Time Passages

Is any day “just another day”? If I stand on my soapbox and loudly proclaim that every day is a miracle, a gift from the universe, that one can never predict the direction a day can turn, would you boo me off the stage? Click the red X in the upper right hand corner of your screen and turn off?

I think I would.

Let’s face it. When you get to be our age, don’t some of the days just blend together, become so routine and rote that the magic that once infused us upon waking evaporates right along with the steam from our morning cup of coffee? I am conscious of the passing of time. I note to myself the big milestones of my life. I am not talking about birthdays or holidays or once a year events. I nod my head in acquiescence to the universe when I add cotton balls to the jar on the bathroom counter, when I have to switch to a new tube of toothpaste, the weekly laundry ritual, the arrival of the fireflies.

I have been noticing the fireflies flickering in my yard for the past couple weeks. Every night, I would step outside before brushing my teeth for bed, to see if they had ascended to my treetops. I would see one or two, twinkling in the new darkness, and head back inside. Saturday was a different story. I padded outside in my bare feet; Lexi wriggling with excitement over my company in the back yard, and there they were; a multitude of fireflies, filling the darkness above my house, the hickory trees ablaze with light.

Excitedly, I went back into the house.

“Scott, the fireflies are back! They’re up in the treetops!”

“That’s great, Mom.” Scott’s eyes never left the television screen where Ken Griffey gripped a bat and stared intently at an over grown boy, poised to pitch a fast one.

Not giving up, I hurried to Greg’s room, finding him lounging in front of his computer, his buddy Nathan, reclined in sympathy on the sofa, watching Futurama reruns on his television.

“Greg, the fireflies are back. They are lighting up the hickories like fairy lights!”

“Cool Mom. I’ll make sure I take a look.” The IM screen popped up on Greg’s computer and his hands automatically moved to type a response.

I went to Kevin’s room. His fingers were flying across the controller, aliens exploding on the television screen, cars careening around corners and lights flashing warnings amid the din.

I sighed and headed outside to my bench, settling down, resting the back of my head on the bench, gazing up at the wonder of the fireflies in my treetops. I have been watching these fireflies for five years now, ever since an old boyfriend told me to look up one sultry summer evening. They had been there all along, every year, and I had simply never looked up.

I’ve looked up ever since.

The lights flashed on, fainted off, some in rapid succession, some brightly blazing, others just a flicker. The fireflies don’t last for long, just a couple weeks around the summer solstice. If you don’t remember to look up, you’ll miss it.

The fireflies mark the passage of time for me, the fading of an ordinary day into an ordinary year into an ordinary life. Just another year of watching those fireflies on the bench by myself.

I look up again. More have come, and more will come over the next week or two. In the height of their blaze of glory, after the full moon fades, the fireflies will illuminate the entire back yard. My boys will bring their friends, after I’m long asleep, and they will sit in the chairs around the fishpond and be silly, laughing the light hearted laughter of youth. But they will also gaze upward, their voices silenced for a moment by the miracle before them. I know this to be true.

I also know that as long as I am able to share this wonder with them, I will never be really alone with the fireflies.

They will simply mark the passage of time.

Frustration-Male/Female Style

The sun blazed on the baseball field, bottom of the fourth inning. A gust of wind blew the dust into a swirling cloud over the parched infield. The first baseman wiped his brow before leaning in for the pitch.

I sat in relative comfort in the semi shade. After sixty hours in a stuffy office this week, I was happy to expose my tender pink skin to the Sun God. Leaning back in my lawn chair, I closed my eyes and paid attention to the sun’s soft caress. Two moms sitting next to me rustled in their chairs, moving back a few feet to escape the offending rays. Jolted as I was from my reverie, I listened to the voices of the little sisters of my son’s teammates playing in the shade behind me.

“Now remember, do exactly as I tell you. I’m the Mommy and I get to make the rules.”

“Oh, fine. But next time is my turn, you promised. You promised last time, too. Next time, you better not forget.”

“Ok, next time is your turn. Now, go make your bed. Right now.”

I saw her stomp her foot out of the corner of my eye. Obediently, the other little girl sauntered to the far end of the yawning tree and pretended to make a make believe bed.

Dolls were strewn about, girl toys, a bit out of place among the trappings of the baseball game in progress in front of us. The clunk of a steel bat colliding with the rawhide of the ball interrupted my attention to the conversation of the duo behind me.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Kevin?” I thought of this conversation as the girls chattered on about other household chores being commandeered by the bossier of the two.

“I’m not picky, Mom. I’d like to be a professional baseball player or a professional basketball player, either one.” Kevin had replied, earnestly.

I smiled at the memory, not just because it came from the mouth of my youngest son, but also because I remembered hearing those same words from his brother, who is seven years older. Grand plans were shared in the car of the houses he would build, the charities he would fund (ok, maybe that was Mom chiming in), the never ending supply of Coke that would be available from a spigot in his kitchen should he ever command the salary of a professional athlete.

I thought about what I wanted to be when I was twelve, the age Kevin is now. I’ve always wanted to be a Mom. Always. I always wanted to be something else, too, but always a mom. It was preprogrammed. I would talk about wanting to be President, the first woman president, so that my name would be in the history books. I even had a plan…marry a senator’s son, take over the dad’s senate seat when he died, progress to President. Mostly I said it because it got people’s attention and I always liked to get attention. As the youngest of five, one did..or said, whatever one needed to do or say to get attention, whenever my father wasn’t around. I was never serious about it.

I was serious about maybe being a lawyer. My sister told me when I was in the sixth grade, after observing me chatting up a customer to the drive in movie concession stand that my family ran during the summers, that I had the gift of gab, and would make a good lawyer. The idea stuck all the way through college.

Raising my boys, interacting with their friends, I have noticed that most boys want to be a famous something or other when they grow up, and they put forth a great amount of effort and time into achieving that aim. They practice shooting hoops for hours. They toss balls and catch footballs, and run until they are soaked with sweat, fueling a dream of fame and fortune.

The toys my children chose reflected their appetite for glory as well. Even though I did not allow weapons in my house, super heros abounded on the shelves of their rooms, rallying cries heard from the voices booming from the television boxes whether it be satellite stories or video games. They defeated monsters, saved the world from disaster, fought the demons of the day, all in a day's work in the life of a male child.

The daughters of my friends seemed to have very different aspirations. Granted, once the girls got past second or third grade, being a mommy wasn’t the ultimate achievement, neither did they seem to aspire to Barbie doll perfection, either. I rarely heard of aspirations to be anything unattainable. A teacher, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, but Mistress of the Universe never entered the conversation.

In fact, girl toys, rather than promoting the unattainable, come in every occupation imaginable. Doctor Barbie. MBA Barbie. Teacher Barbie. Scientist Barbie. Nurse Barbie. Veterinarian Barbie. Dentist Barbie. Lawyer Barbie. Barbie seems to have spent a lot of time pursuing graduate degrees. Then there were American Girl dolls, girls depicting everyday life in a variety of historical times and social status. Girls can easily and realistically imagine themselves attaining any image the toy industry sold to them, except for body image.

Boy toys past the toddler age, are very much focused on super heros, on unattainable powers, on super human muscular strength, on defeating the enemies of the world and being glorified for their efforts. How likely is it that any boy will develop the ability to fly, or to disappear into thin air, or to spurt spider webs from his hands or to summon rippled muscles on demand and throw his enemies across a city block. Other than GI Joe, do any boy toys suggest the attainable?

Even the traditional bats, balls and nets whisper a hope of super prowess if not super powers. They watch their idols on television and stand for the seventh inning stretch at Great American Ballpark and imagine themselves down there, hat held over their heart for the National anthem. They grow up and join rec teams with other balding fathers, but still, if the team is down by two with three seconds left on the clock when they catch the ball, they hear the roar of the crowd as the ball slips through the net for a three pointer and they raise their arms to their cheering fans, even if it’s only the janitor who has paused to watch.

Men are conditioned from the time they are out of diapers to seek the unattainable; to long for what they will never have, to never measure up to their own standard of success. Surely that leads to incredible levels of frustration.

Women suffer the malady in a different way. The women I know are most likely to gnash their teeth over their weight or their looks, not their job success or lack thereof. Even single moms supporting themselves. Their frustrations are over things that are difficult, granted, but are attainable. There are thousands of products on the market to assist a woman in her endeavor, too, and just as many men willing to put in their two cents worth.

“Your jeans are getting a little tight, sweetie. Perhaps you should lay off the consumption of raw fatty tissue, which is exactly what that tator tot you are about to put in your mouth is comprised of.”

“Getting a little jiggly on the back end, there honey. I got you this book on running which might help you take care of that.”

“You too can have the body of a swimsuit model if you just take two of these miracle tablets with a full glass of water three times a day. For the introductory low, low price of $10 a day, you’ll be down three sizes in six weeks.”

But, how often to you see a television ad for a product to give a man X-Ray vision, or the ability to fly? Society implants the idea of the unattainable in the minds of six year olds, and then snatches it away by the age of twelve, leaving boys with this nagging feeling of failure.

Boys seem to get frustrated from lack of power; girls by lack of control.

Girls, by and large, achieve the perfect bodies that they will then long for for the rest of their lives, by the time they are 21. Ravages of child bearing, emotional eating, sedentary jobs will rob them of this societal sanctioned beauty, but at least they have the memory of having attained it once, and have the faint glimmer of hope that they might attain it again.

Rational thought robs boys of their dreams, dreams that our society plants and waters and nurtures for years afterwards.

Is it any wonder that men turn to sports as an addiction as they age? Is it any wonder that mechanical toys of Humvees and Corvettes rock the world of suburban dads?

Is it any wonder that the chance to live out the super hero dream with a machine gun in your hand is the only solution to conflict in international relations? Could it be that our leaders have simply never grown up and given up their super hero dreams?

Perhaps that is why you don’t find many women at the operating end of a gun. We never had those dreams to start with.

And perhaps this is why we need to have a woman in the white house. A woman will lend some logical thought to conflict resolution, not revert into super hero mode and try to save the day.

I hereby announce my candidacy for President of the United States in 2008.

Some dreams just die hard.

And some kids never grow up.

Fish Pond on June 1, 2007

The Ghost of Fishes Past

The big fish I caught two weeks ago is haunting me.

I lay in bed one night about a month ago and it occurred to me that I was safest from my father while he was alive and sick. I knew where he was and whether I saw him or not was up to me. I chose not to see him. As an adult, I saw him only seven times in thirty years, and never for more than an hour. Seven hours of my life in thirty years is all I could bring myself to share with him. Sometimes it was for only ten or fifteen minutes. Or less. I didn’t even talk to him at my uncle’s funeral.

I dated a guy once who told me I was being too hard on him, that I should forgive him, let him back into my life.

I dumped that guy.

Quickly.

Now that my father is dead…and has been dead for over a year, I wonder where his spirit lives…if there is a spirit world, of course. I’m not sure. I have faith, in something difficult to describe, but I have faith and trust that a force is out there to guide and protect. Of course, I wonder where that force was when I was a little girl, frightened and vulnerable, wetting my pants in fear of my father, so faith for me requires a certain suspension of disbelief, just like in the movies, or when reading a good book.

So there I am, thinking about the spirit of my father and suddenly, I’m just a little afraid. Not a lot afraid, just a little. I still feel stronger than my father, even in spirit form, and the part of me that allows a belief in spirits, insists that only the good part of a person is allowed to survive, only the good in my father is allowed to take spirit form.

Right?

I don’t think much more about it, but I ask my psychic friend what she thinks. She agrees that only the good survives, but gently smiles and tells me that even so, I’m still under no obligation to let him close, that I can still tell him to leave me alone. She says it’s up to me and I simply must ask my spirit guides to keep him away.

Two weeks ago, I took Kevin to my client’s farm down in central Kentucky. My client had invited 35 inner city kids to his farm to fish and frolic, and he invited me and my boys along as well. We got there late because Kevin had a soccer game and a baseball game. We were there for about an hour before all the inner city kids left.

My client had about 15 cane poles and dozens and dozens of nightcrawlers to use as bait to tempt the blue gills in his lake. I sat down with Kevin and we threw our bobbers and bait into the water. My client had enlisted a half dozen or so of his guy friends to help with the inner city kids, and one of them rushed to my aid when I started rummaging for a pole.

“Here, let me help you bait the hook.”

I looked at him. He was about ten years older than me, well dressed with khaki shorts and a polo shirt, leather boat shoes, clean shaven, thinning gray hair, wedding ring gleaming from his left hand. I smiled charmingly and let him bait my hook.

I’ve been fishing since I was three. My father was a fishing fanatic. Every vacation I took as a child involved fishing. He got me two presents my entire life. Ever. He bought me a bottle of L’Aire Du Temp perfume for my sixteenth birthday and a fishing pole of my own when I graduated from high school. My first means of earning money when I was a kid was to crawl around on soggy summer soil with a flashlight and pick nightcrawlers, which we sold for a penny a piece to my dad’s best friend who owned a bait shop. Nightcrawlers where nothing to me, baiting a hook was still as familiar to me as baking cookies, but still, I let the guy be a man and bait my hook…just that once. I did it myself the rest of the time.

I handed my cane pole with the nightcrawler squirming on the end to Kevin while I got a pole ready for him. While I skewered the nightcrawler on Kevin’s hook, the bobber from my pole disappeared under the water.

“Kevin! Pay attention, sweetie. Jerk the line to set the hook! You’ve got a fish!”

Kevin jerked the line wildly and the empty hook sailed out of the water and flew towards us.

“Careful Kevin. Fishing is an art. There’s a fine line between setting the hook and setting the fish free. If you keep your pole close to the edge of the water, you have more leverage. When it’s time to set the hook, one short, sharp pull will do it. Otherwise, you cue the fish, he lets go and your line flies up out of the water.”

I handed him a freshly baited pole, re-baited my pole and settled down next to my son. His bobber disappeared again. He quickly made a short, sharp jerk of his pole, and again, it came flying out of the water, empty hooked.

“Good job, Kevin. You were listening to me. Next time, count to three after the bobber disappears, but before you jerk the line. You don’t want to wait too long because you don’t want to give the fish time to swallow the hook, but you want to give the fish enough time to get the whole thing in his mouth so the hook has something to latch onto.”

Kevin looked at me warily. “This is boring, Mom.”
I sighed. I remembered so well sitting in a boat with my dad. Sitting and sitting, the morning still so early the mist wrapped us in moist. My dad always brought a thermos of coffee and a bread bag filled with sandwiches. His cigarettes would smoke out of his mouth as he gripped the butt with his yellowed teeth, eyes glittering with anticipation as he cast his lure. Fishing excited my father as almost nothing else did…well, except his prepubescent daughters.

I wasn’t allowed to talk while we were fishing. The only sounds were the birds, the water lapping at the edges of our boat, the insects humming, frogs splashing into the water as we passed close to the shore. That didn’t stop my father from screaming at me, from pulling my hair and calling me stupid when I missed a fish. It was ok for him to scream, but I couldn’t make a sound.

I would have never dreamed of voicing an opinion as to the value of the time spent in that boat with my dad, excruciating as the tedium was and I would have never dreamed of showing my fear. I smiled at my son’s comfort with expressing his displeasure with me.

“We won’t stay too long, sweetie. I don’t get the opportunity to fish very often, and I’d really like to enjoy this for a few minutes, ok? You don’t have to stay here with me if you don’t want to. You could go play on the swing if you wanted.”

“Nah, I’ll stay for a little while.”

His bobber disappeared and he gripped his pole, glancing up at me. I saw his lips move as he counted. He jerked up his pole and a medium sized blue gill wriggled at the end of his line.

“Kevin, you caught a fish!”

“Wow, I did, that was fun!”

“Do you want to try to get it off the hook or do you want me to?”

“You can do it, Mom.”

One of the guys had stood up and was headed towards us. “Here, let me do that.”

“No, actually, I’ve been fishing since I was three. I can handle this.” And I smoothed down the projecting sharp fins, gripping the fish with my left hand, deftly extracting the hook with my right.

“See Kevin, you have to be careful of these fins. They’re sharp. If you slide your hand gently down them, the fish won’t hurt you when you take the hook out.”

The guy watched me with my son. I glanced up and smiled. The guy shrugged his shoulders and headed off to find a beer.
“Look at this beautiful fish, Kevin.”

The fish gulped in quiet desperation, while I crooned to it. “Oh, you are a beauty, Mr. Fish. Your fins are strong and sleek, your scales a lovely iridescent blue. Thank you for entertaining us this afternoon.”

I tossed him back into the lake and for a moment, he hovered in the water at our feet, then darted off to recover under the safety of a rock.

“You don’t want to touch them any more than necessary, Kevin, because they have a protective film on their scales that prevents infections. If you touch them the slime comes off on your hands and when you throw them back in, it makes them vulnerable. I always admire my fish, thank my fish, then throw them back into the water as quickly as possible.”

“Do you like fishing, Mom?”

“I do. I don’t think I’d want to fish every day, but once in awhile is good for my soul for some reason.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, I guess I developed a love of gardening from working with my mom in her garden when I was a girl, and I guess I developed my love of nature from my father.”

“But I thought your father was not a nice man.”

“He wasn’t Kevin, but people are always a mix. No one is all bad, just as no one is all good.”

We fished for a while then, Kevin catching five blue gill, I caught three or four. One of the guys brought me a comfy chair to sit on, another guy brought me a beer. I smiled to myself at the thought of men waiting on me, a foreign concept to be sure, but I was the guest and they were playing host, so I decided to just enjoy it.

Suddenly, my pole arced and I stood up. I had something, something big.

“Hey, I think I’ve got a big one!”

My pole was almost bent in half and something was swimming wildly just off the pier. I started to inch my hands down the length of the cane pole.

My client rushed to my aid. “Here, Betty, let me help you!”

“No, really, I can do this!”

“Here, let’s get that fish up here on the dock!”

“Art, I can do this!”

Art pulled the line up, the large mouth bass dangling fitfully at the end. I snatched it from him, snaking the fingers of my left hand under the gills so that I could support the weight of the fish. With my right hand, I deftly freed my fish from the hook.

Art stepped back.

“You stay right there! Right there! I gotta get a picture of this!”

I was giddy with excitement. A beautiful 2 lb bass wriggled in protest from my left hand and Kevin peered silently at the biggest fish caught of the day.

“Hold it up higher, Betty!”

I grinned at the camera and proudly held up the fish, my other arm looped around Kevin’s neck, hoping the fish wouldn’t flop the wrong way and slap my face with its tail.

Kevin and I admired the fish for another minute, thanking it for entertaining us, then we tossed it back into the lake. Three boys came over and asked Kevin if he’d like to go swimming. He looked at me and I smiled my encouragement and off he went.

My client and two of his buddies were still fishing, so I sat back, tugged at the beer and re-baited my hook. I doubted if we would catch much more as the boys were splashing about thirty feet away to my left and the six month old puppies belonging to the son of my client were exploring the shoreline of the lake just a few feet the other way.

Half an hour went by. We caught a few more blue gills, the guy fishing across the lake hollered over at us that he had caught a catfish using chicken livers. I was enjoying the waning sun, the smells of the farm, the sounds of nature surrounding us. I felt something nibbling through the cane of my pole. I watched my bobber plummet, then resurface, plummet, then resurface again.

I stood up, tiptoeing to the edge of the dock. My bobber plunged deeper than a starlet’s neckline and my pole arced in half again. Suddenly I was struggling to maintain my grip on the cane pole. It was arcing left and right and out to the middle, then back towards the dock.

“Betty’s got another one!” One of the guys shouted and they all stood up to watch, but not a one of them made a move towards me. I think they were afraid I’d push them in the lake if they tried to help.

I shoved my cane pole all the way back behind me and slowly started pulling up the line with my hands. The fish was panicked, trying to find a way out of being extracted from the water. I was patient and gentle, cooing calmly to the fish the whole time, promising to set him free just as soon as I took out the hook and got a nice, long look at him. Holding him up with my right hand, the fishing line pressing deeply into my flesh, I slipped my fingers under his gill and hauled him up to show off. I whisked off the hook and took a good look at this beautiful fish.

Brilliantly green scales shimmered up at me, exquisitely detailed fins arched in protest, its tail fanned frantically as it fought my scrutiny.

“Betty, that fish has got to be at least 3 lbs. I think that is the biggest fish I’ve ever seen caught out of my lake.” Art stood before me with his camera. I raised up the fish and smiled at the flash.

“Do you want to keep it or should we let ‘er go?” My client queried.

“Oh, we’ll let her go, but from now on, whenever any one else catches her, I’m hoping you’ll call her Old Betty….like Walter in ‘On Golden Pond’.”

My client chuckled and nodded. “You got it, although I don’t know many women that would want their namesake to be a fish…and to be have “Old” tacked on, to boot.”

I thought about that fish while I sat there on the dock, watching the sun set, the lake calming to a smooth mirror. I was the only one to catch any bass that day. Me, who fishes maybe once a year. I wondered at the odds, and I thought of my father and how proud he would have been, how he would have loved to have been there, teaching his tricks to my twelve year old son, basking in the glory of watching me pull in those fish by hand.

The breeze picked up at that moment and I shivered in response.

Perhaps he had been there all along, guiding those fish to my pole, inviting me out to play, asking for a chance to reconnect.

Could I?

Could I ever?

I drove home in the dark, Kevin slumbering next to me, and my eyes brimmed with tears. I was a little ashamed of myself for refusing to let those men help me, for being so damned independent that I couldn’t give those men the pleasure of handling the nightcrawlers, and taking the fish off my hook. I had to do it myself. I had to show them how tough and accomplished I was, even at such a manly sport as fishing. I have to prove myself to every man I meet. No wonder I’m single, I chastised myself. What guy would want to compete?

I remembered then, why I am the way I am. I am fearless because I had to be. I am fearless because courage was my greatest resource in learning how to survive being a daughter of my father’s. He hated fear. He preyed on fear. He respected courage. Of course I couldn’t ever voice an opinion, but at least he didn’t beat me like he beat my sister.

I learned to be independent, to not trust anyone else to take care of me because of my father’s sick relationship with me. My father failed at a father’s primary job; to teach their daughters how to deal with men, and to teach their sons how to treat women. My father taught me to distrust men, to be careful, to be cautious, to never need anything, especially from a man.

Even worse, he taught me to equate sex with love. Every show of affection my father ever gave me was tainted with sexuality; a pat on the butt, a slip of the hand, a full on the mouth kiss. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it. Every memory of my father that I have is laced with nausea. The only way my father knew how to love me, or my sisters, was sexual in nature. But that wasn’t love. That was sickness.

How do I unlearn this?

Six months of celibacy is a start.

And tossing back that fish was a good idea, too.

A part of me likes to think that if my father knew the consequences of his actions, if he knew that succumbing to his sick desires when we were little would cost him the pleasures of our company for the rest of his life, that he would have made a different choice. That requires thinking that he regretted his actions, and truthfully, I don’t think my father was capable of regret. It was always someone else’s fault.

My father justified his actions by insisting that he was “teaching” us, helping us to grow up. Now that I am a parent, I realize the horrendous gravity of his crimes. The actions we take with our children, good and bad, last them the rest of their lives. Those first twenty years imprint us. There are no rewinds or do overs from a childhood.

All there is, is live through and survive, and that’s a lesson I learned and learned well.

For where I am right now, I say to the spirit of my father, “No thanks, Dad. I don’t need your help. I can take it from here by myself.”

Like I always have.