No Finer Form
After school my son finds a six-foot stick with a forked end and lugs it to the car. “I need this walking stick,” he says. “I’m worn out.” He keeps shifting its position to better carry it, and I keep waiting to get blinded by a giant stick. When we pass his kindergarten buddy, the other boy says, “That is a staff. I bet every time you tap it a tsunami starts.” They practice tapping it but run out of tsunami locations after Myrtle Beach and California. Then they argue over whether Poseidon or Neptune is the god of the sea, refusing to believe that it’s both.
I tend to believe that birds are signs, and there are many birds near my house. I think, “Well, I guess poems mean nothing. Might as well give up,” and a cardinal alights on the porch chair opposite me with a sudden busy flutter. That’s my grandmother’s way of saying, “No …. Keep going.”
My last lover promised me a bunch of things he couldn’t follow through on, like an actual relationship. “It’s like I was carrying a diamond cake, and I tripped and fell on it face-first,” he said. I don’t know what a diamond cake is. I was the cake, I guess? I would have preferred to be a human woman in the scenario. There were other problems, I learned. He was still living with his girlfriend. But the cake issue was there, as well.
When my uncle was small my grandmother took him to a barber who drank and who talked loudly and forcefully. The barber once pressed my grandmother to buy some tractor pull tickets he was selling, exclaiming, “No finer form of family entertainment!” Ever since, my uncle has been prone to think of this statement at odd moments. Luckily, he had curly hair as a child.
* * * * *
Misfits
“What does ‘baron’ mean?” My son is reading a book in his carseat.
I try to remember what a baron is. “A type of nobility,” I say. “Like a prince but not quite a prince.”
There is a pause. “What does it mean when it’s like, ‘The earth was barren’?”
*
His friend at school has referred to the “b- word,” and he needs to know what that is. I don’t want to talk about it, I say. He keeps insisting until I break down. But first I remind him what sexism is, and explain how sometimes people attempt to put those with less power in their place, to suggest that they shouldn’t claim their power and speak their truth. Finally, I tell him the word.
*
He asks me what a “misfit” is.
“Someone who doesn’t fit in with the group and maybe doesn’t want to fit in,” I say.
“We’re misfits,” he replies.
“You and I are?”
“Yeah.”