take no chances. The war had exhausted, at a young age, many grown-ups’ interest in taking chances.
I still spent lots of time with my paternal grandparents, who divided their lives between a one-room apartment in the city and a one-room cabin in western Wisconsin, as well as with the maiden aunts and uncle who had raised my mother: their names were Mamie, Sadie, and Boo.
My grandparents were, in retrospect, odd company. Grandpa hardly spoke at all and worked from early in the morning till late at night building beautiful, intricate things in his workshop, inlaid tables primarily: he had been a carpenter all his life. My grandmother was musical, psychic, and a gifted storyteller. And in their presence I was what every child needs to be for however long it takes to put down the roots of a strong spirit: the object of love unlimited. Similarly, Mamie, Sadie, and Boo spoiled and petted me. Boo, in particular, would take me to the dime store every visit and bring me back with my pockets full of plastic treasure and my cheeks bulging with sweets. Left in the care of my aunts, I learned to roll pies and eat them right up with ice cream. Left with Uncle Boo, the cuisine was simpler. “Cooking,” for Boo, meant buttering a slice of Wonder Bread and covering it with syrup. We’d eat it, then pick up the plates and lick them clean. When I hear words and phrases like “grace” or “the mercy of God,” my frivolous mind composes a dinner plate glazed with Log Cabin.
But it was only a few years ago, when I turned fifty, that I realized how disconnected I felt after the move to Roseville—cut off from what Carson McCullers called “the we of me”—like a pup taken out of the litter and set to train on a cold cement floor. After one summer moving day, I never again saw my warm-hearted Italian uncle, Tony, my cousin, Denny, who marauded the countryside with me, Rosie and Joanne who looked out for all the younger ones and brought Denny and me home safely when we stalled on some great dump adventure. Behind, as well, was the upright piano I had lain behind from babyhood, absorbing music through port-holes in the soul. A piano would not fit into my parents’ decorating scheme for many years and, when it did, it would be a tinkly spinet with the pinched soul of furniture.
That week I turned fifty, my children got hold of an old photo album, looking for pictures of mom as a child. They found a snapshot of me, tiny among cousins, so uncharacteristically surrounded. “Who are these people?” they asked. Without thinking about it, I almost gave the response my parents had taught me when I wailed for that lost family: “They’re nobody special to us.” The bare words seem cruel, but the underlying sentiment was, I think, merely elegiac: our blood connection was uncertain, we want to put that life behind us, something happened that doesn’t concern you …
Instead, the little black-and-white photo blazed its revelation: the “we of me.” The answer, perhaps, to a number of miscellaneous questions: why I keep trying to live in community, why I married a man who was the eldest of ten children, why my house has accommodated, over the years, such odd lots of people, why, still, I keep wandering around looking for “the rest.”
Roseville, the merciless subdivision: Levittown of the prairie. It must have unrolled as though from a traveling puppeteer’s bag of tricks, sidewalks, tarmac, chain-link fences, and the ugly houses with their false brick fronts and aluminum siding: unreal city. It did not take me long, transplanted from the delightful squalor of Case Street and fourplex living with my cousins, to start howling. My parents, I’m sure, were thrilled to be there, which illustrates the economies of cosmic intelligence. Why provide space for both heaven and hell when in two thousand square feet both can serve their respective inhabitants?
I love city life, its ruthless push of body on soul, the exacerbation, the grinding down. Sometimes. Often. And I love deep country, lakes lit like white fire. But nothing in my soul responds to suburbs, from which life has been sucked through a stellar straw. As though we were an experiment in the making of black holes.
Worst was the green and loathsome grass. People in those days did not understand the folly of monocropping the fussy gramineae family: how the pesticide washing over temperamental grass would kill not only dandelions and plantain (a handy medicinal plant, called “nature’s bandage” in the old herbals: this is a commercial message) but also the tiger swallowtail and luna moth, the earthworm, and probably my dad who died of cancer in 1991 after fifty years of dusting everything green in sight with a chemical cocktail called 2–4 D. It will probably compromise my sister and me as well, who walked barefoot on that grass, as well as our children, who carry our poison in their veins. But nobody knew, or believed what they had been told by the likes of Rachel Carson—for, tramping around old barns, I often come upon stores of the same chemicals stockpiled (I assume) by guys of my dad’s era. They’ve heard some kind of bad news about this handy chemical mix and—having experienced Prohibition—they instinctively hoard.
I still labor with my city neighbors over the dandelion issue. I’ve caught dear (in other respects) friends sneaking over at night to spray my yellow miscreants. And I have to head for the basement every spring when clouds of vapor drifting across the neighborhood catch me unaware. A tank truck has pulled up next door, a happy golden truck painted with children playing in the poisoned gramineae, eating their dissolution. Once I accosted the sixteen-year-old driver of the golden wagon labelled “Robolawn,” or whatever they call it these days. He had stopped to spray, and to tack out the little signs that warn whichever animals are literate.
“Excuse me, but I’m a mom, and so I have to ask you why the company doesn’t provide you with a respirator and whether you know what you’re breathing in there?”
“I have no idea,” he responds to the latter question. “And they decided it’s bad for business if we go around wearing gas masks while we spray.”
“May you be safe, may your body be well, may your mind be at peace.” This is an ancient Buddhist prayer for sending meta, compassion. May your hormones not be altered. May your children be capable of reproduction. May they see, some sunset, the pale green elegant line of luna moth.
Having survived the war, just about everybody in Roseville was trying to put death behind them, but fortunately I saw enough of it, like the child Siddhartha, to get me thinking.
The crow had been slit by a cat, I guess, and it lay beside the chain-link fence that edged our garage. The contents of its stomach had silted out beside it on the ground, undigested bright corn. I had never before witnessed this particular dialog of assimilation and dissolve. If a huge vulgar bird could simply eat corn and die, the universe seemed to my seven-year-old mind an implacable place.
The bird’s death had occurred a little beyond our property line, where it was not subject to my father’s relentless maintenance. So I could watch through a month of summer, as though at the July Academy of Desire and Longing, its slow decay. First the bright eyes went, then other scavengers plucked the corn from its gullet. Finally, the thing just mummified. I shared the drama with no one, but simply visited this summer school every day and pondered its lessons. It was during that July I began to cart home every bone and skeletal fragment I could find while ranging the neighborhood. I would label these old cow teeth and weasel skulls and put them on shelves in my room, which did not make my parents happy.
Death became a concern of mine. That was the winter I had been knocked out with rheumatic fever and exiled from school. Children do not grasp the whole picture of certain finalities—death, divorce—as quickly as they seem to. A young farmer I know, who niche markets lambs to the upscale restaurant trade, was determined to raise his children with a full and generous understanding of barnyard life and death. He hated to think his children might grow up with the idea that “meat” sprang cleaned, cut, and shrink-wrapped into the supermarket case. In the interests of education, he led his five-year-old to participate in the life cycle of one sturdy wether named Jimmy, from birth to lamb chop. Parturition went fine, gamboling proceeded as usual. From time to time the little boy was reminded that Jimmy would ultimately go to the butcher. The day came, the boy said good-bye, and a week
