The Magic of Childhood

When I was a child, my grandfather would often preach at Park Street Church in downtown Boston when he was in town from California. I remember so clearly running wild through the ancient cemetery that the lobby let out onto, watching fearless squirrels gather acorns fallen from the enormous oaks. Boston was, to me, a magical land of lush gardens and old brick buildings crouching low on the busy streets. Tall glass skyscrapers and cement monoliths, all sitting atop the troglodyte world of the cavernous T train system. It was going down trash-strewn stairs into the tile-lined tunnels, dark beneath the earth; the screech and hiss and rumble of trains approaching—the rats scattering beneath the tracks; something so ancient, and something so modern. I traveled under the roads and the bay in dirty train cars with old, hard smears of bubble gum and the odd assortment of New Englanders. Immigrants speaking different languages, prim middle-aged women dressed from the Land’s End catalogue carrying canvas library totes, punks and skinheads, and the multitude of college students in worn army jackets and thick wool scarves and torn levis. This was where I encountered the greater world—greater, anyway, than my small, homogenous New England town with it’s little town green and single strip of stores. Boston was rich with history and beauty and it felt worn and dear as a favorite coat. Most of all, it was thick with the mystery of the adult world which I was excluded from. Busy people with lives so foreign to mine, buzzing about their day and intersecting my life for the space of a train stop or two. Then they were off, or I was, and the lines of our lives spun onto different routes. Exiting the tunnels, I’d emerge back into the sun and the city, finding myself somewhere entirely new, like being birthed.

I moved to Atlanta when I was 13, which is just about the age when the magic begins to wear off of childhood—the small tears and chips on the corners appear and, more than that, we realize they’ve been there all along and we were just not aware of them. I think for this reason, Boston remained an untouched perfection, dewy with wonder. It was a fairy tale put away on an unreachable shelf. It was the motherland from which I had been exiled. It lay untarnished, the patina of childhood still firmly in place. It is no wonder that it was not all that I expected when I moved back ten years later. But while I was there, for moments or hours, or sometimes days, Boston occasionally became exactly how I remembered it.

When I walked, the first time, to my interview with the head hunters that would eventually help me get my job, I didn’t know that I’d find myself walking past Park Street Church. But as I turned the corner, just there onto Tremont Street at the edge of the Boston Commons, there was a man who played the saxophone in front of the cemetery fence by Park Street Church. Rounding the corner from South Station, the notes would hit me and lift me straight up. Give me butterflies. I would be giddy with memory and magic and the way in which his playing united the entire street into a cityscape—even the sun was a conspirator in it’s near perfect slant through the old oaks--the way it fell just so on the bricks of the sidewalk. And everyone within hearing was suddenly captured in the net of his music, as if they were all there just for me, a sound stage I’d walked on to. A movie set. Everyday that he was there and playing I would smile so wide I felt like I was being turned inside out. Because I was the guardian of a sweet, sticky little secret: this Boston that I found myself in, weaving in and out and around with the breath of the sax, it filled me. It nourished me. It made the smallest, most interior part of me shiver with joy.

It was as if all of what I had missed, all the magic of New England that lived in my memories, was rolled into this one instant on Tremont street, brought back to me with the flow of the music. The feelings of a New England fall and then the winter that I remembered so clearly: the changing colors, the early dark, the chill in the air, the sting in the nose; chapped cheeks, slush seeping through the seams of shoes; that slightly metallic smell of a scarf that has been wrapped tightly against lips and nostrils—beaded and hot with moisture; the smell of snow; days spent fort building and clumping heavy wet mounds together into snowmen; the sting of snow as it crept over the collar of my jacket and hit my neck while I made snow angels; the oddly sharp pain on numbed skin when hit with a snowball; the crunch and give of day-old snow.

New England still held these wonders for me, unchanged in their beauty. These moments where time bent back on itself and I was wide-eyed and enraptured once again. But mostly, Boston was a city where I worked, and couldn’t afford to live; a place still closed off to me even when I had come back all this way after many years. Inaccessible. It was as if I was trespassing. As if it was no longer mine.

But those windswept moments on Tremont Street, with the saxophone reaching out to me, pulled me into the world, included me in the web of humanity from which I felt so distant. I was caught up in that precise moment: asphalt gritty beneath my foot, swing of my quick walk, rush of air on my cheek, rough wool against my chin, and music, music, music floating me back into a time when I was realer than I’d been in awhile.

My Year of Pain and Beauty

Atlanta in April. The trees are all wearing leaves again—spring came upon us quickly this year. One of the things I missed most when I lived in San Francisco was the changing seasons. There was something about the lack of seasons there that allowed time to slip past unnoticed. We wore the same clothes all year round. Our hottest weather was in October and everyone would scramble to buy a sundress or unearth a pair of shorts. The few places in town that have patios were packed with long lines whenever the weather got above 70, but no matter how warm it was during the day the evening would bring fog and cold and wind. Summer was often one of the coldest stretches—hats and scarves, misting rain, thick wool sweaters. It was the only time that really felt like fall to me. Pumpkins would appear on doorsteps and I’d remember that it was October, that time was passing. But for the most part, time was a line unpunctuated by anything particular. Time both swept by continually and appeared to never move at all.

I moved to San Francisco when I was 23. I had lived one tumultuous year in Providence, trying so hard to love and be loved. I was with the wrong boy, and it was a year of finding this out. Of continual heartbreak and occasional beauty. But it was undoubtedly my biggest year of growth. Boston had been to me everything I had hoped. And it had been less. And it had been more.

I moved to Providence with Adam, someone who I was desperately in love with. Someone who felt like my soul mate at times. Someone who felt unfeelingly distant and aloof at other times. I lived in Providence, in an apartment which had its own sad story, but that is for another post. We moved in and made it ours as much as we could. But there was sadness in the corners—smeared reminders on top of the fridge. I worked in Boston, a place I had been longing for since I moved away when I was thirteen. Every morning, I took the train from Providence up to Boston and walked to work: a landscape architecture firm on Mass Ave, right across the street from the Berkeley School of Music. I would go to work where I was the only administrative employee for a firm of 23 landscape architects and I would think and think and think as I performed tasks. The longer I was there, the more my job grew to encompass. I was, when I left, involved in marketing, award proposals, RFPs, preparing bids for new jobs, reorganizing the electronic libraries, accounting, and my original job—front desk person. It became important to me. It was a good job with a good company and I was needed. I edited and formatted almost everything that left the office. I was only there for 10 months, but several things happened in that space that changed me and the course of my life.

But again, I digress. I want to write about coming back to Boston; to a place that had been magic to me when I was just a child, taking the T into the city on the weekends with my friends. The trains, the tunnels—walls smeared with soot and graffiti—the musicians who always seemed to be playing Simon and Garfunkel (is that possible?) the feeling of being a very small girl in a very big city. The feeling of being capable. This is something I had lost through years of self-doubt and discouragement.

And suddenly, there I was, back in the New England of my youth. But at first, it wasn’t how I remembered it. It was expensive and cold and dirty. But the romanticism had worn away. The people were rude and the wind was bitter and the subways were just dirty. Mostly, however, it was the feeling of being capable that failed to reappear. I don’t know what I was expecting. To reencounter myself? To become, again, the girl who was so fearless and confident? This had been worn away by many years in the South, a foreign place to me where I had never found my legs. It took many months for me to find her again, but find her I did. It was my year of pain and beauty.

When did it become beautiful? Only after the pain. In that raw and broken space where life feels so real and sharp that it’s like burlap on bare skin.

There are so many small moments that added up to that amazing change in me. So many lonely hours spent wishing I knew myself. Wishing I liked who I was. Hard wooden park benches where I escaped for lonely lunches hoping to avoid being noticed. Awkward seconds spent in the elevator that inched by like hours, feeling insecure and shy and ugly. Was I fat? Was I stupid? Did I have any value at all? A collection of minutes waiting under the large clock in South Station, wondering if Adam would show up. Wondering if perhaps he hadn’t waited for me and was already on the way home. Wishing someone could sweep into my life and fill it up to the brim. Riding crowded train cars, yawning distance between me and the people I rubbed shoulders with.

But at the end of it, when I began to see it all differently, see myself differently, I wallowed in the hurt and fear and crazy until I owned it. Until I became part of the world again as just me: a small girl in a big city wondering who I was and being ok with not knowing.

This was such a crucial time in my life, so rich in blessings and epiphanies, so drenched in beauty, that it deserves many posts. Over the next few days I’ll be writing snapshots of these moments—each pregnant with potential. Each moment an essential piece of who I am as I sit, now, on my front porch in the waning light of an Atlanta spring evening, still trying to know myself. But very sure that I’m on the right path.

Fly me to the Moon

Apparently, anything higher than 120 units per cubic meter is considered an extremely high pollen count. Today in Atlanta, the pollen count is 5,733. The ground is carpeted in yellow dust; the cat making pollen angels as she rolls on the deck, coming up chalky yellow like an elementary school teacher too long at the chalkboard. I’ve been pinned in the house all day, sneezing and itchy from every small foray I’ve made into the outside world: feed the cat, retrieve Batman from the car, get out into the heat and birdsong and sun and leave my life behind for just a moment.

We may have been held hostage inside, but our Indoor Day passed just like any other with the exception of Henry being denied access to the outside world. There was frantic running and chasing and jumping, but there were also lulls of energy for snuggling and napping. There was quiet when miraculously both boys slept at the same time for an overlap of 45 minutes. But mostly there was noise and drama: car chases; fires; trains falling off bridges; Batman and Spiderman repeatedly saved the day. Also, there was hiding and finding; snacking and sorting and whining, tears and time outs and meltdowns.

Henry is now ensconced in his “bat-cave” (a blanket stretched between the coffee table and an upturned laundry basket) holding his “Spiderman car” while he sucks on a binky and nuzzles his blanket. Right now, at 2 and a half, he is a contradiction. He is a puzzle of interesting words and phrases and nonsense; of truths and myths; of baby and little boy. And I love him like this—all mixed up and still snuggly and still mine. His skin is so soft it makes me ache with love, but his legs are punctuated with dull blue and fading light brown bruises, a little scrape on each knee.

Leaving the Batcave, Henry walks towards me and informs me that we are bats. "You are the mommy bat and I am the baby bat. Are your bat wings working on the computer right now?” he asks.

“Not anymore,” I say, putting my computer down, “now they’re free for hugging.”

“And for flying?”

He climbs onto my lap and faces me and we flap our bat wings and talk of going over to the neighbor’s house for a bat dinner.

“What are they having for dinner over there?" I ask.

“Um, stars. Stars and moons,” he says, still flapping.

“Sounds perfect!”

Bon Appetit!

Waxing Poetic

Some days it’s hard to write because I haven’t had any great thoughts all day long. My days are filled with sidewalk chalk and rattles; matchbox cars and impromptu, pretend games; eating food at certain intervals like I’m checking it off my to do list; changing loads of laundry, remembering what can be dried, what needs to hang; worrying about expenses; answering innumerable questions. These questions range from “why do we talk to God?” to “isn’t this train the silliest one you ever seed in your whole wide world?” But then, sometimes, right in the crux of the thoughtless, mindless day, Henry will break upon profundity. He will utter words so unintentionally wise that they make me catch my breath, and I want to run here to put it down, to let my wheels turn on it: on the absolute beauty and simplicity in the way he sees the world. Child wonder.

Ever since he visited his 5 and 7 year old cousins last weekend, my 2 and a half-year old has been really into superheroes. Really, really into them. “I don’t like Dora. I want to watch Spiderman.” This has raised so many parenting questions for me. I’ve obviously already given up on not letting him watch a lot of tv, but now I’m suddenly faced with age-appropriateness, violence issues, and the biggest one—am I ready for my little boy to become an actual boy who likes heroes and villains and action figures? So I did what I often do, I consulted my own upbringing. And though my parents were very strict with movie ratings (no PG-13 until I was actually 13, which meant I had to skip almost everyone’s birthday party in 5th grade because they all seemed to want watch Dirty Dancing, the only movie I wanted to see so bad it hurt, but it was PG-13 and I was 11. Finally, one of the moms took pity on me watching a kids movie with her younger children and told me to go ahead and watch Dirty Dancing, she wouldn’t tell my mom) I remember watching Superman when I was around 3. So I rented and watched it with Henry. At one point, Superman is talking to his father and Henry asks me why he’s talking to him—isn’t he dead? I explained that his father was still in his heart and so he was sort of talking to him, but yes he was dead. “It’s kind of like the way we talk to god when we pray. You talk to God, don’t you?” “No,” he answered. “Does God talk to you?” I asked. “Yes,” he nodded seriously. “What does he say?” Henry held up his finger right by his cheek the way he always does when he knows an answer or is stating a fact and said, “First, he said ‘get the wax out of your ears,’ then he said to love people. Yes, get the wax out of your ears and love people.”

And there it was: a jewel of wisdom plucked from his little brain. A truth for me, so valuable it may have come from God himself; Henry only the messenger. How can we possibly hear God with all this wax in our ears? Daily noise and staticky buzzing electronics; the hum of the tv, the pull of the computer—even the things I love and the people I love can become impediments. Love people. And get that wax out of your ears!

It's a Wonderful Life

8 o’clock and still perfectly warm. The sun has set and the sky is a dusty blue grey. Planes fly overhead trailing jet streams that glow pink from the sunset over the horizon. As usual here, there is a symphony of raucous, arguing birds, looking for springtime mates and chasing each other about. I’ve seen large blue jays, a pair of cardinals, two chickadees, several hawks, perhaps a dozen mockingbirds, and hundreds of robins. An owl just hooted from behind the tree line, but it’s yet to make an appearance. The sky is darkening now, as I write, and the porch lights begin to glow a brighter yellow against the now deep-blue of evening. Saba is crouching on the edge of the sidewalk, ears perked, observing the dogs being walked through the neighborhood. And my sweet Gordon is working on his computer just across the porch from me. Life is delicious. Better than I’d imagined.

2 days ago, Henry and I found a snail in our front yard and placed it on top of a dandelion flower and waited for it to creep out of its shell and find its way back to the ground. Slowly, slowly, it poked its magic protruding antennae and soft body past the edge of its shell and slithered down. Henry and I laughed at its oddity and discussed why a snail is not a bug, even though it is the same size and lives a similar life. It could not, I explained, be killed by his exterminator-truck-matchbox-car. Life is good.

I’ve spent a lot of my time here, in the space of this blog, writing about the small resentments and details of my life. Blathering on and on about what sucks time and what drains patience. About how I wonder where I am in the mix of this. But this is only a tiny miniature corner in the enormity of my life. Because here I sit, the sky now a dark navy blue, the trees black against it. The stars have come out and the planes’ lights blink paths across the arc of night. And I’m happy; happy with my choices, happy with my family, happy with my life. Sometimes, I admit, I’m not happy with myself, but that’s for another day. Tonight, I just wanted to explain that no matter what I say here in this space, life is good in my house. I am grateful beyond measure.