Dear Chick

August 1, 2019

Dear Chick:

I remember the day, almost 30 years ago, when I wheeled my grocery cart around Food Lion in search on one last thing to fill my growing boy’s Easter basket. My offering of jelly beans and Peeps seemed rather paltry. I needed something large that would stand out.

And there you were, your black eyes staring at me, yellow arms outstretched, your orange beak almost shouting at me: Take me! Take me!

The boy didn’t yet have a favorite friend, but he had a yellow blanket he loved, and so I thought you’d match each other well. Off we headed to the register, Jelly Beans and your soft yellow torso in tow.

Morning came, and the kids saddled up to the kitchen table to  check out their loot. Your boy, who always left his candy in his basket for months until the magic beans melted together, plucked you up like he might a new puppy, and in this mother’s eye, rarely let you go. As he grew, though he didn’t take you to school (he tried), you sat with him on car trips, always, snuggled up with him each night for a story, hid in the caverns of that yellow blanket — it’s folds and you lit by a flashlight  — long after you both were supposed to be asleep.

Once, you must have hurt yourself somehow, because you and the boy came downstairs to show me your arms, now guarded by green Ninja Turtle Bandaids, carefully placed. I wish I could remember the conversation, but it’s very possible (and likely) that he had identical ones on his knees. 

In time, the boy wore the blanket to shreds, but you could still be seen holding fort beneath the windows left in the yellow threads by his nurturing hands. You were a team, the little yellow Chicky and the boy.

Until one day, while the boy was on a father/son trip with his dad, I found you abandoned on the bed. I couldn’t imagine he would have left you on purpose, but he was now in first or second grade, and maybe boys of that age didn’t want to be seen snuggling up to what others might see as a stuffed toy, in the middle of a cabin filled with boys and dads. That weekend I do remember, because the boy came down with a high fever and had to come home, and when we placed him on the bed, he searched until he found you, carefully tucking you under his arm, a place you had long-since molded to fit. And there you stayed for a really long time.

On another day, we visited the boy’s grandmother, who had a dog fond of chewing things. The boy had left you on his bed while he ate his breakfast, and upon return, found pieces of your face scattered about the room, your beak torn away. I thought he might be inconsolable, but he picked you up and loved you all the same. (A dog lover all his life, he did not, however, ever like that dog again.)

And so the boy grew up and moved away to college. The blanket was long gone, except for a tiny corner of silk and yarn and a single band of silk, salvaged by me because I couldn’t bear to throw it out. But you, you sat on his bed for the long-haul, beak-less but waiting for him whenever he came home. I know his love for you never wavered, though it may have waned in those years. Yet you were patient, somehow knowing that one day you might be needed again.

I thought about that, too, as I moved around his room, cleaning out, changing it from boy’s room to college kid’s and beyond. I sat you on his bookshelf, then on his chest, trying to find the perfect spot for you to stand sentry. I brought you out on his wedding day, wrapping what was left of the ribbon from his blanket around your neck to remind him that he might be grown, he would always be our boy.

This year, spring came, our man was about to become a Dad. I knew he needed something special to show him just how great a dad he would be, so I plucked you up, studying your whole body for the holes that might need stitching, the stuffing that might need replacing, and when I found more wounds than a box full of Ninja Turtle Band-aids could heal, I searched Esty for a shop that might care for you as I would. I found a woman who through her description promised care for you in her healing as much as our whole family did.

So Chicky, I bundled you up with a prayer and a picture of what you looked like at your most loved (but with your beak), and she set to work. You arrived safe at home a few weeks later, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, your new beak smiling as if you were chirping, Thank you! Thank you!

I found a box and put the picture of you and the boy and your Band-aids inside, wrapping you up with a special note. And on Father’s Day, I put you back in the boy’s arms, ready for your new work to begin.

Now you sit in the crib where in just a few short days, a new baby will be joining you. We don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet, but I’m certain that as he or she grows, they will reach for you and will feel all the love poured into you by that boy rushing out to greet you, dear Chick. You. And you will pour all the love you’ve been holding in your heart right back out, and a new story will begin.

You have an important job, watching out for this new child growing up in our family. It is my hope that one day, the boy will find you under covers lit by a flashlight long after you and your new owner are supposed to be asleep, and he’ll crawl inside with the two of you, to see what the story is all about. 

With much love, Sooze

about a boy

just before daybreak, the phone rang and i answered. a woman, asking for my husband. a reporter, she said, for one of atlanta's tv stations i recall. i pictured a well coiffed, sleek brunette in spiked heels just waiting to purr something seductive into my husband's ear. i shook him awake, handed him the phone and looked toward my feet, but couldn't see them.

just then i felt, well, a nudge. and when he hung up the phone from his seductress, i said three words:

don't go far. then four more. 

the baby is coming. 

i could feel it.

my husband dressed for work — he was in public affairs for a utility company at the time and there was some sort of nuclear issue, which is in no way as important as a baby, don't   you know.

i gathered my thick body in my quilted robe and put my alarm clock in my pocket. walked into my daughter's room, wondering what in the world i would do with her in these hours as i waited for this new baby to come.

she found my closet, right after breakfast, and as i timed my contractions with the pocketed tick of the blue plastic clock, she found my honeymoon shoes and pulled my 'Princess Diana' rehearsal dinner dress over her head just so. how i wish i had pictures. 

as my 3-year-old plundered, i crouched on my hands and knees, cleaning all the bathrooms because once again, my mother would be coming and things had to be right. 

a few hours in i called my mother-in-law, who was on her way to the beauty parlor, which would be the perfect distraction for a cute little girl who would greet a new sibling, we hoped, by the end of the day.

i called my husband. it's time, i said, and he left the carefully coiffed reporter and drove the 20 miles home to take me to the hospital and into our new life as a family of four.  

it was one year to the day, i remember, from when the space shuttle exploded on national tv.

+++

last night we sat across from our son and his girlfriend sharing supper and stories. she asked what time he was born, he said: after Guiding Light, which is partly true. there would be no tv in the labor room that day, and GL was my favorite story, so i asked one of the nurses to find some way for me to watch. 30 minutes into Josh and Reva and this boy would have nothing of my distraction, breaking into this world so quickly that his napping dad hardly had time to put on his scrubs. i have to say my son has consistently interrupted my train of thought since. just when i thought i'd have a moment to myself, this quiet boy would say something that made me wish i had been paying closer attention.

he does so, still. 

+++

it seems, looking back on it, as if he grew from two feet to four then to six overnight, stretching his lanky body at times in such awkward ways that you could almost see the paIN in it. as a boy, he craved independence, admired (and practiced) great wit, loved Harry Potter and studied how to build things. he learned how to be a loyal friend to many and a brother to the sister he adores.

some say he looks like me, which is a curse or a blessing, depending upon your perspective (his/mine). the two of us have had our moments. there were days when i thought, well, i will never be good at the mother/son thing, and others when i felt we had just about gotten it right. 

lately, though i don't see or talk to him every day, it still feels tenuous. i want to help him but give him space. want to soothe with my mother thing but give him breathing room. want to say i'm proud but leave space for growth.

in the last year, i have seen my son grow into a man. we walked, hand-in-hand, into his grandfather's hospital room and out again, both of us quietly weeping. we shopped for sofas for the house he was buying. i stood by as he walked my mother to the communion rail on Christmas Eve, her arm in his hand. 

he inherited my father's saw and is building a place to put it using plans he found online. he is kind and funny and quiet, and he can be quite charming, i hear. though he drives me mad sometimes, my love for him is fierce.

+++

today he turned 27. Happy Birthday, G. It's a pleasure to know you.

mom

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son days

my friend katbird posted on facebook this week that friday was her oldest son's last day of kindergarten. in between his first day and this, she wrote, he: "learned to read and write and play the piano. he figured out math." (well good luck with that one, says i) "he grew two hu-normous front teeth. he can tie his shoelaces and ride a bike without training wheels (mostly).  he can smack a baseball and shoot a hoop.  he had his first communion and saved money for a good cause. he teared up for the first time while watching a movie (Kung Fu Panda II, go figure). wow. It blows my tiny mind. how could it not have blown his?"

that's a lot, for one little guy, in just a year. yes it is.

i knew this had been on her mind. she came into my office a few days before, talking about how much she hated Velcro shoes because how can anybody ever learn to tie shoes if all they wear is Velcro? i said the exact same thing into the air when mine were the age of hers. tying those shoes all by yourself seemed to me, as a young mom, the symbol of all there was yet to learn, and the independence of it. if my children could tie their own shoes without me, well, they might just do ok.

"all of a sudden, he could just do it," she said. yes. so sudden it takes our breath away, these things new to our children that we have known so long we can't remember when or how we learned them for ourselves.

i love the fact that, though she visited on the pretense of showing me how to use Illustrator, she felt at home enough with me in the purple office to plop herself down say just what was on her mind. and after we'd gotten our Velcro rant out of the way it was this: should she should jump more fully into her business, or stay in the 'life right now' she had planned as a stay at home mom, with her cool little boy and his cool little brother.

her boys are growing up and eventually away, and that seems a little bit (a lot?) at odds with her dream to embrace the artist she is. what if, as she sinks herself into that creative zone she misses the 12 things he will next learn to do in the next 12 days or weeks or months? "i don't feel like i'm doing any of my jobs well," she admitted. but the mother of the grown up children in me says that if she is thinking about that at all, she is probably doing just fine.

we've both had son days this week. i met mine for lunch at a busy downtown restaurant on a corner in the city where we both live and work. we moved here when he was on the cusp of three, clumping around in cowboy boots we found at a thrift shop. he wore them with jeans, shorts, with diapers probably. back then, he was not even three feet tall and often roamed the house brandishing a wooden gun carved by my father. and now he, actually, is marketing our city to visitors, conventioneers, even film makers. (just yesterday.)

i remember when he was learning some of the things my friend's boy put in his brain in the past year. how at not quite 5 he said: take off the training wheels, and we did and he was off, never turning around, never even wobbling. it had taken his sister three days to learn this new skill. how he would disappear for awhile and show up wearing a robot costume he'd fashioned out of leftovers from a packing box, staplers and tape. how later, his angular fingers began plucking the guitar strings into a tune i could easily recognize. and this: dear kat has many years, thank goodness, until she is on the sidelines of her own son's broken heart.

this boy of ours hates to shop, so when in middle school he found a pair of tennis shoes that worked, we just ordered them over and over. have been doing that since.

my son arrived for lunch this week wearing a crisp white dress shirt and new slacks — (how did the three-foot boy become a six-foot-two man is what i want to know) — he is tall and thin and everything he wears hangs just right, and i couldn't help but think of that boy i sent off to college with a closet full of madras shirts. and bow ties. i taught him that, too, how to tie the bow tie. (now if he had always worn Velcro would he have been asked by his fraternity to teach his new brothers this particular skill as part of his pledge responsibility?)

the new business clothes he has taken to wearing since he started his first post-college job a year ago suit him. but i didn't recall buying the slacks.


"i went shopping," he told me. "my clothes were wearing out." he means the clothes i bought him just as he was about to graduate — two years ago. "i waited until jobanks had a sale." wow. i felt like katbird. how did this happen?

his great-grandfather, who bought all his suits on sale — so goes the legend — would be happy about that. a man who knows how to hang onto his money.


we had a nice lunch (of course, though he makes more than i do, i picked up the tab.) we talked about work with his high school buddy who is now his coworker, how they play trivia every week at a local bar. "do you win?" i asked. "not a lot," his friend said. "hey maybe you know the answer to this one. what's apgar?"

"what do you think it is?" i asked, and they both laughed. "we said it had something to do with engineering," he said, "nobody at our table is an engineer," though both agreed they had heard it before.

well yes, in a way. and then i told them what it was, a measurement, sort of, of how well you are engineered at birth — the first score of many you get in life. "he scored 9 on the apgar!" a new parent will say, like they might years later: "he scored 1600 on his SAT!"

"no wonder we didn't know what it was," my son said. "how would we know that? only parents know that."

what is it with sons and their hold on us? that they share so little of their lives as compared to daughters that we celebrate every single thing they do tell us? probably. 

we welcome them home from that first year of kindergarten, our arms and hearts like sponges, absorbing the minutia of their days spent at lunch, on the playground, at nap and snack time. year by year their sharing becomes a little more guarded, but we welcome them just as hopeful, as we will a thousand times over — after their first great ball game, as they stretch their arms toward the finish in their first swim meet, after their first trip abroad. we hold them in their failures and their broken hearts, as they graduate from high school and college, and as they bury their friends. 

and some of us — as my friend martha did her son a couple of weeks ago — get to hug the whole man after his first experience (and we hope his last) at war. 

we wait for the details, celebrate the rare phone call, the ride to airport, welcoming every single chance we get to be the mother of them again.


this week, my friend lee celebrated her youngest son's high school graduation. the salutatorian talked of his friend, another mother's son — headed for Yale — who died in an accident, the result of a senior prank. he was the fourth mother's son to die in accidents in just two days in our city. (a daughter died, too.) it always happens during graduation week. these mothers do not get this chance again — any more son days — and i can barely breathe just thinking of their insurmountable loss.

to paraphrase, the salutatorian spoke to his classmates about what they each have been given, how our job is to figure out our God-given gifts and use them as best we can in the world. he got a standing ovation — something rare in the high school graduations of my memory.


as i read his words today, i thought about my gifts — my kids —and i wonder how well i have helped them become who they are, launched them out into the world as good people. have i, like katbird worries, not done a good job at mothering because i have been so focused on something else?

a little while ago, my phone jingled like robin hood's men announcing their arrival in sherwood forest.


'are you cooking tonight?' read the text.


sure. 6:30.


k. see y'all then.


k.yes. 

another son day.

Where the Wild Things Are

When my son was small, his favorite book was Where the Wild Things Are. At night, after a difficult day together, we would bundle ourselves into the rocking chair, and I'd read to him about a place where in the quiet of his room, all the rules of the day would melt away like the walls and become a land of his own bidding. As he grew older, I would find the book tossed on the floor by his bedside when I cleaned up his room. Here's what I wrote about it years ago:

Why would he pull out this old story now, its cover long gone, the pages scribbled on with purple crayon? He is 14 after all.

Perhaps he's searching for clues. He's he's headed for high school, and maybe he wants to remember how to tame the wild things he may meet there. Earlier in the week, we ventured into the catacombs of the school he'll attend in the fall. Watching him lumber through the halls with his friends, it was easy to forget that he is still that boy who loved the courageous Max and his wild friends. Towering over the others, my boy stands six feet in socks, his buddies flanking him like sprouts. All angles and lines, he is useful for pulling things down from high cabinets, but I know sometimes he feels ungainly. Standing in shoes my father's size, he is a man-child, wavering on the border of each age, a little unsure of which way to go.

Last week the two of us had a movie date. We had planned it ever since the summer afternoon we watched the latest Harry Potter together, when we saw the trailer for the movie made from what had become our favorite book together. So on a rainy afternoon he drove me, and we settled into our seats among the other parents and children clustered to see what had been labeled by reviewers as a masterpiece.

My son is now 22, a good four feet taller than the other children in attendance. A spring college graduate, he is living at home, working as an intern for the 'family business', spending his nights searching for his future life on places called Monster. There, wild things indeed throw fire at him, luring him with their yellow eyes into sending them all that he is, in hopes that they will allow him to, just for a few minutes, tame them with his bag of magic tricks. Tricks he hopes will engage them enough to invite him into their den.

He does not yet know what he wants to be, but he is certain he will be something, somewhere, will make a difference in his corner of the world, and so are we. He, like so many people these days — young graduates, managers with years of experience, executives who've been let go — are hoping someone, somewhere will give him the chance. And he is tired of talking about trying to find a job.

And yet, he sends his written self out into what feels like a vast ocean, one like Max sailed across a year and through a day to get to the other side. Will it take that long for him? Sometimes the response falls dark. And then, one of the wild things responds: Come see us, but we will probably fill the job before you get here. He books a flight, but the job is gone before he lifts off the ground.

And then, another wild thing responds: Let us see your tricks.

His father and I, long distanced from the interview whirl, give him tips at supper: look them in the eye, shake their hands, ask good questions, reveal something of yourself. This is probably old school, what it was like Before. He nods, and I ask him if he needs me to iron the shirt he will wear with his suit.

The night before the interview I lie awake, thinking that wild things in the movie are more like the neurotic characters on The Office than the ones who brought him comfort all those years ago. Maybe Spike Jonze's interpretation is just the right training for this next adventure in particular.

During the interview, my son threw out his best tricks,  a couple of which he felt might have tamed them. But a week later, we are still waiting, still hopeful. And we are grateful that they let him in for a couple of hours, at least. "Every interview is good training," we say, but our response feels a bit empty.

I have loved having Graham home with us the past couple of months. It feels as if he's come home again, after a long absence when he was rarely in touch. Each night we share a hot supper together, talking, which is something he rarely did he was in college. Though he does not ask us for much advice, I wonder, if one of these nights as I head off to bed, I'll find him scouring the old book again for clues as to what to do next.