Togetherness

 We separated this holiday season. 

I took one kid and a carload of stuff.

He took the dog, and the pickup truck, and a trailer with an old rusted tractor riding on top, the kind that could weather an apocalypse and be in working order for any surviving organisms with opposable thumbs to use its mower deck and horsepower to rid their gardens of choking bittersweet.

“Working the tractor requires a little more finesse than that,” he’d say if he were reading over my shoulder right now. 

But he is not. 

There is nothing fair about my feelings. 

I downplay his lofty intentions on this family weekend to wax defensive about the straw I had pulled. It was my job to pick up all the humans after the workday had ended, whether at home or in Boston and drive them to Maine.

I was not looking forward to the task: the traffic, the crosswalks, and people leaning on car horns. I was not sure I could be the aggressive driver I needed to be to muscle my way through rush hour. I imagined we’d be driving for days. 

But I didn't say anything.

I just listened to him go on about wanting to get in at least one day’s work at his mom’s house before the rain and the rest of the family descended for a festive weekend.

His parting words gave me hope, though I feel guilty about wishing.

“Maybe I'll pick up the girl in the city on my way. That way it would be a straight shot for you.”

My heart skipped a beat. 

If you do that PLEASE take a picture. I want to see you pull up to the dorm towing a beat-up Massey Furguson through Bean Town. 

A truly Tom Sawyer move. Painting this fence would be so much fun!

He said he would keep me posted.

But he didn't. Staying vigilant about the sway of his heavy load was foremost in his mind.

I didn't hear a peep from the college student either. 

So I stalk them both using the surveillance powers of Find My Phone. His dot traveled steadily along the Mass Pike, while hers hovered over the address she proudly calls home. 

“I knew when your dot was in your dorm

and his dot was zooming up 290 that your twains would not meet. So I will be hunting down Huntington tomorrow.”

She blinked twice and narrowed her eyes.

WOops.

“How often do you use location services to find me,” she asked.

I had broken the first rule in cyberstalking: Talking about cyberstalking. Don’t let on that you know she was at El Jefe’s at midnight last Friday night. 

It’s not as if your intent was nefarious. 

You never intended to call her out for her choices. You just liked knowing her dot was out there somewhere that I could still see and feel connected. Even if only remotely so.

And of course, I imagined she got the churros and that were cooked to perfection with just the right amount of cinnamon sugar.

On this, I hope, we can come together. 

Well enough

 The clicker isn't working.

I rattle it against my hand. Twice. Then I try again.

This time it turns the television on, but it won't change channels or lower the volume.

The batteries are probably losing their juice. It's been a few minutes since the loud, announcer voice started repeating the intro to a broadcast I don't want to see. It might be a show or a movie or a swatch of the news. It doesn't matter. 

I could probably get used to the narration repeating if I focus on closing my ears. It occurs to me that I don't have the stamina right now to process new things. 

And I don't want to get up. 

I am comfortable under a blanket on the couch: a putty-colored throw that is filled with down but otherwise nondescript. It is more subdued than the one made of t-shirts that my husband prefers, or the green woolen Mexican blanket that is older than our marriage. The longer it stays, the harder it is to jettison. 

 

My blanket is different, though. It is timeless. It blends in so well it seems invisible. It has no weight. It has no color. And I have no recollection of its purchase. It just appeared one day when I was cleaning out a closet. 

The moment I saw it I had an urge to hold it to my face. Rubbing it against my cheek. It felt uncommonly soft and smelled of cedar. It came as a surprise when it spoke to me. 

I felt like I'd just met an old friend. A friend I do not wish to offend.

Like I did my old hand mixer - the one I bought at a hardware shop one Thanksgiving eve when I was in my early 20s. 

It was in my first apartment, hosting my first holiday dinner but it had never been my job to make the mashed potatoes. Now it was. In addition to the delicate-fleshed yellow gold spuds, I selected the Easy Mix Proctor-Silex hand mixer with five speeds. $11.99 plus tax.

I didn’t think about the purchase, I just stopped by the hardware store after I’d packed the car with groceries and carried the only electric-mixing product they had on display to the register.

It worked well enough, even though I had to apply a certain directional pressure I alone understood, to keep the top speed humming. And it continued to work well enough for the next thirty years as other machines started taking up residence, such as a stand mixer; an immersion blender; and even a classic, low-tech, potato mashing tool, which also came to live in our kitchen.

Though … I must admit, the allure of seasonal displays of perfect pyramids of kitchen gadgets over the years had tempted me to replace the working-well-enough mixer with one that might work more perfectly than well enough.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have a pretty mixer that came with a storage compartment? One that would work at all speeds without hesitation? One that I had thought about for more than a moment and that would fulfill some understanding I have about my life?

YES! I admitted. “Yes! Thirty years is a good long time,” I reasoned. “It may even be wise to replace such an elderly appliance. Who knows how much moldering cake batter is kerning around inside the works.”

So I marched into the hardware store and bought the prettiest, most elegantly designed mixer they had – a six-speed beauty with a snap-on case. $37.99 plus tax.   

And when I got it home and fired it up … it worked well enough.

 

Training day

“You want to go to the gym?”

If you are like me … you probably don’t.

You’d rather curl up in your favorite chair with a cup of coffee and a sleeve of crumbly cookies and scroll through Netflix for something that will take your mind off the world for roughly 45 to 120 minutes.

On the other hand, also like me, you might be painfully aware that the question is coming from a gangly teenager who is only two months (and a few days) shy of being eligible to drive himself.

After that … It is a mere 18 months until he’s packing up for college.

And then he won’t be asking me to do much of anything.

It is all part of the unspoken contract we have with ourselves as parents to soak it all in before it’s all over.

Time is of the essence.

So I change into clothes that might facilitate a four-way “stretch,” and start the search for my keys.

He raises his hand and swipes the air. Around his finger hangs the electronic fob. 

“Ahem.”

He might have stood there forever, silently dangling the non-jangling device, before I would have noticed my hunt would be for naught.

“I’ll drive.”

His voice, as he says this, is imbued with more snark than excitement. The last time we made this trip I had insisted on driving and, well, let’s just say I made one navigational error that would live on in infamy in the novice driver’s mind. He is careful in his gloating. Knowing full well he still has to play to the audience, who is at this moment feeling a bit chagrined.  

“Of course. You could always use more practice driving at night.”

We don’t speak much on the commute. Instead, we listen to the soundtrack he has carefully programmed so that it won’t require him to take his eyes off the road even for a second. It sounds like the fast-beat celebratory music that plays at the end of just about every 80s-era arcade game. I don’t understand how he does it, but the fast-paced beats seem to keep him calm and focused. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

And it makes me realize he’s not such a novice anymore.

Because in trying to block out the visions of Froggers falling off logs or getting splattered on roadways, I focus on his driving. The starts and stops. The consistency of speeds. Smooth and unlabored. He’s come a long way. Gone are the days we inched toward the end of the driveway … it seems five inches per minute.

Tonight, in a moonless sky, we will practice using high beams. 

He is good at it. Turning them down the moment a car approaches but before it comes into view. 

Before long we arrived at our destination. We park and head into the gym, I assume, to our separate corners. He will go to the free weights, and I will go to the circuits.  

Do you want me to show you how to use the squat stand?

I resist the urge to laugh at the oxymoron in that sentence, and just follow along.

Time is of the essence, especially in the world of personal training.

Safety Third

I read with interest linguist John McWhorter's essay on the loss of the freer-ranging childhood of his youth (NYT Opinion Nov. 2).

In it he explores the more than five-decade history of childhood between the 1970s and now, wherein our nation's kids increasingly found their movements tethered and under the near-constant observation of adults. 

He surveys the time after chattel enslavement and the industrial age, skipping past civil rights and Jim Crow. He lands in the early 80s where the numbers of kids seen and heard in the wild seem to precipitously decline. 

We went from teens and tweens on every corner, to witnessing virtually no unaccompanied minors anywhere. 

He uses studious theories to foment the rational argument that our kids are experiencing a decline in mental health like no other generation because they have no opportunities to navigate our communities alone. 

He cites thinkers who believe it's the eyes upon them that keep our kids from becoming the stable, reliable adults we think we became. 

As a member of GenX, and someone who experienced the barely restricted freedom to pedal off into the world alone and unhelmeted - I identify with McWhorter's sense of grief.

I, too, believed my childhood was marked by a sheen of magic that has dulled for my children. 

I say this despite the dangers I know my parents worried about at the time: dog bites, cars colliding with bikes, even the unspeakable attentions of men no one in polite society would have suspected.

But McWhorter, like most of us, focused on 1981 as the flashpoint. 

In my mind and probably the minds of many, the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh at the hands of a stranger is what shattered our idyllic veneer. 

It changed the way society viewed the ways we could and should protect our children.

“Stranger” became synonymous with danger. And a new crime entered our unshakable belief system: parents who would leave their children alone or let them go anywhere unsupervised for even short lengths of time could be charged with neglect. Even if nothing foul befell their kids.

McWhorter makes good points as he implores our fearful leaders to support new laws that won’t criminalize parents for allowing their children to “range” more freely.

He's not wrong.  

In his essay, McWhorter reminds us that on the whole, the dangers we envisioned haven't materialized. Violent crime is down, and children are as safe as they ever were during those magical days of our youth. 

If they happened before the 1990s.

Of course, we now have cars that drivers need cameras to see out of; and a Supreme Court that will let states take away voting rights and health care choices, but they will let just about anyone have a gun. 

Because of that, our schools have armed guards and active shooter drills because some of our leaders would rather have a right to a private arsenal than a public education. 

We may think that safety is our FIRST priority, but the reality is that safety figures much, much lower on the list. 

We should be reminding ourselves as well as our leaders that our desire to make our kids safer has driven innovation: it gave us bicycle helmets; backup cameras, hearing protective earbuds, and protected bike paths.

We should be reassuring ourselves, too, that most of our children will grow up and become loving and protective members of society. And they will likely have fond memories of their childhoods they wish their children could share.