I was mowing the lawn yesterday when the elder daughter pulled into the driveway, home from practicing (golf). She came up to give me a kiss and thoughtlessly put her arm around me, then suddenly jumped back. "Eww! You got dirt on me." That's the way girls work things. She's the one who extended the gesture, but it's my fault she's got dirt on her. And I was a mess. My shirt was sweat-drenched, flaked with grass blade fragments, and mottled with dark grey patches of dirt kicked up by the weedeater, clouds of it.

"Im sorry," I said, advancing upon her, "it was an accident." She was back-pedalling. "I promise to do it on purpose this time." I leapt at her and she, with a yelp, took off running. I returned to the mower. She moved cautiously toward the house, walking on eggshells. I feinted toward her and she jumped away again.

"I wouldn't do that to you," I said. She had on a nice turquoise golf shirt that looked good against her dark skin. Latino guys sometimes address her in Spanish. They think she's one of them. In their dreams. I put the mower in gear and headed out, making a left turn at the sidewalk. She was walking toward the house again, watching me every step. The camphor tree came between us for a second, and that's when I bolted. She screamed and took off running again, for the house this time, and I had a good angle on her but she made it through the back door, shrieking all the way. We've been doing this since she could run. She's now twenty-two. I used to chase her round and round the house. It's a big yard with lots of trees to dodge and bushes to hide in. I don't want to grow up.

That night I put the soundtrack from the movie "Cocktail" in the stereo. We (the girls and I) used to dance to it when they were little (how old is it?), usually all three of us at once. I've never seen the movie, but I love "Wild Again" and "Powerful Stuff", good old rock n' roll dancin' music. And Bernadette and I danced to it right there in the living room, some jitterbug interspersed with some freestyle stuff. She's a good dancer. She used to be a ballerina like her sister (a really good dancer), who watched us from the couch, alternately laughing and feigning outrage at her father's undignified display. Every now and then I'd hop over behind the couch and start poking her in time to the beat. "Oh my God! Somebody stop him!" This from a girl who, at the age of sixteen, once did a pole dance in a grocery store. We were in Oxford, having taken her sister back to college, and the three of us stopped into the Jitney Jungle to get some groceries. They have these metal poles coming down from the ceiling right in the middle of the aisles, very awkwardly placed if you're pushing a cart. I don't know what got her going, maybe the cheesy, elevator rock music being piped in through the speakers, but she suddenly broke into a dance with the pole as her prop, like Fred Astaire and his hatrack. It wasn't one of those slow-motion eroticizes like you see in men's clubs - okay, maybe some of that and some of what you might see on Soul Train or from a cage dancer in a nightclub. It was a mix of a lot of things, which shows you what the kids can pick up from TV, but fortunately this kid was inclined to mockery, not emulation. She slapped and kicked the pole, twirled around it, rubbed her backside against it with her hands overhead holding on, jumped up high and slid down it with one knee bent and the other leg straight, toes pointed. I saw some shoppers at the far end of the aisle stop to watch. Their expressions were hard to read. This was Mississippi. Her sister was laughing so hard she had to lean against a shelf of canned goods for support. I think she knocked over some asparagus. The whole thing looked choreographed, but she had made it up on the spot. Elizabeth can get a little edgy at times. You have to be careful of your mannerisms in her presence. When you turn your back, she can mimic you to a tee.

If God gave me the chance to go back and live those childhood and teenage years all over again, I'd do it in a heartbeat. And not just to be in the presence of that near-perfect innocence that you hope they will keep all their lives. It wasn't all sweetness and light. I remember Elizabeth's broken arm, bumped noggins, unexpected illnesses, the diabolic torment inflicted by certain neighborhood kids, the day you had to tell them there was no Santa Claus. I'd like to relive it because their innocence sometimes made me think, maybe then more than now, because I felt responsible for that innocence, that God had given it into my hands even as I knew I could not keep them, or save them, from the world.

Well, that's a thought for another post. I remember one morning the toddler Bernadette and I were sitting at the breakfast table (I'm estimating mid-1980's) and outside the sliding glass doors in the backyard a little drama unfolded that rather caught her attention. I don't think she understood what she was seeing, but I knew that in time she would. So this was written a long time ago. I found it in some old papers I occasionally thumb through. It's called

Firstborn

When the cardinal outside our window lifted its wings
With a cry to embrace the air and escape the cat -
Knowing as I did all worldly things,
Replete with knowledge, on wisdom grown fat -
I'd not have troubled to turn my head,
For experience had quelled all unseemly fires
Of outrage, as the heart in increments acquires
The bloat and ballast of the dead.

But "Oh!" you cry, "Look!" you point, and so I do
To where the stretching cat embeds its claws
In pine bark below the branch the red bird flew.
Laugh now, as the kitty-cat sits to clean its paws,
Lick its lips, patient promise of tomorrow's fray:
One day, my child, you'll question, my answer ill-wed
To your delight in the game they play, the feline's flay
At the crying cardinal's fleeting red.

While your mother slept from the surgeon's blade
I beheld you, in universal babe's apparel
Wrapped: placid, curious, with no malice made,
No memory of the downward journey's peril
Through the gloom, nor of how your mother's belly bled
To bring you to the light. The panther stalks
This whitened hall
Panting his survivor's tale of straining claw
And feathery fall,
The pitch and pallor of the dead.

Beast and man, embrace them while you can, restrain
The lion, free the lamb, balance to matter and mind
Restore. For love and lust wax and wane
Like moon and stars, severing sacred ties that bind.
Trust no somnolent rhythm; be not compelled nor led -
For the lion by design devours its young,
But your voice must never be among
The praises sung,
The tone and tenor of the dead.

In longing we sang through the wall of the womb,
Our green gowns a shield (as if by water blessed)
Against Nature's stain: to the cold touch of this room
You would not yield without a cry of protest
That only a child may enter. You will hear it said
That we live a while and are no more known -
But, oh flesh of ours and bone of our bone,
In your mother's passion creation groaned
To call us to recall the dead.

When you are grown to a woman remember this:
That your mother, like you, has forgotten the pain,
For she held you when still too clean for a kiss,
That in no arms but hers have I ever lain
Since the promise was given, by which love is fed,
That we pray your beauty ever serve no disguise,
As the world was made new again through eyes
That raise the living from the dead.

Posted August 18, 2003

Comments:

Once again, beautiful and poignant images. I am in awe. I know that I am loved that way, but sometimes I could wish for a poet to tell me so. And, no doubt, the women in your life fail to appreciate your gifts and instead choose to focus on your failings. I think that tonight I will hug my husband just because he is my husband, and I would hope that your wife will do the same. Daughters, on the other hand........
Posted by alicia email at August 18, 2003 05:57 PM

Daughters, on the other hand, get hugged whether they like it or not. But mostly they seem to like it.
Posted by William Luse email at August 19, 2003 12:46 AM

That was beautiful.
It made me cry. (I mean that as a compliment. I'm hardly the lachrymose type. If I cry, it must be really good...)
Posted by Ellyn von Huben email at August 19, 2003 07:53 AM

That's about as good as a compliment's going to get. Thank you, Ellyn.
Posted by William Luse email at August 19, 2003 05:21 PM