A Bus for Jesus

Jesus came back to life (again)! To celebrate, we want to the Chapel of the Resurrection on the campus on Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana. Grandpa Mark ("Ark") and Grandma Dorothy ("Dot") accompanied us. As did your baby doll, a snack cup filled with Teddy Grahams, a book about baby bunnies, a tiny toy choo-choo, an entourage of quarter-sized animals to ride the choo-choo, and a pouch of gummy bunny fruit snacks. These items amused you for exactly 30 minutes. Then you noticed the backside of the woman in front of us, a backside covered in a speckled silk dress and sagging through the opening in the pew. "Dot!" you shouted, "dot! dot! dot!" As you shouted you also poked at the dots...and I promptly removed you from the service.

You ran around the entryway for awhile and then discovered the wide spiral staircase that leads both up to the choir loft and down to the smaller chapel and bathrooms below. The stairs were high enough that you could go both up and down them on your very own, without assistance from me or the vertical golden rails that wind downward with the staircase. At the very bottom of the stairs, the golden rails create a circular cage of sorts, the bars spaced about 18 inches apart. The bottom of the cage is paved with black rocks and stones, most about the size of a softball, their edges unsmoothed so that walking across the surface is a thoughtful event. In the center of the stones is a baptismal font that looks like it belongs to a different age. It is a cylindrical mass of gray stone, the top rendered slightly concave to hold water. I thought of Machu Picchu, the giant slabs of rock used for ceremony or sacrifice or chiseled so that running water could be diverted into pools, gullies, basins. The stairs you walked upon were stone too, a deep burnt orange, flecked with bits of light and dark. You walked upon all this in your Easter dress, pink at the top, rows of pastel flower cascading to a ruffle at the bottom. Pink tights. New silver shoes with zero traction. I missed the majority of the service but I will carry in my memory the contrast of your small body against the complexity and weight and formality of all that stone.

After church you ate frozen macaroni and cheese and took a nap. The adults sat on the sun porch and drank martinis and ate pastel colored almonds and Cougar gold cheese and matzah. After you woke, Dada and I walked you to the park (still, admittedly, a little tipsy from the martinis) and watched while you tackled the slides and the bouncy bridge and the wood chips. Dot worked on her knees in the flowerbeds and Ark took a nap in the study (below a painting I fondly refer to as "Yawn"). In the late afternoon we watched you play on the porch: blocks and wooden train tracks, your stuffed animal entourage and a plastic ball nearly half your size. Your favorite toy was a plastic school bus with a button you could press to incite the vehicle to offer songs and commentary ("stop and go, stop and go, la la la" or "look at the flashing lights!" or "we're on our way to school!"). The bus passengers included a white girl with frizzy hair and glasses, a happy African-American boy with a book, a Latino(a)-transvestite bus driver, a dog, and a wheelchair. Never has there been a more politically correct bus. Jesus would have loved to drive this bus! Luckily, you also alerted us every time a bus (or something that vaguely looked or sounded like a bus) drove by the house. You sure do love yourself a bus.

Now we are home again. Actually, Dada and I are home and you are with Grandma Ricki and Grandpa Peter. I'm not sure who was the most thrilled with the idea of you spending the night, you, us, or Grandma Ricki, but it's been a win-win situation all around. It's been raining all day and the house is very quiet without you. I both want you home and want the quiet to go on just a little bit longer.

The Village Ahead of You

When I was in grad school and I needed to write a poem, I'd often give myself a prompt. I'd write from a work of art or I'd give myself a list of words to include in order to spice up my diction. Sometimes I made the limits more rigid: meter, rhyme, number of lines, number of words in a line, etc. Often I invented a speaker and made myself write a poem from the person's point of view. During my first year at Iowa I decided to write from the perspective of a mother who knew she was going to die soon. I imagined a daughter, what I might say to her. I imagined a modern, less-wind-baggy version of Polonius. I wrote the poem on Palm Sunday.

Today is Palm Sunday and I want to give the poem to you. I don't think I'm going to die immanently but being a parent makes me far more aware that I am already in the process of doing so. Lists of advice are futile but comforting too. I'm not the speaker of this poem, Thiz, my list for you would be different, but a part of me is in this poem too. So here you are.

[Note: this poem was published in "The Cresset" a number of years ago. I think I'm allowed to re-print as long as I mention that.]

THE VILLAGE AHEAD OF YOU

I am not sure how this ends. If the body

dissolves or is taken up, if the roof of sky

feels like cellophane or moss.

When I was five I wanted to be a hen so

at a petting zoo I reached below one

to collect an egg. Her quills were stiff

and the vanes were damp and warm, sticking

a little to my knuckles. She didn’t peck

or squirm or try to stop me. There’s something of Abraham

and Isaac in this. You should know

I would never have collected sticks to burn you.

Patty says she’d collect only green ones but Patty

likes to please everyone. I love you

more than God and I do not

accept the parts of the story where

bodies are taken up with a greater

plan in mind. You should love your home.

Lot’s wife did not turn back to watch

fire spitting from the shoulders and hair

of those who followed; she looked back

at her house and at her pasture.

Land gets taken up by fire too and possessions

are not always wrong. Wear something comfortable.

Sleep with my nightgown. Don’t try to look

after anyone else. Every town has a bell, bells

return us to ourselves. The second time

your father left I flew to Quito and was miserable.

It was Palm Sunday so I stood with a crowd

at the back of a cathedral. A girl gave me

a cross woven out of palm leaves, grit

at the corners of her eyes and brown, milky

irises. A basket filled with crosses

hung from each of her arms and she wore pink

bedroom slippers over thick brown socks.

She stood in front of me a long time, I thought

because of blindness. I was too sad to know

I was supposed to pay her. It is difficult to be happy

knowing the way that story ends. The point

is that we sing the songs and lay the palm leaves

down, that we turn to gaze at the man who sits

halfway up the mountain with his head between his knees.

I believe we will know when the time comes

what it means to crouch beside him, using both our hands

to raise his face to ours.

Password

You have been an explosion of development lately: teeth, words, and the consumption of a State Fair's worth of calories every day. You have become newly enamored with a baby doll we creatively refer to as Baby Doll and you often spend 10-15 minutes carrying her around pressed to your chest, sometimes absent-mindedly patting her on the back, sometimes heaving her down on the sofa or a chair, sometimes laying on top of her on the floor while making a weird humping motion with your hips (that we generally try not to see as a "humping motion").

You have simultaneously developed a mild disdain for books coupled with a hearty interest in letters. We sing the "ABC" song often and you call out "S" in the appropriate place. This weekend we bought you a 17x11 inch magnetic chalkboard with accompanying letters and numbers and you can already identify "O" and occasionally "I" and "S." the identification of "O" may have to do with your favorite sound to imitate which is "oooohhhhh" as in "ooooohhhh, look at that cute kitten" or "ooooohhhh, isn't that flower so pretty" or "ooooohhhh, Thisbe is humping her Baby Doll again." I think it's mostly Grandma Ricki that makes this sound excessively, but I am somewhat embarrassed to acknowledge that I, too, have been known to "ooooohhhh" on occasion. And I challenge you, dear cynical and older Thiz, to go and see that baby farm animals at the zoo and NOT make that sound. Seriously.

The word explosion continues. You were considerate enough to inform us about every truck or bus we passed on our journey from Northfield to Minneapolis on Friday. Each day you experiment with another word or two. Today we went to visit Jamie and Jennifer (and new baby Linus!) and you enthusiastically pointed to the dog entrance in their basement door and shouted "hole, hole!" Later, on a walk with Grandma Ricki, you identified (tree) bark and the dock on Lake Harriet. You are most verbally thoughtful as you try to distinguish "poop" from "toot" and those conversations are perhaps the most common and most meaningful in our household. [Thisbe: "poop." Mama: "poop or toot?" Thisbe: "toot" Mama: "toot?" Thisbe: "poop?" and so forth].

Some of my favorite moments of the last few weeks have been during your early waking moments. Because you have been waking too early (both in the AM and from naps), I often bring you into bed with me (or Dada and me. Or me and the mailman) and tell you that you need to sleep a bit longer. Sometimes you actually fall asleep and I get to feel the weight of your body snuggled into mine, your head tucked into my neck, your fingers curling around my shoulders. I get to feel the tiny shocks that stir your body occasionally while you sleep. My body was once your home and the fact that something in your body remembers this makes all the growing away and out of and into a little bit more bearable. I love you, sweet girl.