Painting
Friday, August 6
8-midnight, with Bill Beach & Dave Captein
Wilf’s
Portland, Oregon
And listen to KMHD, 89.1 fm, on Friday, August 6 at 1:30 pm for a live, on-air performance with bassist Dan Schulte
“Mom, I need a ramp.”
I’m washing up the dinner dishes. I have the flu. This morning I woke up to a soaking couch and the living room hardwoods slick with water. It is spring in Portland. It is raining hard. My roof is apparently leaking. I taught today, but before that had a meeting with Oregon Humanities who called me to talk about war and memory and how we tell stories, why we do and why we must. After teaching, the kids and I sat in yet another doctor’s waiting room for Clarke’s head. It’s half an hour past our appointment and we are still waiting. Clarke looks at me, “Mama, let’s just go. They can’t do anything any way.” I just look at him. “It’s been nine years,” he says. “It’s not going to get any better.”
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“Yes I do,” he says.
I stand up. Soph puts down her People magazine. We walk out. I tell him we are not giving up, that is not an option. Pain and hearing loss are at an all-time low. We have to boost his immunity, he has another infection. We have to deal with his resistance to antibiotics. I’m done with surgeons. Done. I call his acupuncturist, whom we haven’t seen in two years. Needles and herbal concoctions are not Clarke’s most favorite combination. I tell Clarke I’ll pay him to do this, a dollar a visit. He smiles and says okay.
So I am thinking about a lot of things, washing the dishes after dinner. Soph is in the tub, and Clarke still needs a ramp. I tell him to look at the house with ramp-maker eyes, I tell him I’ll help when I finish. I put in another load of laundry and go to check the bucket in the living room. Across the floor are CDs, books, tupperware. A cutting board is the main ramp, propped up with a book and plastic lids. The path leading to the ramp is a road of CD cases butted up against one another: Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Ani di Franco, Wilco, Smashing Pumpkins…Clarke has his remote control car poised on Tom Jobim, the first CD of the path, he pushes the lever and the car sails across the music, angles up the ramp, and plows straight into a stack of blocks topped with Steve Kuhn, Radiohead and The Arcade Fire CDs. They go flying. “Yes!” he shouts.
I wish I could look at the world with bridge-maker eyes, see how to build something to the people I miss, the things I’ve lost.
Tonight at dinner Soph calls a family meeting. She started something called the BLDCB, which stands for the Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner-Communication-Book and if anyone has something to talk about they write it in this little spiral notebook. Then we talk about it and end the discussion by going around the table and reading a poem, selected from a stack Soph keeps on the floor of the kitchen nook where we eat. This was all her deal, I had nothing to do with any of this. So tonight she presents an old empty tea canister in which she’s placed folded up pieces of paper. She instructs us to close our eyes and draw three. It turns out they’re new jobs for the week. I draw Harold (the guinea pig) feeding chores, setting the table, and Job Judge, which apparently is quality control…there is also the Clutter Helper (picking up around the house), food preparation (I had to modify that one a bit, considering no one knows how to use a knife or the gas stove but I…), and Ruby (the cat) and Clara (the other guinea pig) chores.
The poem book Sophie hands me tonight is one of Billy Collins’s. I read a poem called Love. About a girl, a boy, a cello, and a train. If only it were that simple, I think. Or maybe it is, and I just don’t get it. Clarke reads Dog Love from this kids’ pet poems book. He takes every opportunity possible to remind me on my promise to get them a dog, finally, one year from this June. Soph chooses Paul Merchant, and his Greek translations of Yannis Ritsos, and straight-faced reads a piece that contains the words “A cigarette. And the moon on your breast.” At which point she and Clarke double over in howling laughter that lasts for 7 minutes and results in spilled yogurt and rice on the floor.
I do not care. I do not care about the roof. I do not care about the flu. I do not care about surgeons.
In our little family we play a game called, “I love you more than…,” and depending on the mood, the stakes vary. One day it could be, “I love you more than green tea,” at which point Soph will ask me, bagged or that expensive loose stuff you buy…again, my answer depends on my mood. Tonight while tucking them in Clarke trumps my “I love you more than chocolate,” with “I love you more than everything.” Soph says she loves me more than the world.
In the world of our house, tonight at dinner, we noticed that the tiniest corn and tomato starts popped up out of the soil. Their little pots are on the kitchen table and the kids have been diligently spraying them with water. In maybe two weeks we’ll transplant them outside. In the summer we like to sit on our back patio and eat from our garden.
My son does not believe his pain will ever go away. This is what he believes. And I can’t change that. Can’t seem to fix it. And every time I think about that, some piece of me somewhere cracks a little. He’s right, nine years is a long time. I don’t know what I believe in anymore. About medicine, about love, about war, about the weather. All I do know, is that when my kid reads Greek poetry and erupts into laughter, or when the other one builds a ramp with my cutting board and CDs, that ramp extends straight to all the parts in me that hurt. And in those moments, quite literally nothing else matters except that exact map-pin point of geography where I’m standing, except that exacting light threaded through the needle to all the pieces of ourselves we sew together and patch over and over and over and over.
Kalashnikov In The Sun, my two-years-in-the-works project on Sierra Leonean poets, is sent to the publisher, one week following the death of Tom, one of the voices included in the anthology, a friend. I dedicate the book to him, I hear the cadence of his voice, still.
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It’s been my first week teaching at the university level. It’s been my first week of classes myself, graduate school at my age, I don’t know… but a teaching fellowship and tremendous grant covering full tuition, a chance at more stability as a writer, a chance that this two-decade long plan in the works to build the days writing, painting, singing, could actually work…so I jumped. I am tired. I have not stopped moving. Not so much because of school, but because of everything that kept cascading in the in between hours. I drove over the Morrison Bridge last week, about 9 pm, after the last class of the day, an early October moon, the kind that is buffered in part by night clouds, the sky a movie set, the sky not sky, but a mood instead. this whole week has been a mood.
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