No guarantees
I was locking the door but a force pushed against the turning key. It was Benjamin PJ'd and disheveled wanting to say goodbye for the first few hours of the day. The truth is we could've been saying goodbye for the rest of this life, so I hugged him as if that could be the case. There's still no guarantee it won't be.
This truth is disheartening. I cling closely to him and my daughters and my wife and my sense of who I am, which is very closely tied to those things to which I so closely cling, especially my sense of who I am, which is very closely tied to those things to which I so closely cling, which is, etc.
We like guarantees in the American suburbs. That's why we moved out here. But there are no guarantees in the sense that we like there to be. How many unforeseens can you fit on the top right corner of a bank statement or blade of well-kept grass? We like to think we can awaken the fairies of our dreams if we can just clap hard and loud enough, and we think the gospel should work at least as well as the magic of Neverland. But there's a reason they called it Neverland. It could never answer my son's WHY should I not make it home today nor mine.
1 Peter 1:13
We live a few miles from the site of a major skirmish during the Civil War. The Union was steadily making way toward Atlanta and the Confederacy was holding them off 150 years ago just a few miles from our home. Chances are some shots were fired in the Marietta woods razed to build our neighborhood in 1989. The site of the Cheatham Hill battle is routed by walking and running trails pounded by tourists and mesh-clad locals shedding off their baby weight and office guts, by cross country chicks and their shirtless boyfriends, by waddling toddlers stumbling over pine straw and small roots, all who once found it intriguing to read a tombstone of a man who'd fallen with a fatal wound near their tracks but who now like me are consumed with summer, hedges to trim, kids to keep cool at the neighborhood pool, thoughts and curiosities that all quell the sound of distant fire and the falling of another field.
Alligators
It's 3:30 and Abigail has dreamed of alligators and in my weariness I think "I'm glad it wasn't crocodiles." A vision the shape of a crocodile's mouth flashes through my mind. I lay next to her for a while pondering the differences between alligators and crocodiles but then remember it's way too early and that I'm slightly bothered by having been wakened by an alligator dream. "Go back to sleep," I tell her gruffly. But Abi wants to lay on the couch or in our bed or have us lay with her and I'm growing angry and finally snap! and wonder why she dreams of alligators this far from Florida.
Photograph of my life
It was a serious hunt. The kids were draped across their beds when we turned their lights on. We crouched, lay, rake, ransacked, replaced in every closet, under every bed, through every basket, kids snoozing all the while for more than two hours. No stack of papers, books, dolls, toys or clothing was left unturned. My wife's keys have been missing for almost two weeks. Saturday we went on a hunt. "I'm searching everywhere for my keys," she told me. And we did. Everywhere. Then, somewhere in the midst of what felt like an activity of the Khmer, I looked at our lives from the outside and found I was investigating and dissecting memories along with toys. I also was getting to peek into the minds of my children through the still lives they'd left with artifacts we would regard under normal circumstances as clutter. The silly cloth dinosaur puppet Sarah would hold by the tail, the Barbie's naked and clothed cloistered and crammed in a pink box, silken princess dress ups, light sabers, retired batmen, various tinker toy fragments, real baby shoes the size of my thumb stored away for Goodwill. Our search for the keys unlocked our lives sitting in repose. With headlamp shining I made my way to the garage to search every cranny of the van. I squeezed between seats, rocked over into the trunk, dug amid crumbs and the missing parts of figurines and Lego sets. I found a stash of Valentine's Day M&Ms and ate two bags. In the muffled interior of the van I could hear Megan in her booming search as boxes dropped, feet pounded, even the gasps of frustration sounded through our small home. I went upstairs. No keys. But the searching for keys created a moment to look if we chose to at our brief history.
Franklin Rd: part 3
Muhammed offers me the hooka pipe at the Nazareth bakery. His older friend Mikey was a computer engineer in California until he was laid off, moved back to Nazareth for a while then back to the states where he works at the bakery, serving Arabs who come from all over Atlanta.
Many Mariettans probably feel divided about their presence here, wondering whether they are funding terrorist acts. These aren't my concerns.
They pass the hooka back and forth.
"I saw soccer balls in your car. You play soccer? I was best soccer player in my country," Muhammed says.
"I coach my son's team. Soccer is the best?"
"No. I mean I was the best in my country. My brothers play still."
Mikey (though I don't believe that's his Palestinian name) takes puffs from the hooka, a two foot tall water pipe that sometimes burns hashish but legally provides a sweet smelling smoke at Arab restaurants (apparently) in the states.
"American football you hit so hard you lose your memory," Muhammed says.
"Yes. Yes," Mikey agrees.
"America is the only place they play it," Muhammed adds.
"Yeah. I'm not crazy about it," I tell them.
I'd come to see why a bakery took so much space in a shopping center. Earlier Mike told me what Palestinians eat as he showed me around the Arab supermarket. Frozen shelves hold falafel and halal meat.
"Fava beans are very popular for breakfast," Mikey told me.
Encased in glass are rosaries and camels made of olive wood from the Holy Land.
"What do you do?" Muhammed asks me, the hooka smoke floating from his mouth.
"I'm a writer."
"Ah!" They both smile.
And because I feel again that I've stepped into someone else's world without much else to say or time to say it, and because I'm late for my wife's tacos, I search for an excuse to leave.
"Gotta go," I take a menu from the cafe. "I'll be back."
Franklin Rd: part 2
The white guy wore a yellow cap and no shirt. He had 12 tattoos. He was singing "Calling Baton Rouge" then he asked the west African clerk, "You like country?"
"It's all right."
"Yeah. It is all right," said the white guy.
"At least they don't use dirty words."
"Dirty words. You a Christian?"
"No," the clerk said.
"You go to church?"
"No."
"You believe in God?"
"Yes."
"You an atheist?"
The clerk smiled and gestured with his hands in a way that said Let me teach you. "If I don't go to church and I'm not a Christian and I believe in God maybe you could ask me something else."
"Oh. You a Muslim?"
"Yes."
"Oh. Them's fightin words. Hehe. I'm just playin. Could I get the ultralights in a box?"
"I like rap music, too. I rap," added the white guy. The white guy sang 'Operator want you put me on the line' looking at the black guy with corn rows who'd just walked in to pay for his gas.
"You rap?" he asks the guy.
"No."
Franklin Rd: part 1
I took the long way home. I drove through an apartment complex off Franklin Rd. I gave a wave, which felt like a white man's wave all of a sudden, to a young black guy taking his pit bull out for a pee. The guy didn't smile. I received many stares. I was uncharacteristically white and I had entered a different world. I had entered their world in my silver Honda with my earbuds channeling This American Life, my Blackberry buzzing with calls from my wife, with my white man's suburban colonist eyes casting glances from above. "How cute. A baggy pants African American. A shop that sells Halal meat. A Jewish bakery. What a menagerie of humanity I've happed upon off Franklin Rd."
Darwinian weekend
Weekend mornings are an evolution. 1, 2 then 3 the children emerge in various stages of development but end as one in the same organism trailing at various lengths from the others but tethered by some invisible sinew electrified and taut, snapping with a whine, a scream, the pain of dependence in this amoebic mess of a morning. It’s breakfast time, and they remind us painfully and repeatedly with their bedside petitions for “raisin cereal” or requests to play the XBOX at what time is it?
This is Benjamin. Usually awake by 5:45 or 6 with no in between. He snaps to and is already training like a Ninja before leaving his bed. Jake up the street has been teaching him some moves.
Abigail is shortly after. She wants breakfast too, a fresh pair of pants and her hair up but then she can be preoccupied by a book or a song in her head, which she can dance to alone for more than an hour.
And I can still hear Sarah Kate snoozing over the whir of refrigerator and noise box. She snores lightly and sleeps heavily and used to, when she was younger, say loudly “I am awake. I am awake.” (Sarah did this until she learned from her older two that she could climb out herself.) Two-year-olds have mastered the art of chipping away with repetition, partly because they have no concept of how long ago they said the thing they’ve said every 30 seconds for as long as it takes. It’s like that dog barking into the night the same bark. Dogs and children can say the same things over and over, expect different results, and get them.
And cats, too. The black one we own, Oscar, meows through every room in the house at irritating times until someone feeds him or, stranger, turns the shower on then off so he can lick up the beads of water from the shower floor. He’s also been known to eat, or at least chew through, large amounts of plastic and power cords.
Each emerging life form is a threat to my survival as I fight keep my wife in her sacred sleep. This morning I succeed.
Friday Night
The server uselessly walks us through the new menu.Then I order the cheeseburger with the thick-cut bacon on top. My wife orders the chicken tacos. We both have Coke and talk about the DEFACS kids she tutors.
Later we join the middle-aged men browsing the history section of Barnes and Noble. A blond sporty mother with a smoker’s voice helps a younger girl find a book. The young teen girls peruse the Manga books. Young teen guys with hair in their eyes watch them. In the cafe a 13-year-old’s Victoria’s Secret purchase hangs in a striped bag on one hooked finger. I look at her to see what she’ll do when she sees me looking at her. She looks at me. She’s 13. It’s strange. Too adult for a girl her age. I show my wife. “Turn around,” I tell her. “Are you sure I should?” she asks. She turns around.
We order the plain cheesecake and two ice waters. The man behind the counter serves our order slowly, deliberately and with an Eastern European accent of a sort.
It’s date night. The kids are at home.
My wife reads People. I’m reading the Atlantic about a guy named Manelli and his Blue Oasis in Switzerland. It’s a death resort for suicide tourists. Over the past year he’s helped a thousand people kill themselves. A table nearby reminds us Easter’s April 4 and that we could buy an easter-y book if we wanted to celebrate. “Izzie’s coming back to Grey’s Anatomy,” my wife tells me.
"Can I buy this magazine?" I ask.
We get up. Walk into the night empty-handed fearing the day we become the people we've seen. Fearing we already are those people. Fearing what Mizelli's patients feared, not living whatever life they had left with the dignity their consciences required.