Alison McGhee

I’m spending the day going through the ratpile that is my office. It stands in marked contrast to the orderly rest of the house. A psychologist would probably find this marked contrast interesting, but we won’t go there. In the many piles of papers and books are journals from the few years I kept one, back in the 90’s. I know better than to start leafing through, but leaf through I do. From 4 November 1996, when my son was five:

* * *

At the playground my son and his friend swing high. Higher and higher; they pump their legs straight out and arch their backs.

“I’m swinging up to heaven!” she says.

“When we die I’ll see you up in heaven!” says my son.

They laugh. They pump higher. She wears two hearing aids, blue-green, one in each ear. She looks at my lips when I speak to her. She lives directly across the street from the playground. There’s a yellow Deaf Child sign on the street.

They laugh. They pump higher. When they’re high enough they leap off the swings and land in the sand. They stretch out on their backs with early November sunshine making them squint.

“When I die I’ll see you up in heaven!”

They laugh. They keep on laughing.

* * *

That your nose hairs freeze the second you walk outside.

That you cough uncontrollably the second you walk outside.

That your booted, double-socked toes are continually stubbed as you kick repeatedly at frozen dog turds while on poop patrol.

That you have to hunch down to the level of the steering wheel in order to see out of the only truly clear patch on the dashboard despite scraping, wiping, and setting the defrost on full blast.

That the plug-in heat seater your sister gave you for Christmas shorts out after only a week, probably due to constant overuse.

That you carry hand lotion with you wherever you go, but it doesn’t matter, because your hands crack and bleed anyway.

That no matter how carefully you explain it to him, your dog still sits on the snow and tilts his head at you, not understanding why his paws are literally frozen.

That no matter how long you aim your fake-sun lamp at your eyeballs, you still can’t lift the gloom that has descended on your spirit.

That others tell you continually how beautiful winter is, and that it is your job to change your attitude.

That when they come up to you to be petted, your dogs inadvertently shock you with their electrified fur.

That despite the fact that you are currently wearing smartwool socks, silk long underwear top and bottom, fleece-lined Carhartt men’s jeans, a long-sleeved knit shirt, a wool sweater, a fleece vest, and a scarf – and you are INSIDE YOUR HOUSE – you are still trembling with cold.

Do I love weekend breakfasts? Yes.

Huge greasy weekend late morning/early afternoon breakfasts of eggs and pancakes and bacon and toast and coffee? Yes.

Do I live in Minneapolis? Yes.

Have I lived here for twenty years? Yes.

Had I ever been to the Band Box Diner, at 729 S. Tenth St. in Minneapolis? Not until yesterday.

Here is what I ordered: a plate-size pancake with butter and syrup, a side of sausage, and two orders of American fries. I debated about a cup of coffee – I’m a single perfect cup made with boiling water hand-poured through a filter at dawn type, so there is little worse in my personal culinary world than nasty coffee that’s been burning for hours on a hot plate, but I threw caution to the winds and ordered a cup.

Tasty! As was the pancake!

BUT.

The American fries.

I’ve never had anything like them. They took a long time to get to the table, but in my experience, perfection often does take a long time. These American fries were soft, melt-in-the-mouth soft, with equally soft onions, grilled together with the potatoes just long enough so that crisp bits mixed in with the overall melting softness.

As I ate, the cook stood by the grill peeling already-boiled red potatoes and then, as he held each one in his hand, slicing it tenderly in cross-hatched rows until a pile of pieces fell into a waiting bowl. The waitress, with her many lovely tattoos and piled tangle of black hair, greeted an old, mute, toothless woman by name – “Hello, Monica, do you want the usual?” and set a can of Sprite and a hamburger down before her.

The counter stools are red. They twirl. The tables are red. The windows are large. The place is tiny. My friend and I ate everything on all four of our plates. “I’m surprised you can even move, after all that food,” said the waitress.

The Band Box is my new favorite diner in Minneapolis. It’s a one of a kind, the antithesis of a chain restaurant. Wherever you live, tell me about your own one-of-a-kind diner, will you? I’d like to visit it someday.

Praise to the airport dog park.
Praise to its winter marsh and blue snow and wide white slopes.
Praise to its dark branches reaching skyward.
Praise to the roaring birds of jets, ascending and alighting.
Praise to the large woman with the high fretting voice, calling her dogs over and over, calling them that they, unlike the others, might never leave her.
Praise to the man with the leathery face and the earflapped cap, treading the far marsh with his huskies.
Praise to wilderness surrounded by highways and barbed-wire FAA fences.
Praise to this place that reminds me that winter is beautiful.
Praise to life sleeping under the ice, holding itself within itself.
Praise to my black dog, shadow behind my legs.
Praise to his doe-eyed cousin, friend to all he meets.
Praise to them both, flat-eared silent streaks, racing the woodland path.
Praise to the god of dogs, who watches over their streaming tails, their soulful eyes, and their consecrated hearts.

A child enters my room sometime after midnight.
I know it’s my son by the silhouette of his cheek,
his spiky, sleep-tossed hair.
I say his name. He doesn’t answer.
I call his name again and
again, he does not answer.
It is my boy, isn’t it?
Or have I transformed a masked stranger into a
second-grader in blue plaid flannel pajamas?

A whisper of a laugh escapes him and
it does not sound like the laughter of the boy I know.
Someone else has come upon us,
insinuated himself into our family,
eased in on a black night.
Fear slips cold gloves around my lungs and
I can’t breathe.
Motionless on the threshold, the
stranger stares at me in darkness.

Next morning at breakfast the
eight-year-old is back. His spoon lifts
in and out of a cereal bowl, flashing silver.
He sees me gazing at him in the morning sun.
He smiles his gap-toothed smile.
After a minute I smile back at him.
I don’t want to think about
what I witnessed there, in the dark:
the man inside the boy, waiting to get out.

The newspaper reports that at twilight tonight
Venus and Jupiter will conjoin
in the southwestern sky,
a fist and a half above the horizon.
They won’t come together again for seventeen years.
What the article does not say is that Mercury, the
dark planet, will also be on hand.
He’ll hover low, nearly invisible in a darkened sky.
I stare out the kitchen window toward the sunset.

Seventeen years from now, where
will I be?
Mercury, Roman god of commerce and luck,
let me propose a trade:
Auburn hair, muscles that don’t ache, and a seven-minute mile.
Here’s what I’ll give you in return:
My recipe for Brazilian seafood stew, a talent for
French-braiding, an excellent sense of smell and
the memory of having once kissed Sam W.

Then I see my girl across the room.
She stands on a stool at the sink,
washing her toy dishes and
swaying to a whispered song,
her dark curls a nimbus in the lamplight.
The planets are coming together now.
Minute by minute the time draws nigh for me to watch.
Minute by minute my child wipes dry her red
plastic knife, her miniature blue bowls.

Mercury, here’s another offer, a real one:
Let her be.
You can have it all in return,
the salty stew, the braids, the excellent sense of smell
and the softness of Sam’s mouth on mine.
And my life. That too.
All of it I give for this child, that seventeen years hence
she will stand in a distant kitchen, washing dishes
I cannot see, humming a tune I cannot hear.

Once There Was

Once there was a childhood full of space. Long stretches of stillness. A deep sense not of loneliness but alone-ness. This was in far upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. There were three little girls, sisters who dressed up for Easter, and for the first day of school, and never else.

The oldest woke every morning to the sun slanting through pines at the far edge of the field across the road. She stood outside in the darkness before bed and looked up at the stars glittering thickly in the heavens, diamonds on black velvet. When she lay her head on her pillow her ears were drawn inward to the depth of the surrounding silence, and the shushing of her own heart was all she heard.

There was a giant maple tree at the end of the driveway. Every summer afternoon the three sisters gathered there at three o’clock, and their mother read aloud to them.

There was a dirt road that meandered down the hill and through the woods and over a wooden bridge that spanned the brook to a far meadow.

Down the dirt road there was a swamp that – if they jumped from hillock to hillock – they could cross without getting their feet wet. In the midst of the pine trees that grew on the other side was a clearing made holy by its thick carpet of pine needles, by the sunlight sifting through outstretched branches. The sisters called it their pine tree house.

There was a green insulated knapsack that their mother packed bologna sandwiches in, to take down the dirt road, across the swamp, to the pine tree house, for picnics.

There were blackberry canes down the dirt road, bending over the brook. There were green paperboard berry boxes that they carried down the dirt road to the blackberry canes. Drone of insects. Beat of sun. Burst of sweet juice on tongue. Long auburn hair caught in thorns. A curving scratch on a knee, beaded with blood.

There was a broken-down barn filled with hay. A rope swing tied to a rafter. Three little girls heaving hay bales into stacks, pushing out tunnels in those stacks, making a hidden fort. There was a flashlight and a book being read in the silence and darkness of the hay fort. A girl listened to her sisters running on the hay above her and shrieking as they swung out on the thick rope swing.

There was a tree house built by the oldest that neither of the younger two could manage to climb into. The girl took her jackknife and carved her initials into a slender branch: A. R. M.

The dirt road? Still there. The pine tree house, still there, and the broken-down barn, and the holy pines. The giant maple, gone. The scratch on the knee faded to a whispery white line. And the three sisters grown to women all, their shadow baby selves still wandering the dirt road of their childhood. The A.R.M. is fat and pillowy now, cradled in the embrace of the branch that healed around it. And the girl who carved it is sitting right now in a bagel shop thinking of Neil Young, who wrote, “All my changes were there.”

[photopress:Binkel__Alison__and_Oatie_1.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

There’s a lot of great writing out there these days. Here’s a sample:

1. I cleaned out the William Maxwell novel section at my favorite bookstore – Magers & Quinn in Uptown Minneapolis – and stacked them up on my desk. So far I’ve made my way through “So Long, See You Tomorrow” and “They Came Like Swallows.” I have to stop sometimes as I read this man’s work, it’s so painfully beautiful.

2. A new novel by a novelist named Rebecca Lee, called “The City Is a Rising Tide.” Amazing book. If I tried to describe the plot it would sound mundane, so I won’t. The magic of this book is in the writing, and in Lee’s ability to capture in one sentence emotional undercurrents that would take others entire books to describe.

3. “The Madness Equation,” by Mary Spalding, which is an essay/memoir in the September issue of The Sun Magazine. The writer draws a connection between fractals (as in math and physics, both subjects I love reading about) and  “madness.” Fascinating.

4. The Ramona books, by Beverly Cleary. Ever read these when you were little? I just read them all, one again and the rest for the first time. They’re great.