Afternoon at the library

and boys spill inside, playing lightsabers, the battle edging into the new books section, giggling, shouting, one of the boys collapsing dramatically in front of the self-checkouts. The older woman browsing a cookbook looks up and we both raise our eyebrows and smile,

thinking (gratefully) how our parenting days are behind us, or maybe that's just me, and when did this happen? One moment I was washing the dishes, peering out the window at my kids darting across the lawn, my daughter and her little friends prancing with broomsticks pretending they were Harry Potter, my son and his best friend tinkering with the Medieval-style catapult they'd built, 

and now

they're all grown up and far away, the real world much more precarious than any they had ever played, and darker than any I had ever imagined for them. And believe me, I can imagine a lot. 

I read a book last week that I hesitate to recommend, not because it wasn't good, but because it did its job too well. Freaked me out, actually. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It is marketed as Science Fiction, when there's not much science-y or fiction-y about it. Published in 1993, it takes place in the early 2020s, in a world of extreme climate change and societal breakdown. Oh, and lots and lots of guns. 

The narrator is a teenage girl, but it was the older folks in the story who interested me. Those people long for the past to what they perceive to be better times and are incapable, despite the imminent danger, of accepting reality. In the end (SPOILER!), they perish, and it's down to the younger generation to navigate the present. 

The book is supposed to be hopeful, I think, and isn't all of dystopian literature? No matter how terrible, there are always a few left to tell the tale, is what I used to say when I talked up these books to my students. 

But that was a long time ago, when a book like that seemed fantastical. When I was young myself, and so, naturally, assumed I would be one of the survivors. 

The boys pick themselves up and resume their lightsaber battle. That movie came out years and years before they were born, but isn’t it funny how perfectly they mimic the whoosh of electricity, the clank of light beams hitting light beams? I show them where we keep the Star Wars books and they seem weirdly surprised. 

I don't know why. I mean, we're in a library. 

My husband and I are visiting his parents

and like always when we visit them, I get caught up in their family stories. My mother-in-law musing about sleeping upstairs in the house built by her father, the cracks in the roof exposing the sky, waking up with a dust of snow on her face. The family origin story of my father-in-law-- his grandfather's crossing from Denmark on a ship that sank, the week on a lifeboat, a daring rescue, the eventual settling in America and the birth of twenty-two children (My husband's grandfather was number 12.) 

I love these stories. The little tidbits and back-matter. The plant in the corner that came from a clipping of a plant grown by my father-in-law's mother. How when my mother-in-law talks about going upstairs in her childhood home, she means climbing a ladder. (I've been part of their family for thirty two years and I just now learned that detail.)  

My husband and I share our own stories with his parents, updates on our daughter's wedding and our son and his girlfriend's van-life cross country trip. Which, okay, seem a little trivial contrasted against the life and death of a ship going down, a childhood spent in abject poverty, but the grandparents, of course, are always happy to hear any stories about the grandchildren. 

For a few days, life slows down. Meals. A list of handyman jobs for my husband to do around his parents' house. Side note: they keep the heat on 75, and my husband and I are sweating up a storm and laughing about it, but after a while, we just decide to go with the flow, channel the word COZY. We can't stay very long and we'll soon be back to what we have now been told is our very cold house. 

65 degrees, my father-in-law had exclaimed. Is that what you keep your heat on?  

Meanwhile, against my better judgment I sneak peeks at the news on my phone. Stories about the new Supreme Court Justice nomination. Stories about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The stories make my head hurt. Did I mention how hot it is in this house?  

Oh, here's a story about the chickens the great grandmother kept, how she loved them so much she would cry every Sunday dinner when the family ate one. The frogs and turtles my mother-in-law's older brothers caught because some days, what else was there to eat? 

Our daughter has chosen a wedding dress. Our son and his girlfriend found themselves in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Did you know, he texts me, that anyone can march in the parade if they want to? We share the pictures with the grandparents. The lovely dress. Our son draped in colorful plastic beads.  

Home Less

Six years old and I had already lived in six places, one of them a tent in a campground. But that was only for the summer.

What happened was the duplex where my family was living was sold and the new owners booted us out in June. And then the apartment my mother found for us wouldn't be ready to move into until September. I'm unclear on the details of how we ended up at a campground.

My father took the car and moved in with his mother. My mom's sister gave us her tent and drove my mom and me and my two younger brothers out to the campground. It was the 1970's. Camping was In. I had a Barbie camper. I used to set it up on the grass or drive it down to the pond where my brother and I swam every day.

It wasn't really swimming. We lay on our stomachs and kicked in the shallow water and pretended we were floating. Our baby brother sat in his gated play area, drooling. He learned to stand up that summer by grabbing onto the bars. Mostly we ignored him. Ate our hotdogs at the picnic table under a tarp. Drank our Joy juice, the orangey drink my mother mixed up for us, which we called Bug juice because if you left a dixie cup of it out for more than a minute, you'd find insects dying on the surface. 

We only went into the tent at night. Rolled out sleeping bags on plastic swimming rafts. By morning the sleeping bags had always drifted off the rafts and we woke up on hard ground. It was musty in the tent. Don't touch the canvas when it rains, my mother warned us. It'll make the water drip on your face. 

Rainy nights I fought the urge, but in the end, always touched the canvas. My mother was right. Rainy days were the worst. Nothing to do but sit at the picnic table under the sagging tarp, rain spattering our backs while we colored in coloring books. The best days were spent rolling down the hill above the pond, tromping through the woods, playing on the playground. 

My goal that summer was to see-saw on the seesaw, but I didn't have anyone to balance out the other side. Both of my brothers were too young and the others kids were weekend kids at the campground, coming and going too fast for me to work up the nerve to introduce myself. 

My sixth birthday my mother hung balloons over the picnic table. My aunt gave me another barbie for my camper, the Sunshine Barbie who came with her own beach towel. A Mod Ken who had a collection of sideburns and beards that I promptly lost.

By the end of the summer my brother learned to swim for real. Our baby brother took his first steps. I made a friend and we see-sawed until dark. 

The moment I walk in I am calmer

It's the smell, I think. Books, specifically, library books, all smell the same to me. Something familiar and comforting. Paper and dust motes. My ten-year-old self with the bed covers thrown over my head.

Escape.

As a kid I liked to wander the aisles, trace my fingers along the book spines. I still like to do this. I don't know why it's taken me so long to work in this place. 

And how fitting to be the person who gets to shelve the books. I start each day with a cart, everything quickly and perfectly organized by the alpha numeric label. 

There's a whole system going on behind the scenes that I never thought about. All of those books being checked out and checked back in. All of the carts that need to be shelved, and shelved, and shelved. Am I too fast and maybe making a mistake? Am I too slow, struggling to see those teeny tiny numbers? 

Those labels are what I'm focusing on when I shelve, but still, I can't help glancing at a cover here and there, thumbing through pages. A book of essays I heard about on NPR. A true crime story. That novel I've been meaning to read. And other books that snag my interest as I fit them into their proper place on the shelf. 

Books on photography and printmaking. Biographies of obscure people. Holiday decorating. I want to check out all of them. And I can. 

Different from when I was a child and restricted by what I could carry in my arms for a mile. My mom and little brothers and I walked to the library back then. Actually, it was only that one year when we didn't have a car. The walk took forever. A hilly trek through a park. A rounding of the corner. And then, the wall along the front of the library. My brothers and I would climb on it, pretend we were walking at the edge of a high building, arms out. 

A few months ago I went back with one of them. We stopped in the park and walked from there. It was a gray chilly day. The town where we'd grown up was exactly the same and totally different from when we were kids. 

We came upon the wall and I said, do you remember--

at the same time my brother hopped up onto it, walked the edge, arms out. He read as much as I did when we were little. Now he reads ten times more. 

Although, now that I am working at a library, maybe I will catch up. 

Searching for Duckies in the Ball Pool

Every year my husband and I volunteer to help out at a community center holiday party for underprivileged kids.

We show up early on a Saturday morning and help organize the gifts, which always ends up being an overly complicated endeavor, lining up gift bags on tables and checking off similar sounding names. And then we go into another room and help set up the games and goodie trays and craft tables and take our places at our assigned station for the party.

This year we were in charge of the Fishpond Game.

Basically, this game is an inflatable kiddie pool filled with plastic balls. To play you dip your hands under the plastic balls and fish out the hidden plastic duck toys. The end.

It's supposed to be for the very littlest of the little kids, something to occupy the toddlers while their older siblings make glitter crafts or play mini golf or tattoo themselves with holiday-themed tattoos.

My husband and I sat across from each other on the floor and were immediately stressed out playing the Fishpond Game.

I was worried about the germy germ aspect of all of those plastic balls. The runny noses and drooling and dropped wet cookie chunks splattering. My husband was anxious about the kids who were clearly taller than the height restriction sign, but yet kept trying to jump into the ball pool. And then there were all of the kids who thought it was fun to throw the balls, so that within minutes of the holiday party starting, plastic balls were bouncing and rolling all over the room.

A toddler toddled up, a little boy, maybe age two or three and very serious-looking. He refused to climb into the ball pool. He was hesitant about even putting his hands in, not that I blamed him, what with all the germy germs. I showed him one of the toy duckies, and he was curious, but kinda meh about it, not that I blamed him there either.

All of the other kids were having a blast. My husband and I pointed out the plastic ducks and wiped runny noses and tied little sneakers. We gave up enforcing the height rule and let the older kids flop and roll in the ball pool. We praised a helpful kid who brought back a thrown ball and soon we had a bunch of helpful kids running around the room chasing and collecting.

Another volunteer came by with a camera and asked all the kids around the ball pool to smile. The serious little boy just looked up at her blandly.

Come on, she said. Gimme a smile. And she reached down to touch his face.

I started thinking about this children's picture book author I heard speak at a writers' conference a few years ago. He said that most people have this very nostalgic view of childhood. They remember it as all glowy and happy and carefree, and they forget the reality. How so much of your little life is out of your own control and at the mercy of adults.

You're sitting on the floor playing a game and having a grand old time, and BOOM, some large person comes into the room and swoops you up and carries you off to bed.

You're constantly being monitored and told what to do and what not to do. What to eat. What clothes to wear.

And that's just the kids with the good, loving parents.

What about the children with parents who aren't all that good or loving, the author reminded us. The children who are neglected or abused. Imagine how unpredictable and scary and dark the world is for children like that.

The photographer volunteer wandered off to take pictures of the kids at the glitter table. The party went on. The holiday music blared and the balls bounced around the room. The cookie crumbs and drooly doughnut chunks kept dropping into the ball pool. The older kids flopped and buried each other. They darted off and got tattoos on their cheeks and made glitter pictures and then darted back to show my husband and me what they made.

During a rare quiet moment of an unoccupied ball pool, the serious little boy climbed in and sat down. He dug his hands under the plastic balls and found a couple of toy duckies. After a while, he leaned back, sliding his small body under.

Are you a giant duckie? I asked him.

He didn't say anything, but he smiled up at the ceiling.

Santa Ho-Ho-Ho-ed into the room, and it was time for presents and everyone trooped off to go get them. The little boy climbed out of the ball pool and toddled off to catch up with his older siblings.

If there is a word for the opposite of nostalgia, I am that word.

But I understand why we do it, paint our childhoods under a glowy haze. Why we want children to smile. Why we imagine them playing happily, their parents swooping them off to bed each night with gentleness and love.

Moving Day, Part Two

The other day I hefted five boxes out of my son's room and mailed them to him in California.

Before I hefted the boxes out of the room, I thumbed through the things left behind--the books on the bookshelves, the plastic bag on the floor filled with lacrosse balls, the rumpled viola sheet music on the desk, the closet, now empty, except for a pair of old soccer cleats.

After I mailed the boxes, I came home and wandered around for a while feeling weepy and silly over feeling weepy because it's not like I didn't know my son was leaving. And anyway, he's happy and I'm happy for him and tra la la.

When my son was packing up the boxes a few weeks earlier, I didn't help him, except to offer garbage bags, in case he wanted to chuck anything in the trash, and a box for Goodwill, in case he wanted to donate anything to Goodwill. I told him he didn't have to make up his mind about anything if he didn't want to. If there was stuff he wasn't sure about, stuff he might want to hold onto, but didn't feel like packing, he could feel free to leave it at our house.

It's not like his room was going anywhere, I told him.

He said, okay.

Which made me wonder if the books left behind and the lacrosse balls and the viola sheet music and the soccer cleats fell into the category of stuff to hold onto for later. Or not.

It's hard to guess the things that matter to people, even people you know well.

When I was packing up the things in my own childhood bedroom a million years ago, I didn't feel a particular attachment to much of it.

I was going away to college 1250 miles away, flying there. So packing space was limited. What I was most worried about were clothes. I didn't have a lot, at least anything that felt fashionable (whatever that was). I'd gone to Catholic schools and had worn uniforms for most of my life. Also, I lived in Connecticut and owned a lot of winter-y related stuff and my college was in Memphis and I suspected I wouldn't need many sweaters and long sleeved blouses, the bulk of my meager wardrobe.

I left behind my long winter coat, the one my stepfather bought me when I was in ninth grade. I left behind my hefty feather pillow.

My stereo system. My albums. The much-played Van Halen and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and the Journey Escape record that I'd won at the county fair.

My two shelves of books, my prized collection of Trixie Belden books, the complete set of sixteen, the books an aunt had given me when I was a child, two or three a year, on birthdays and at Christmas, the books I'd read over and over, from number one Secret of the Mansion to number sixteen The Mystery of the Missing Heiress, the books that deposited me safely out of my childhood for a blessed few hours here and there.

The day before I flew away to Memphis, I hefted a trunk over to that same aunt's house. Inside the trunk were all of my journals and diaries, every story I'd ever written and two novel manuscripts, photos and mementos.

And then I left my childhood bedroom behind. My younger brother took the room when I went away to college. I gave him the key for the deadbolt lock that my boyfriend had installed on my bedroom door. Why, you might ask, did I need a deadbolt lock on my bedroom door?

Well.

Let's just say that after my sophomore year I never went home again except to visit. Somewhere along the way, all of the things I left behind in my childhood bedroom disappeared. The pillow. The albums. The books.

When I graduated from college, my aunt drove from Connecticut to Memphis to attend the ceremony. Inside the car she'd packed the trunk of my stories. She gave them to me, and then she surprised me by giving me the car too.

How do you even begin to express gratitude for gifts like these?

The other day my husband suggested we turn our son's room into a guest room.

Let's wait a little while, I said.