Love’s Paraphernalia

the phoenix we have. perfection in an imperfect frame.

Needing It

There are frogs living in the desert that only need to drink once every five years.  K, 8 years-old, tells me this excitedly over brussel sprouts and chicken sausage, which he pulls apart and eats with his fingers.

Every five years?  Nature is weird, but that’s pushing it.

He nods, and explains.  The frogs just take a really good soak.  And if a dehydrated human comes across one– lucky lucky!  You can just pick it up and squeeze it and drink to your delight out of its butt.

I have to fact-check that one.

But K is uproariously confident.  He is as full of nature facts as the frog is filled up with water.  He jumps from the fantastical existing creatures into mythological ones, with just as much scientific umph.  He tells me that the Phoenix’s egg combusts into fire, and then the phoenix is born anyway.

Like the rest of us?

Born, anyway.

Oops, Hee Hee

Q, 6, brings home a pet stick.

The stick is about the size of his forearm, thick, rained on a bit too recently and still holding water.

J says, You won’t believe what this stick can do. He gestures deferentially to the stick’s adept trainer, his younger son.   

Watch this, Q says, eyebrows raised, and tosses the stick across the room.  STAY!

The stick stays, with utter obedience.

Q claps with joy: Now that’s a great pet!

Wow, we say.  You just trained it to do that? 

Yes, Q says, anyone can.

Later, when we play our board game, he must slowly sounds out the word EXPRESSION.  Reading—one of the many things we non-sticks train ourselves to do.

E X P E N S I V E?

Nope, I say.  And cover the letters one by one, so he can tackle it in parts.

E X ER C IS E?

Nope, though expression can be an expensive exercise, for sure.

Eventually, when he is ready, he gets it right.  He has to stop in the middle to feed the pet stick.

Because the card we picked said so, I have to draw for him the expression “Don’t cry over spilled milk” while the sand timer runs out.  Funny, because this expression is exactly about using time wisely, not getting caught up in a past.

He watches me draw a carton, a cup, an overflow from the cup, a face crying.  He guesses wildly:  Milk!  Sad face!  Fall!

Something like that.

Anyway, K says later, why would you cry about milk?  You could always get down on the floor and lick it up.

Yes.  It really does taste the same.  The boys are unshy about rescuing fallen dinners in this way.

When we eat, we hook pinkies to thank every bit of food that made its way to our table.  Q leads us, extending sincere gratitude to the carrots, tomatoes, lettuce—and  what’s in the pesto? Mac’ n’ cheese.  S—me—for cooking.

When we let go, Q makes a halt sign with his hand, one green pea wedged at the depression between each finger.  Hand of peas!  He says gleefully.  Hand of PEACE! 

Like the feeling when your pet stick settles down for the night, when the dishes are clean on all sides, when there is no milk to cry over.

If you wish to weep, though, as the ordinary often provokes, there is instead the degree to which love has taken root in the storehouse of your life.   That is always fodder for tears.  Love is always a burning phoenix, with a bright egg in its center, ready to break open.

Breaking Open in Collaboration

Big G’s Loose Leaf

Writer’s Block is Relative

To console the stymied artist, Sidney Sheldon, a writer known for his TV-style serialization, explained, “A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”  Sheldon’s reliance on formula made him prolific and successful, but his career was much steadier than his mind.

Yes, the unreliable state of our world can make a person think that its presiding deity may have been manic-depressive too.   However, my job today is not to diagnose archetypes, but to be cheerful.

With the stinky red dry-erase marker, I write Sheldon’s quote on the conference room whiteboard.  Over the heads of my students, out the floor-to-ceiling windows, midtown Manhattan looks like a Legos project.

K reads Sheldon’s explanation aloud solemnly.  How hard it is.  Nods of resonance from my twenty-eight adolescents, confronting their own blank pages: Yeah, man, rough.  Epic rough.  A few of them even touch the pages on the desk like they might a crush’s arm in the cafeteria.

Sheldon had a god who dug deep for content, and my boys know about having to dig.   This fellowship serves young men of color with big dreams.  Sometimes their dreams are bigger than their attention spans.

dreamscape. attention span can be seen reflected in water.

It’s August.  In business casual, sequestered at the enrichment program, they adjust their belts under the tables.  Some chew on their lower lips, hoping for a big lunch sandwich.  Look fondly toward where their phones are charging.  J sticks a pick in his hair as if an exclamation point for his acrobatic thinking.

T rereads the quote and says, maybe for the first time, Oh, that totally makes sense!  Who is the guy that said that?

A writer, I say, just like you guys.

Hmmm.  “Being a writer” just got an upgrade from chore-status.  A ruffle of self-importance sweeps the room.  The corporate building—with fifty-plus floors, King of the Lego’s—is freezing cold “to protect the equipment.”  Even my 16-year males, testosterone toasters, have the shivers.   Their body heat could normally power a small shack, or at very least a reading lamp.   I want to hug them.  If I could, I would be a hut for all of their dreams to stay warm and alive.

But right now, I’m doing some sloppy math on how much it costs to keep a financial behemoth like this so chilly.  My inner conservationist wants to reregulate the building’s temperature to protect the truly premier equipment—our bodies, absolutely irreplaceable.   But flesh and blood are not expensive enough to put first (or so goes my snarky assessment), and so the AC rules.  My students, empathizing now as God’s newest colleagues, focus their gazes on the quote.  Knowing just what Big G feels like, ay-ay-ay-men, they bend over and write.

Ideas & Images come in patchwork.  That’s how I suspect the world manifested itself during the imaginative flurry and giddiness of creation days.  My little brother’s hot breath.  Laughed at in school for the immigrant mispronunciation. Stopping mom from hitting dad with a vase.  Doing HW in the bathroom stall.  The bright orange tubes for spanking.  The cliff-face.  Sham Valedictorians.  At the beginning of a long, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting process of intellectual transformation, my students are realizing that god must be a workaholic.  Or at least a serial fiction writer.

So while they play Creator, chewing on their pens—or mine, if I’ve lent them—, hunched over, a few of them protecting their pages with an arm, I play Nature.  From where I sit, October is still far off, but I’ve already decided I want to be her for Halloween.  I’ve never been one to plan a costume, and now I don’t need to.  I am already wearing it, and always have been.

Dress me

It might feel like Nature is not in the conference room, or purposefully aloof from this part of the city, but she is.  Just like Big G is, streaming through the big hands and edgy minds of my teens.

With my beloved J, who riffs on the magnificence of evolution all the time, I have been watching BBC’s Life & Planet Earth, ingenious series that move up close and personal with all the animals and plants that live Here.  The film crew reveals the design of the macro and microcosm in tandem—the profligate octopus, the swollen mycelium, bowing pines, Arctic pin-wheeling sky.  Their cameras can capture even the blinking eye of a hummingbird.  Most of the shots make me cry.

Flower sneezing bless you

But here’s why I dig on Nature as writer and artist.  She’s is not so attached to her own ideas—not any of them.  She’s too prolific for that.  Each idea is just fine: none are particularly special.  She creates in excess of need and favors only what works, without preconceived notion or plan.  She doesn’t brag, but she puts out everything she’s got.  She’ll never explain to you fully how her mind works.  She’s got art down to a science.

Nature hands God a fresh piece of paper on demand.  And so I walk around with loose-leaf, catering to those whose enthusiasm has driven them over the edge.   K takes a small stack.  T has written more than his name and school and is nodding with approbation at his paragraph.  Not so hard after all, to bring a little life into their narratives and the room.  Just let them pretend heaven is impatient for their proposal, and have faith that earth, running out of some things quickly, still has ample ink.