dinner on the sodden icy grass-mess beneath us, the sky adamant in its colorlessness and the east wind as foreboding as possible.

The children take a few bites. They go to get more wet leaves for the combustion chamber.

.

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My reply, about all the other days, makes them uneasy. They pivot.

But we will shut the door. They are clever with the non sequitur.

No you won’t, I say, and also, take the bag of coins out of your underwear.

Rats are smart!

I’m sure rats are brilliant, I say. I have heard about the ones who drive little cars and locate bombs, I say. But they also have sharp teeth, I think, and giant testicles that look very uncomfortable and I just can’t, I think.

I pull out the heavy artillery: If you can’t do a chore every day then you aren’t ready for a pet, I say.

Oh, may I clean the toilet? says the one who has no problem doing chores.

I WILL SORT THE ROTTEN FRUIT! says the offender, inventing a chore he likes better than the ones typically on offer. The toilet gets cleaned and the rotten fruit is sorted. The next day, the toilet cleaner inquires about the oven, her other favorite, and the rotten fruit sorter drives the vacuum at a run.

The weekend comes, and chores are happening. I attempt to replace the pets with an allowance. Ten dollars! Spend as you will!

The rabbit lover requests that we go to a toy store. I cannot say no to someone who loves cleaning an oven with infinitely delicate hands. We head east.

There is an interval during which I practice my breathing at Target. The rabbit lover has found a kitty: her 25th cat stuffie. It being her own money, however, I make no remark, or maybe one remark, and then pivot to the panic brewing in the next aisle. When I confirm for the other child that his only desire (a Blaster so big it cannot even lift it) is too expensive, the lid blows off the operation.

NEW THINGS ARE JUNK MOM WE NEED TO GO TO AN ANTIQUE STORE, my son erupts. I check the time. There is an hour until dinner, also known as snap peas and yogurt. I can afford to acknowledge that this dissatisfied customer is correct, new stuff is junk, excepting of course his sister’s cat stuffie, which we buy, and then head south.

When we get to the haunted industrial park woods surrounding the preferred antique store’s new location, the children know which roads to take and navigate for me loudly. We find a parking spot by the ravine edge and totter out.

The children enter the huge industrial space expertly, and my son in his two-sizes-too-large boots begins the urgent, manic clomp of his accustomed circuit. Emboldened by chore money, he drags his companions from stall to stall at a slightly higher pace than usual. My purse keeps falling off my shoulder and by the time we’ve entered the second circuit (he is narrowing in on a target in earnest), the antiquer’s sister begins to complain of sore feet.

I need a fancy potions bottle, he announces at the start of lap three. This is a relief, because the white noise of the conflict-static rising from his head, as he tries to learn what it is that he so very much needs, has been fritzing out his sisters’ and my radio antennae. The declaration of intent at least means we can be of use. OK, fancy potions bottle, and now all three of us are searching with the kind of intensity that makes you drool.

*Note: this child’s main birthday gift was the continually requested antique round-wick oil lamp with a tall funnel and a real glass shade. The other child’s was kitties numbers 23 & 24.

I show the antiquer several very nice, shapely items that look like fancy potions bottles to me, as best I can with his sister riding on my back, but these proposals are disqualified immediately, though he can’t say why. Slowly I come to understand by process of elimination that the desired bottle should also be large, and colorful. I begin to suspect, with no small amount of dread, what I should have known all along, which is that it should also be gilded.

The search has become so narrow at this point that I’m having my first actual fear that we may not find an acceptable prize. Then I hear a shout. The child is standing in front of a twenty-four inch gilded cobalt glass carafe with six matching port glasses.

I gird my loins to check the price tag. To my amazement, it is only $28.

We pause for a brief discussion about the rest of the money he has to his name— roughly forty further birthday dollars, mostly in single bills, which he has such a tendency to use as decoration for forts that we’ve taken to keeping all of it for him in the kitchen junk tin. I reckon aloud that if he adds his fruit-sorting money to his confiscated dollars he will have enough for the carafe and glasses.

He nods sturdily as a stone mason, seizes the slender glass vessel by the neck, extracts it from the display without a sound, and makes for the checkout counter. We are now in the hands of fate. My role at this point is purely supporting. I tail him, sister with the sore feet now riding on my back and six gilded port glasses in my hands.

“Some of my colleagues started at this age,” the salesperson at the register says, eyeballing the glowing carafe owner as she wraps his bounty in sheets of brown paper. Each glass goes into a slot in a spare wine box, and the carafe itself rises above the top of the box like a lone heron surveying us all calmly.

When we get to the car, he says he will hold the box in his lap. No, I tell him, it’s too big and fragile. He clarifies the situation for me with some cellularly felt moans: it is not only an affront but a spiritual severing to separate him from his cobalt carafe on the drive home, which he knows is likely to be nearly twenty minutes with traffic. because I am too tired at this point to endure his grief if I do not, I agree to let him hold the vessel itself.

At home, the carafe and its glasses are unloaded and arranged in various configurations. The favorite setup seems to be the tall slender spectacle at center with acolytes surrounding. There are explorations of the “tinking” sound capacity for each glass, using toothpicks, because we are wise, and do not use metal for the tinking. Then, at last, we begin the pouring portion of the evening.

Kitty 25 watches patiently, the faux-pearl necklace she nabbed at the counter of the antique shop adorning her skinny rainbow neck. Kitty 25 is served first water and then ginger ale and then tea. The evening, astonishingly, goes without incident.

It is the next day, from the far bathroom, that I hear the smashing sound. A slow wail rises and blooms into despair as I rush to the scene. I know several things, before I make it there, just by the particular music of the disaster: that it must be the carafe, that no one is physically hurt, and that it will not be fixable.

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When I arrive in the bathroom, the child is up on the sink stand, holding the neck and handle of the carafe. there are shards and granules and molecules of glass everywhere. I was just trying to fill it, he sobs.

I tell him to hold still and quickly gather the largest pieces and stick them in a small box nearby. I would airlift him out but I know he would refuse. He is honorable this way, and would stay near any maimed loved one as he does by the remains of the carafe.

I make all the musics of empathy and sadness. It’s so sad, I say over and over. Soon, he begins the rage-grief sine wave, alternately roaring about the stupidity of fragile things and sobbing over his loss. It’s no use to try distraction, and he won’t let me hold him. Humor is completely useless here, in the land of desolation. So I sit with him and wait for an opening. Any pause, any stutter, any hesitation in the tsunami. There is none.

I try vacating to let him regulate himself.

Ha.

Then, as usual when my children are inconsolable for extended periods, I do something perfectly ridiculous.

“Would it help,” I say, and close my eyes as I realize what’s about to come out of my mouth, “if I tried to fix it?”

The wailing stops dead. He sniffs.

Oh, sure! Yeah, that’d be great! he says, and jumps down, already on the way to what he supposes are the fixing-grounds.

“It may not work,” I call after him, very clearly, but he is already certain it will. Don’t worry, mom, you can do this.

In the box, there are no fewer than nineteen pieces of glass, some ten inches or more, and others less than half an inch square. All I have is epoxy and desperation.

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I open the windows to the freezing outdoor air, put on a vest and hat, toss some snacks and instructions not to come anywhere near me to the children, assemble toothpicks and paper plates and paper towels, and try to lay out the pieces in the order I think they might need to go.

Each joining, I find out very quickly, really does require that I sand all the edges with 220-grit sandpaper first, or else the piece, no matter how long it’s held or how carefully it’s balanced, simply slides off its neighbor.

Very well, now I am sanding shards of glass, while my son hovers around me like a deerfly, saying Mom I love you, you’re doing amazing, and bumping into me and the table, saying and doing ceaselessly enthusiastic things with his body, all of which disturb and attenuate the process.

This goes on for about three hours, at which point we go somewhere to escape the epoxy fumes. I don’t remember where, likely because I had glue poisoning. There may even be an extra day in there somewhere.

When we return, the multiple assemblages I have made and balanced in various places along the mantelpiece in order to keep them out of reach are still in place, and have remained solid. Maybe it IS going to work??

That evening, of whatever day it is now, I finally get the number of parts remaining to be joined down to three: the carafe proper and the two sides of the base (which are completely gummed over with epoxy smudge but holding steady so no one is complaining). I opt to join one side first, so that the collage can be balanced idiotically from a seltzer package to cure until it’s ready for its final piece.

After dinner, I go back and see that it’s all held together, somehow, and there’s just the final half of the base to join. I sand it, mix the glue (it has to be done in dozens of tiny batches because it hardens so quickly), and line it up. I go to place it in, and it does not fit.

Everything looks almost perfect, but there’s a whole edge along which the angle is just wrong, and if I pursue it and put the glue on anyhow, the base will be too tilted, completely nonfunctional. So I sand it, for twenty more minutes, just hoping that I can somehow bring the differential down enough for the whole jagged rift to click into place. In the end, it doesn’t so much click as it crunches. But nothing falls or shatters.

In the morning, I go to the seltzer box and peer down at the severely damaged, bird-like, glue-smudged artifact. I pick it up and walk over to the table. I set it down. IT STANDS. Nothing falls or breaks or explodes. I poke it. It doesn’t wobble. Soon, it occurs to me that this thing is now about 19% epoxy by weight, and at least that much stronger than it was before.

I yell GUESS WHAT up the stairs to the still-waking chore-doers. I say nothing else. They come thundering down.

The antiquer looks satisfied. He nods. Maybe we can find a piece of sea glass to close that gap in the neck, he says. I agree. For now, the thing has a tracheotomy hole, since there was one final shard we never found. It’s not the kind of edge he can cut himself on, though, so I don’t say anything when he seizes it like a beer stein and carries it to the dining room for its next round of duty.

I suggest mildly that we keep the recovering carafe’s duties light for a while, and the child silently agrees.

About an hour later, after the kids are fed and clothed and bundled and shoveled onto the bus, I get a text from my son’s teacher through the classroom communications app. I have forgotten that it’s his share day, his day to make a presentation to the class about something he cares about. “Could you send me a picture of the ‘blue glass carafe with a twisted bottom and six matching glasses?’” the teacher texts me. I round up what pictures I have and send them.

Now. It should be known that this particular child struggles with debilitating self-consciousness. It’s taken him seven years to quit going into a terrified rage when people sing the birthday song, for example. We hold our breath whenever some well-meaning idiot stranger points out something he’s doing, wondering which bookshelf’s going over in payment for his having to bear the injury of scrutiny or attention.

After school, I get one last text from the teacher. “H was an accomplished presenter today,” she writes. “He sure loves an audience!”

I glance over at the carafe, still standing on the coffee table, waiting for its owner’s return, somehow not falling apart.

In such times, what else can one think, but “cheers”?

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You can make a found poem from anything: a road sign, a concession speech, bathroom graffiti, a restaurant menu. The found poem is — oh goody, I feel a list coming on—a lovely thing for several reasons:

1. No presh. Use words that are already there.

2. Somewhere in the course of American events we were instructed to get ours, to keep up with the Joneses, to beat the other kid in the dance-off, to grab a piece of pie before it was all gone. This zero-sum nonsense robbed us (among other things, like community and sanity) of the deep and abiding pleasure of celebrating the work of others.

3. Man was put on earth to move stuff around.1 The found poem affords us word-blocks to play with. Stuff to move around.

4. The found poem is serendipitous. It feels as though it falls into your lap. In combination with the more agentic block-stacking mentioned in the “move stuff around” part, we can get a real nice blend of control and un-control when working on a found poem, which is good practice for, you know, life.

5. It casts the poet in many roles: discoverer, curator, host, celebrator, among other ones. I like niche functioning, so here we are.

My next poetry book, Flesh & Language2 contains original material in the forms of “belly poems”3 and “skinny poems”4; the third species of poetic beast that threads through this collection is the found poem, and I found almost all of mine in… wait for it… psychology articles.

This is because I find that a) the mind is endlessly fascinating, b) poetry and crazy tend to be pretty tight, and c) psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists are spitting total fire half the time and the world doesn’t seem to notice.

So I thought I’d share with you a few of the found poems from this upcoming book, both as a preview and as an encouragement for you to look at and listen to the world around you as if it were a poetry machine, because it is— just churning out gorgeous things on the reg.5

As a kind of game, I’ll supply the original text first, so that you can find your own poem in it if you wish, and then I’ll share how I shaped it, which will almost invariably be different from how you would or will shape it, which is part of the fun and the magic of word discovery and curation: that it speaks as much about what the poet needs and who they are as it does of the original text. In this way, it is an asynchronous collaboration.

This first one comes from Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Here’s the original text I pulled from:

“[Truth] is come at by a process, a coming into being of something; and that process is also, importantly, part of the truth. It is an act, a journey, not a thing. It has degrees. It is found by removing things, rather than by putting things together. This idea of truth-as-unconcealing contrasts with the idea of truth-as-correctness, which is static, unchanging.”

And here’s what I selected and shaped to make the found poem, which I’ll talk about some more after I share it:

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A brief memo before I skedaddle to write this place up.

It has come to my attention while on this planet that things I love (baking a cake, cleaning a car, having people over) are also things I hate (baking a cake, cleaning a car, having people over).

This leads me to believe that it is not the WHAT so much as the HOW that may be important.

In my search for a satisfactory HOW, one that I can, for example, preselect in order to make the Earth days less of a slogging misery of unavoidable disappointment, I have found that very few of what you call “hacks” seem to exist.

But the “hack” that shows the most promising results so far (I discovered it mostly just because I don’t know how to live here correctly, so, it is more of a “happy accident,” along the lines of your historical Penicillin, and one I am just as eager to share, my zrod, the barbaric state of your healthcare! But I digress)— the hack that shows the most promising results so far is as follows:

Do it the way you’re not supposed to.

To wit:

—bake the cake [ at night / slowly / without regret ]

—clean the car [ in your pajamas / imperfectly / with passion ]

—have people over [ eagerly / while wearing a bad outfit / only to go to bed abruptly with the children ]

Heed the alien, ye forest-for-the-trees afflicted sapiens: for they who fear to do life incorrectly have wasted time:

Consider, mayhap (I love that one! Have you ever read really old books in special libraries? They let you! If you wear little gloves!)— consider that you do things correctly ALL THE TIME. So correctly in fact that you have not died. Not once.

And when you do, that too, actually, is normal, even though you pathologize it for some reason. Might as well call it failing when you breathe! Poor Perry, had to use oxygen, dumb sucker couldn’t figure out how to get around the ole inhale. Weak, really. Too bad. My zrod but you are odd little ducks. I’ve somehow come into fondness for you nonetheless. Hence dropping this draft Earthside before I leave to do the final draft back in Andromeda.

Anyway while you’re doing things so correctly, driving on the correct side of the road for example, all the time, and mostly brushing your teeth without complaining, you have missed the opportunity to do things in a manner I might call incorrectly.

Which is to say, I believe, you have missed, at least, perhaps, as much as half of the potential of your allotted life.

Am I advocating for violating traffic laws and rotting your mouth-bones?

Maybe. I mean, they sent me here to do this investigation, instead of someone from the journalism or consumer products reviews departments. I’m actually an office runner, basically, shredding documents and getting snacks. But on my planet, that’s a respected job, because who doesn’t love paper? and snacks? I have a uniform! Maybe what you all need is really just uniforms. They confer a lot of dignity. I’ll consider making that my main takeaway.

Anyway I digress. About my recommendation that you try doing things incorrectly, and the potential resulting traffic accidents and rotten mouth-bones:

I don’t want anyone to be in danger, or have to sit in a dentist chair for one second longer than is going to be strictly necessary on your human mortal trajectory (tried the dentist a few days ago, do not recommend, left early without my shoes and took extra free toothpaste and stickers, deserved it), but I do want you to have that moment, that dizzying microsecond, of having absolutely no idea why or how cars are even allowed, much less which side of the concrete ribbon to place them on and what speed to select with, apparently, the use of mostly the right foot’s big toe (don’t try to use your nose, it doesn’t go well).

The utter strangeness of your daily world is a bouquet of ridiculous wonderments, and by peeling back a few of your strange little filters and seeing its bare-assed weirdness for a flash, I believe it’s possible you can shift the HOW of the heretofore dreaded baking of the cake.

Try thinking like me, clueless tourist on the planet, and now instead of job to do before kid bday, the baking of the cake becomes powders and liquids of flavoring power emulsify in electrical paddle machine in a jiff! Onto finger and poof! Happy mouth and jumpy bloods! Promise of offspring pleasure in future to boot!

Perhaps you’ve sniffed it by now: the alien is championing alienation.

Not a whole lot; I don’t want to scare anyone silly. Just enough.

I want just enough WTF coursing through your tiny pliable blood-pipes for you to pick up the radio signal of a renegade whine, but why must I do it that way? — so that when it’s available, that delicious little sudden sneeze of an answer, oh hey wait! I need not!, can pop out and change the color of everything— from LED overhead box-store lighting to sunset glow on Mexican sand beach, all in the micro-second it takes to form your food-intake hole into the “OH” sound making shape.

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Maybe that’s how I’ll put it, to my boss, when she asks for the final draft: humans need to make more open-mouthed sounds. (She’s a big fan of boiling it down to physical actions and affirmations, very cognitive behavioral approach, I think she picked it up on some draconian silent retreat).

Yeah, maybe that’s it: Ah, and Oh, and Wow. Also perhaps Yeah. Try… sounding a little dumber? And nicer? Appear a little less put together, and… see what happens?

I want you to like your life more. As stupid as it is, and I say that with love and respect, it’s also kind of amazing.

Thanks for reading / I’ll miss you when I’m gone home / and now I hope you’ll indulge me as I attempt my first-ever pun!:

Your Palentine,

Zerg Herxlinger

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»»»»»reply re: Bathrooms» Hi, Old Fashioned, the bathrooms stink because you pee on the seat. You need to put the seat up. Mom and I clean the bathrooms a lot but you pee even more times, even though you should actually probably pee more because you should drink more water and then your pee wouldn’t be such an awful color, but so it’s hard to keep up, is what I’m explaining to you. The stink is not a mystery, not like the Chamber of Secrets. Fondly, Navigator

»group: DINNER // Subject: Marsala» Good evening, I wanted to notify everyone that the planned dinner was chicken Marsala, but we were out of Marsala. I’ve had to use Madeira instead. Hoping this doesn’t cause distress. Best regards, Wool Hat Indoors

»»»»»reply re: Marsala» when do we eat I’m hungry —Snax

»group: FESTIVITIES // Subject: Birthday» what I need for my birthday is an oil lamp a big oil lamp not a small one and NOT the kind that is made into electrical but the kind that is just oil and it needs to have a glass funnel and a hobnailed milk-glass shade can we do that did you hear me —Old Fashioned

»group: FESTIVITIES// Subject: Birthday» I want a baby kitty for the mama kitty I got last week. Also Jell-O for my class party but not with red dye number 40. Remember that makes me vomit. Love, Navigator

»group: MAINTENANCE // Subject: ???» has anyone noticed every single wall hanging in this house is crooked is this the best we can do I mean what is going on here also I just put ice cream in my espresso because we are out of milk is anyone going to the store I hate the store —Snax

»group: DESSERT// Subject: Upcoming birthday» Hi all, I just want to let everyone know that I now have enough mini porcelain dishes to make 28 crème brûlées for both classes for the school birthday celebrations. Regards, Wool Hat Indoors

»group: MISCELLANEOUS// Subject: JELLO» i like jello you can do the red one for me i don’t vomit about red dye but you should also DO WHIPPED CREAM — Old Fashioned

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»group: KITTIES // Subject: I added a New Group» Hi everyone, I just wanted to let you know I added this group so we can talk about kitties. You can let me know all the things you love about kitties, and also I want a baby kitty for my mama kitty for my birthday. Love, Navigator

»»»»»reply: re: I Added a New Group» Hi Navigator, you have sixteen kitties. That’s not including Mermaid Cat. Just wondering are you sure you need more kitties. Let me know what you think. Thanks. Love, Snax

»group: BREAKFAST // Subject: Insufficient Cheese Selection» It has come to my attention that we do not have the right kind of cheese for a Scramble. —Wool Hat Indoors

»»»»»reply re: Insufficient Cheese Selection» We have aged cheddar what’s wrong with aged cheddar ffs —Snax

»»»»»reply re: re: Insufficient Cheese Selection» Too midwestern. — Wool Hat Indoors

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»group: FESTIVITIES // Subject: OIL LAMP» I NEED A BIG OIL LAMP NOT ELECTRICAL WITH A GLASS FUNNEL AND A HOBNAILED MILKGLASS SHADE CAN WE GET THAT I WANT THAT FOR MY BIRTHDAY —Old Fashioned

»group: FESTIVITIES // no subject» have you ever seen old fashioned books with metal clasps like on the front a real gold metal clasp are there any at the antique store I want that for my birthday and also the large oil lamp real oil lamp not electrical with a glass funnel and a hobnailed milk-glass shade —Old Fashioned

»group: FESTIVITIES // Subject: Bullies» I was thinking we should invite my class’s bully, Wendell, to our birthday party. He bites and hits and he won’t stop saying “butt,” so I think if he could do the pinata and have some Jell-O he would stop doing those things. Don’t forget about the red dye. Love, Navigator

»»»»»reply:: re: Bullies» You used to like crème brûlée. Remember when we brought the tiny custards to your kindergarten class with burnt sugar crust and fresh fruit topping? Wasn’t that fun? Crème brûlée is so much nicer than Jell-O! Right? — Wool Hat Indoors

»group: FESTIVITIES // Subject: Important» THE OLD BOOKS WITH METAL CLASPS VINTAGE ONES AND AN OIL LAMP WITH GLASS FUNNEL AND SHADE —Old Fashioned

»»»»»reply:: re: Bullies» does anyone know where to get a pinata I hate going to the store — Snax

»group: MAINTENANCE // Subject: You will Have to Leave» I really need THIS bathroom. Now. —Old Fashioned

»»»»»reply:: re: You will Have to Leave» THERE ARE ***TWO*** OTHER BATHROOMS —Snax

»»»»»reply:: re: re: You will Have to Leave» I CANNOT USE THOSE THEY ARE STINKY FOR SOME REASON —Old Fashioned

»FESTIVITIES // Subject: Yay» I’m so excited for the green Jell-O and the baby kitty! Wendell’s going to love them! Hugs, Navigator

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