Sirens and the Weight of a Boy at 4am

IMG_0035

i’m stretched out on the floor
at 4am and the almost-one-year-
old on my chest bears a particular
heaviness the weight of a life
the weight
of a moment that is here
precisely
when it should be

his lips are thin and soft
his closed eyes pale ovals reflecting
the night light on the wall
behind us        his breath is warm
and slow and heavy and so
crucial
to everything
crucial
to every moment

outside on james street a siren
rises from a distance        closer
closer
screaming through the window
screen through the rain through
the two of us and even through
the small curls that form locks
around my son’s ears     then the siren
fades
carries someone’s moment away

leaving me there
on the floor at 4am in the yellow
burn of a night light
my small son sleeping on my chest
and i’m wondering how i got here
in this very moment

i think
on these things and before
I can disentangle myself
from that moment
that life
that universe
the rain starts up again
heavy and deliberate
and i

i

i am sleep
once
again

One of the Saddest Moments of My Childhood (or, My Conflicted Relationship With Sports)

IMG_0419

It was one of the saddest moments of my childhood, and it happened on a warm summer evening. I was laying on the sofa with my dad and we were watching baseball. He was tired from a long day at work and was drifting in and out of sleep. The air was muggy and warm. I don’t know where everyone else was in the house.

“When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?” I asked him, staring at his face, his closed eyes, his straight mouth. I probably thought he looked old. He was probably younger than I am now.

“Dad?” I asked again.

“Yeah?” he said in a sleepy voice.

“I said, ‘What did you want to be when you grew up’?”

“I always wanted to play baseball in the Major Leagues,” he said in a quiet voice. “I wanted to play center field.”

“Really?” I asked. The thought of my father wanting to do something other than what he was doing upended me, as if I was on a boat and someone had pulled down on one side. The world tilted on its axis.

He nodded, somewhere between being awake and sleeping.

“Yeah. Always baseball.”

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking about my own conflicted past when it comes to sports, especially now that I have children old enough to want to play in some of our local community leagues. On the one hand, I love sports. I feel like sports taught me a lot about myself, a lot about perseverance and teamwork and pushing beyond surface levels of comfort. When I had to run a five-minute mile or when I got benched or when I scored a goal – all of these things changed me, gave me insight.

On the other hand, I hate sports, especially what they have become these days. What happened to just showing up and playing and having fun? These days it seems like you can’t be a 12-year-old and just play a sport unless you’re striving to be on a travel team so that you can position yourself well for a club team so that you can get a scholarship to college so that you can play professionally and hey hold on a second what happened to just playing and having fun?

I’m realizing with my oldest son right now, I have two major pitfalls when it comes to him playing sports.

First of all, I want to guard him from any disappointment. I know what it felt like to be the star of the team, and I know what it felt like to get cut, and I hated the latter. I find myself heading him off at the pass, discouraging him in subtle ways from trying certain sports or activities because I don’t want him to experience the disappointment of rejection. That’s not okay. If there’s something he wants to do, I want him to try – the possibility of failure will always be there, and I want him to come to grips with that now, when he’s young. Fail and learn about yourself and try again and fail and learn more and  try again. That’s life.

Second of all, I take his performance way too personally. I went through some challenging times playing sports, especially in college, where I got upset about not playing as much as I thought I should. Now, when he gets pulled to the sideline, I feel my blood pressure rising. It’s like I’m back there again, getting pulled off the field, or on the sideline waiting to play. I have to separate my playing experience from his playing experience.

This article put things into perspective: The Only Six Words Parents Need to Say to their Kids About Sports (Or Any Other Performance).

Here’s the spoiler. The six words we need to say to our kids?

“I love to watch you play.”

* * * * *

On that summer night when I had the saddest realization, Dad fell asleep for good, and I was left staring at the television, watching Major League players live out their dream. I was heartbroken, because that’s exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up, and to think that my dad had wanted it as badly as I wanted it and hadn’t made it…I felt so sad for him in that moment. I didn’t move. I stayed there and watched the rest of the game, his arm draped over me, his steady breathing like a metronome behind me.

I think we bond together in our common failures more than we do in our uncommon successes. Maybe that’s what I have to look forward to with my son, even in his failures. We’ll get through it together, and we’ll be closer because of it. We’ll walk off a field someday, or a court, or away from a recital, and he’ll know his time in that activity has come to an end, and I’ll remember that feeling, what it felt like when something I enjoyed was over.

Maybe that will be what bonds us together. I’m okay with that.

In the mean time, I’m going to encourage him to try the things he wants to try, and when he comes off the field my first words will not be suggestions for improvement or a list of things he needs to work on. I want to always say,

“I love to watch you play.”

What It Feels Like To Wake Up

breathing

She creeps into our room, wheezing, barely able to breathe, but she does not come to the bedside to complain. No, I had given strict orders the night before that mom needs her sleep so if you come to our room please curl up on the floor under the blankets provided. I wait a moment, but it sounds bad, her breathing, so I slip through the darkness and stretch out on the floor beside her.

I count her breaths. Forty per minute. Her heart is racing, her throat pulling in with all its might, but the air, it won’t go in. She struggled again and again to catch her breath.

“Are you okay?” I whisper in her ear.

She nods.

“Should we go outside to see if that helps your breathing?”

She nods.

I wrap her in a blanket and lift her, light as a blossom, and carry her down the stairs, out the front door and on to the porch that looks over James Street. It’s strange to be there in the middle of the night without any cars, without any people. The street lights shine steadily, the wind rises in a clatter of leaves and paper in the gutter, then dies down. It’s cold for a May night. We sit on the chair and I wonder where the time goes.

The cool air does not help like I hoped it would, like it did when she had the croup and we sat on the back deck in the dead of winter, our breath rising in one steaming cloud. The spring air does not help, so after five minutes or ten – it’s so hard to tell in the middle of the night, when sleep is heavy – I carry her back up to the room and soon it’s 6am and Maile is leaving for work and Abra is in the bed with me, sitting up, still struggling to catch her breath.

The urgent care clinic doesn’t open until 8 so we try to wait it out but I can see she is beginning to panic, such a slow drowning, so we get in the truck and Maile comes back from work and I drop the two of them off at the ER two blocks away. I watch Maile carry her in through the doors that open automatically, like a sea. I watch and I take a deep breath.

* * * * *

It’s always the breathing isn’t it? It all comes back to the rising and falling of a chest, the drawing in of air, the expanding of lungs. It’s the first sign of life when we’re born and the last thing to go. I remember when each of our five children was born, and we waited the agonizing second to hear their scream, their breathing. I remember when my grandmother was dying. Her eyes were closed, her body still, and yet the breathing went on. Sometimes she wouldn’t breathe for 30 seconds, 60, 90, then her lungs would open up one more time, sip it in, take only what was needed. She carried on for days that way, the bare minimum. Only breathing.

Life is in the breath.

I’m breathing again. It comes with waking up. My eyes are open again, and the air. Oh, the air! I take it in and look around, eyes wide, and it feels like I’m seeing the world for the first time in a long time. It feels like I’m in the middle of a new life.

Friends have asked me, Are you really going overseas? and I laugh. Not that I know of. Not yet. Not today. I don’t know where this new wakefulness will take us, what it will show us. But I do know that there’s an African-American man who lives across the street, a man I’ve waved to for the last year since we moved here. He’s a kind man, and he always waves back.

For the first time, yesterday, I walked across the street and offered him my hand, and he shook it.

“My name is Shawn,” I said, “and I see you over here all the time, but I don’t even know your name.”

He smiled.

“I’m Eric,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

This is what it looks like, to wake up.

This is what it feels like, to breathe again.

That Thing I Love About My Church

cry

I am new to this mainline church experience, this liturgy, this Book of Common Prayer. My children and I still gawk at the stained glass on Sunday mornings when the sun explodes on the other side of those angels and saints. I take the wafer every Sunday with a little bit of nervousness, a little bit of uncertainty. I still hold the cup like an egg that might break.

We have been at this wonderful place, St. James Episcopal Church, for almost a year now. And there’s always been something about it that I liked but couldn’t quite verbalize.

Until Holy Week.

We talk a lot about the problems we have with The Church in general, but this week I’m heading up a series over at The High Calling about what our churches do well. In the rest of this blog post, I reveal one of my favorite things about St. James Episcopal Church – you can read that HERE. (Stay tuned next Sunday for my absolute favorite thing.)

When Sam Washed His Little Brother’s Feet (or, Rediscovering a Kindness That Brings Down Barriers)

photo-18

Have you ever washed someone’s feet? Have you ever poured water over someone’s soles, felt the callouses on their heels, dried their feet with a clean towel? Have you ever put your shoes on after someone else has washed your feet?

On Maundy Thursday, we were invited to come up as a family and wash each other’s feet. Nervous shuffling ensued. The kids went first, gentle and uncertain. Then Maile and I. It’s a strangely intimate experience. There’s a tenderness there, and barriers are lowered, barriers that you aren’t aware you even have as you go about your normal life. But when you take off your shoes and someone handles your feet, your stinky, dirty feet, I don’t know. Walls come down.

I looked over as my five-year-old son Sammy washed the feet of his younger brother, nine-month-old Leo. Sam was so eager, and he grinned the entire time, spilling the water, looking up at us for approval, looking up at us to make sure he was doing it right. On the wall behind him, a painting of the crucifixion.

* * * * *

 “Jesus poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” Jesus answered him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no share with me.”

If I do not wash you, you have no share with me.

* * * * *

Kindness, so often seen as weak or insufficient, is sorely missing from the Christian community in this country. We insist on our rights…to own guns, to have one’s opinion heard, to refuse service, to retaliate.

We demand to have what’s coming to us! What’s rightfully ours!

But the voices we use to fight for our own rights are too often louder than the voices we use to speak on behalf of the hurt and suffering people. Those whose voices are overlooked. Those who need us to speak on their behalf.

What I see in that beautiful passage where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples is a kindness that is blind to its own rights, a kindness that serves first, a kindness that makes less of oneself in order to bring down the barriers between individuals. Jesus had every right in the world to ask his disciples to wash his feet, and they would have fought each other for the honor.

But he didn’t ask them to wash his feet. He asked them to let him wash their feet.

* * * * *

Believe me when I say that my little son Sammy is the king of demanding his rights – he has to be. He is number four of five and would probably be overlooked a lot if he did not speak with a loud voice. But what I saw in his eyes when he washed his younger brother’s feet was a beautiful timidity, a soft kindness, and an eagerness to serve.

Somehow, we need to rediscover this. Kindness needs to be resurrected here, in all of us.

When My Daughter Found a Crack Pipe in the Back Yard

photo-37
There is rich, dark earth under
these streets. I know.
I saw it myself when the machines
dug up the asphalt, replacing the veins
of this city.

So we went out into the backyard
all seven of us
into our small patch of green
searching for that rich earth.
A gutted building looked down
smiled at us through broken
teeth, gashed
eyes, and we smiled back
toasted him with raised rakes

then
tore up the new grass
the barely-spring mud.
Shovels clanged against unforeseen
problems
rocks
old bricks
a line of beams that used
to border a walkway
someone worked hard to build
now covered.

Lucy
working on the soil where tomatoes
will soon grow
called out

Dad

What’s this?

In her pale palm, shining
in the sunlight,
hollowed out and jagged,
a crack pipe
filled with mud, it’s bulb
round and smooth
the stem mostly missing.

I told her what it was
because this is the world
this is where we live
and sometimes the easiest
answer to a hard question is simply
the answer.

Then I threw it in the trash
and kept digging
because sometimes it’s okay
to go back to pretending these things
don’t exist
at least for an afternoon
or until she’s a teenager.

We turned over old soil
cutting it open
lining it with furrows.
Cade planted tiny seeds one
after the other one
after the other one
after the other.

Sam and Abra
on hands and muddy knees
crept along the rows and
covered everything
and we prayed for death
because
unless a seed dies.

We took a deep breath
looked at the brown yard
the fresh dirt
the tell-tale rows.
Leo crawled on the patio,
brown smudges on his face.
He smiled
eating
rich earth.

We exhaled
gathered our things
went inside

and prayed for rain
or whatever it takes
to get us out
of this present death.

* * * * *

Other poems:

What They Never Tell You
For Maile On Our Fifteenth Wedding Anniversary: A Confession