say ‘rocket,’ Jacob.” He was not paying attention, of course. “Red udder” had communicated his want.
As I cut and taped, I wondered what chance combination of memories enabled me to translate his words, this image voiced in sparse vowels and consonants. And then my thoughts wandered back to the associations that had flashed in my mind. I realized that what he wanted came to me when I caught an image of a nursery rhyme. During the past week, we had been reading from a book of Mother Goose rhymes, including the one about the cow jumping over the moon. I went down to the basement to get the book. Against the backdrop of a night sky, I saw that white cow, udder hanging over the curve of the moon as the blocky body seemed to lift off toward outer space. I needed the story-rhyme to call out the proper scene, the one that Jacob imagined and translated into hieroglyphic speech.
There is another tale, one that I pondered again and again in those wilderness years: the Exodus story in the Old Testament. It held the kind of images and associations that contributed to my own sense of what was happening, my own internal meaning-making. The story was linked to the name that Mary and I first considered for a boy child but then later discarded like a scrap of paper: Aaron, the brother of Moses. In the splintered remembrances of the Exodus story, I recalled the various desires that come with trying to escape or striving to conjure up faith to confront the unknown.
I had always been drawn to Aaron in the Bible story. It may be that the attraction arose from watching The Ten Commandments, the Hollywood film that recreates the Israelites’ flight from Egypt through the Red Sea. The biblical story contains its own cinematic and dramatic texture, including the ultimate fear of having been chosen by God without the confidence or ability to carry out His commands. When it is revealed that he has been selected to lead the Israelites out of slavery to the Promised Land, Moses timidly tries to convince his God that he should not be sent; he worries about his own ineloquence:
“If you please, Lord,” he beckons, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past, nor recently, nor now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow in speech and tongue.”
But the Lord said to him, “Who gives one man speech and makes another deaf and dumb? . . . Is it not I, the Lord? Go, then! It is I who will assist you in speaking and will teach you what you are to say.”
Yet Moses still insists that someone else be chosen, that he has not the power to carry the word to his people. In anger, Yahweh replies:
“Have you not your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know that he is an eloquent speaker…. You are to speak to him, then, and put the words in his mouth. I will assist both you and him in speaking and will teach the two of you what you are to do.”
Perhaps, in those early years, my desire to reflect upon this story is not surprising. After all, I had begun to grieve for a lost son, a child I had seen in my mind’s eye but had not embraced in life. In my private storytelling, the imaginings that prefaced Jacob’s birth repeatedly called forth the image of the eloquent one, the progeny who could take a lost people across their own Jordan River to some better place. With both my daughter and son, in fact, I had done as many parents do: I had pictured the embodiment of the best of who I was or the best of what I could nurture in my future children’s lives. In these prophetic hopes and reveries, it was my love that shaped their eloquent leadership. Then came these irrational questions: Was this the arrogance that left me unprepared? Was it this turning to earthly desires that initiated the hard years? How easy it was to slip into these superstitious doubts to give order to what I did not understand.
But I can say now what I was just coming to know then in a house resounding with the Jabberwock of Jacob-speak: that to be chosen is to be sacrificed and that to be sacrificed is to come to a new way of knowing. Something unsustainable had to be given up; something new had to be discovered. And it was the story of Moses and Aaron that crystallized this understanding. What a bitter lesson to find oneself delivered into a wilderness, to set up camp there, to tend the fire and suffer the endless covering of coal and ash, to feel the grind of sand in the unleavened bread, to embrace the initial certainty of false gods, to see the distant shadow that starts as Jordan and ends in a bitter stream of cursing. The most holy of mysteries is this very human place, this shoreline defining the tenuous threshold between sacrifice and deliverance, confusion and faith.
Near the time of looking back to this story, this reflection upon forsaken names, I unexpectedly wandered into a lesser, unsolved mystery: Jacob’s puzzling, “Oh, l-ook. Oh, l-ook. A nice dinna.” The unearthing of the phrase’s origin came from entering another story plotted near the shores of the Nile, another tale that ended in the struggle to escape: Tomie de Paola’s children’s story, Bill and Pete.
After a day of cleaning, I sat down with Mary, Sarah, and Jacob (then eight and six) to watch a videotape of our family taken a number of years before. The television lit up with the image of my daughter and son, each four years younger, sitting on the living room floor. Their eyes were fixed upon an animated version of Bill and Pete. Bill is William Everett Crocodile, who lives on the banks of the River Nile. Pete is his toothbrush, that is, a bird that picks at Bill’s molars beneath the canopy of the reptile’s yawning jaws. When William is young, he gets confused by all the letters required to spell his name. Pete unburdens him with the simple appellation, “Bill.”
That night, I decided to read de Paola’s story, and, after a period of searching, I caught a glimpse of the pink paperback with the moon and stars calm and steady on the back cover. As Jacob lined up dominoes on the floor next to his bed, I narrated the tale in the face of his seeming inattention until I came to the part I liked best. For my own amusement, I renamed Bill and Pete, Jacob and Dad. It was always fun to enter the stories destined to end in sleep or discovery. And I read:
One Saturday, when there was no school, Jacob and Dad went down to the River Nile and sat on the bank in the sun. A man on a bicycle went riding by.
Behind the bicycle were cages filled with crocodiles.
“I wonder what that’s all about?” said Jacob.
“That’s the Bad Guy, and those crocodiles are on their way to Cairo—to become suitcases,” said an old crocodile swimming by. “Watch out he doesn’t catch you!”
But he did. The very next Saturday.
Jacob and Dad were fishing and they didn’t hear the Bad Guy creep up behind them.
For a moment, I saw my son pause and so I eased myself into the space of his play. On the rug, he had arranged dominoes in parallel lines. Squinting or with a quick or sidewise glance, I began to see the lines as credits scrolling upwards on a television or movie screen. I laid the book at the right edge of the dominoes and looked at the lines. In their configuration, I could almost see the words imprinted in his mind: the list of characters and voice credits, of executive producers, art directors, production assistants, gophers, hair stylists. From the black dots and black lines between the dots emerged the symbols of his world, a world of repetition, of rituals fulfilling needs that I had yet to understand. I quietly nudged the book against his elbow and, to draw his eyes to it, ran my finger along the golden shore that formed the border between palm trees and the blue water of the Nile. I began to read with more feeling.
The Bad Guy lassoed Jacob and put him in a cage. He didn’t pay any attention to Dad.
Dad tried to peck the Bad Guy, but Dad was just too small.
Poor Jacob!
He was on his way to Cairo.
All he could think about was suitcases.
Brave Dad!
He
