Ewte Talk

If Life is a landscape then childhood summers, playing with abandon among friends, hours spent running the circles of self-made game merging into the next game into the next, relationships forged over laughter arguement thirst sweat : this is certainly one of our highest peaks. It stands at such altitude, through the clouds so to speak, that it takes the rest of our lives to relive it repeatedly in fond memory, such that the further we are from it, the more in awe we find ourselves over it. Once we have children of our own, watching them do the same with their companions, our hearts ache for the love of the whole affair: both that our kids are so fortunate as we, and that this of the kernels of childhood is on display once again for us to witness, to relive. And relive we do. We turn to our adult comrades and immediately begin the trail down our own childhood summers for each other. “I remember when . . .” and “We used to . . .” passes around the table like manna in a ritual that hands down as it is meant to, in another cycle of our lives here on the blue marble: our collective middle-age putting to bed of childhood, memory by memory, just as we watch our progeny forge their own. It is a bitter-sweet moment.

The other weekend my family and I spent a few days with friends of ours in cabins in one of the Virginia state parks not far from where we live. The idea for the weekend materialized rather quickly as I recall, just a couple phone calls: one to reserve the cabin, one to set up dinner arrangements with my friend, which was actually a phone-tag message left for the other. It was just the kind of trip I like: low key, little planning. But this didn’t diminish the anticipation building in the back seat of my car as we drove down to the park, as we crawled, creeped through I-95 traffic making our way to my sons’ extravaganza: Weekend With Sam.

By the time we arrived, our friends, who’d had the smarts to get there earlier in the day, had already befriended the occupants in the cabin which sat between the two of ours. Through a fortuitous stroke of luck it housed two children within the same age range as all of ours and a couple of like-minded parents. This doesn’t always happen, of which we were all too aware, but it happened, and we laid out our thanks and gratitude to the camping gods all day with happy shakes of our heads: Isn’t this wonderful, all of us meeting like this? The kids the same age, and so on and so forth.

For the next couple of days my boys were given a gift they don’t often get, to play most of the day with kids their own age in an unstructured environment. At home we don’t live in a neighborhood proper where my boys can just walk out the door and run to their friends’ houses. The two mornings I put breakfast on the table in our cabin’s livingroom, I had to make a deal with the Devil just to get 50 calories to reach my sons’ large intestines before all bets were off and they were out the door for the day. It was glorious starvation and I let them go for it.
On our last evening the three families ferried their dinners from their cabins to a common picnic table and shared a meal together, the kids picking at theirs quickly so as not to lose too much precious time from their marathon playfest they had going on the grounds among the trees. By nightfall we gave the children marshmallows to ensure an extended bedtime (why not? we’re all masochists here), and, because there was a partial fire ban throughout the park due to our lack of rain lately, we fixed up a fire on the grill and hovered the white round sugars over. Kids aren’t discerning creatures. Have flame, will roast.

When our new friends finally retired for the evening, an orange moon, big and round enough to envelope every one of our hopes, snuck up over the far edge of the cliffs just past our cabins. She rose over the waters of the Potomac, the sun draining her pink the higher she climbed as our friend Wyatt raced to grab his telescope so we could spy.

Later at home, Ellen, my dear friend, called with a distraught Sam at her side. Was Quinn available? Apparently Sam was inconsolable on the ride home when he found out that the cabin trip was over and that my son Quinn, in fact, was not now going to live with him for the rest of his days. I told Ellen that after we left the park and drove to Washington’s Birthplace National Monument, Quinn looked around the parking lot for their car. “Where are they?” he demanded.

“Where’s who?” I asked him.

“Sam and Madison.” Madison is Sam’s sister.

“Oh honey,” I said, “They’re not coming here. We’re all going our separate ways today.”

“But why?”

Why is a good question. Why couldn’t we all have been together on that day, and then caravaned back to our home towns? Good question. Why, once we got back into town, couldn’t we have gone to the grocery store together and grabbed the milk and whatnot that we needed together? I don’t know. Why after we shopped, couldn’t we have all gone back to the same house and lived together for ever and ever? Seems like a nice idea, I suppose. Why do the fun times have to end? Trips like this, summer, childhood friendships. Maybe they don’t really end exactly, but just fade.

Enjoy it now, my darling.

Dear Lover,

I want you back. At the risk of seeming a desperate woman I write this letter in hopes of winning your sympathies and your ultimate return. It is true I am a proud woman, a strong woman. Some people (my husband included) refer to me as a stubborn woman, and I would go so far as to agree, but in this instance I am willing to suffer insult to my pride, a weakening of my strength if I am forced to take up a grovelling stance fit for nothing more than the gutter-dweller I would become should it lead to our reunion, you and I.

My first taste of you was when I was but a girl and that was a long time ago. I saw you on our family’s one small television through a show on Babe Didrickson Zaharias. The show portrayed this spectacular woman’s athletic life, and how she had carried the U.S. Olympic Women’s Track and Field team by herself. I was smitten. With her, and with you. At the time I was perhaps eight or nine years old. I could run faster than every girl in my class except Amy Rogers, and sometimes I beat even her. She and I could also beat most of the boys, which I imagine gave her the same satisfaction it did me. I remember those days fondly. It was a time of fantasy: high hopes of marrying Derek from The Bay City Rollers and running hurdles in the Olympics. My father would run the high school track a couple miles from our rural home and my sister and I would come with him. I remember the sting of the evening air on my lungs when I’d pushed too hard for my unconditioned little body. I remember goofing around with my sister on the pole vault landing pad. I loved the track. I loved you: running.

It wasn’t until later, when we had to run in my other sports, that I remembered my allegience to you, and I switched out of field hockey and into track. From the time of my freshman year in high school I have been with you in one form or another: track, cross-country, road races, triathlons. What started out as sport, moved to a way to keep in shape, eventually became a way of life and a way to deal with life. You are so much more to me than the physical now, after twenty seven years. Our time together is spiritual, as lunatic as that may sound to the uninitiated, but if they only knew just how extraordinary your breadth is. You address my physical, emotional, and spiritual concerns with your one simple motion, all sweat aside. I’ve read that even the Buddhist monks access their spiritual reach through your efforts. Fantastic. The more the merrier.

My problem, of course, is that you and I have been separated now for the better part of eight months, which, if I’m not mistaken is our longest estrangement to date. Our separation indeed put me into a tailspin and before I got too low to pull myself out, I finally sought medical intervention. I was under the assumption that you and I were through for good, the party was over. Back at Thanksgiving my father-in-law made a valiant attempt to get things going. He is an ace at steroid injections in the knee, after having done a million over the course of his orthopaedic practice, and he sat me down in his daughter’s office as I crossed my fingers. I love that man almost as much as I love you, but, sadly, his cortico-boost was for naught. I was left high and dry.

This was indeed hard to stomach. I got up on my treadmill for repeated test drives of the “new” knee only to be driven off after half a mile. Slowly I spiralled down again. But my tolerance for dogdays is about the length of time I’m willing to stand in front of a grocery check-out filled with covers of Hilton or Brittany: not long. I got up. Again.
There is a big running club in this town and I called them, looking for you, or, more specifically, looking for a sympathetic orthopaedic and physical therapist, people who might bring me ever closer to your good graces. And guess what, honey? It’s working.

While I can’t see you or feel you, I can smell you in the air. I have been going to Farouk’s office twice a week for almost six weeks now, he crunching my scar tissue with his mighty arms, me panting back and forth all around the office. Inch by inch, I can now run two and a half miles. That’s nothing to sneeze at, considering, though I practically sleep my way through it given the pace I’m forced to maintain: sloooow. As I peek out the window, I can see the runners taking up the trails in this most glorious of seasons, and that’s when I divert my eyes because it’s more than I can bear.

But I’m making a come back. Make no mistake. In the meantime, I am doing my homework, crosstraining, and finding it rather satisfying, rather fulfilling. How does this strike you? I actually like my cycling class. In fact, my dear, I love my cycling class. I try to go to every one that I can.

Are you jealous? Maybe you should be. One never knows.

Until then,

Yours,

Stephanie

Babe Didrickson Zaharias

Parking so close to the Corcoran today with my boys and husband though unfortunately so far from our intended destination, caused the “Robert Bechtle Retrospective” sign out front of the building to slowly disappear as we diverged from the museum in a steady cold forty degree rain on foot. “Let’s stop by after we finish with the festival,” I said to my husband Bill. We were out in horrible weather to support old family friends who were selling art work at a Japanese festival somewhere on Pennsylvania Avenue. Along the way we were stopped by four Japanese young women, dripping under their umbrellas. “Excuse me,” one asked, “Do you know where the White House is?”

I didn’t. “Do you live here?” the one asked me. I told her I did. Their eyes widened. They were incredulous. How could I not know? I tried to explain that I’d lived in New York and came here with little interest in the city (what city?) “Follow us,” I told them. I’d already made a cop roll down his window in the rain twice for my questions and knew our general route. At least I could get them to Pa. Ave. Soon we found an Info kiosk and let the ladies off there after exchanging good wishes and humor over all of our efforts in the rain. “Good luck!” I told them. They nodded, smiled, giggled.
Later, we found the festival and after a brief recon, I located our friends and made a short appearance before the boys begged us for lunch. By this time our pants below the knees were drenched, our fingers slowly moving, the kids’ shoes very wet. We were looking to speed-nourish. Open hatch, tilt head, pour in tempura soba noodles, gulp twice. I will tell you, at a soaking forty degrees, they were the finest tempura soba I’ve ever inhaled. (And I used to inhale many times when we lived in NY at a tiny place near the World Trade Center when I would visit Bill at work. My actual reasons to visit Bill at work: a peek in at Century 21 [the mecca for discount shoppers] with a tempura soba chaser. An excellent high.)

As we ordered lunch the kids started pleading to go home so we decided we’d high-tail it out of there as soon as humanely possible or risk digital amputation as our weekend family activity. Somehow Bill and Max separated from Quinn and I and the four of us were left to make it to the car in two groups. (We actually had two cars, but that’s another story.) On the way out a table lined with kimono-clad Japanese youth beckoned Quinn hither with a square fruit flavored candy. The table was stocked with cheap Japanese candy and other treats, stuff you’d find at a newspaper stand. Since there were very few of us out to spectate on a day like today, Quinn was the center of their attention. As he chewed they all bent towards him with beaming over-the-top cheerful faces. Did he like it? The candy? Quinn, for his part, could tell he was being asked to critique, or at least to demonstrate the actual eating of the candy, something he would otherwise have refrained from. He would have liked to squirrel the nugget away for ever, as often happens. The poor fellow. The candy must have had liquid cement in it because it took every ounce of leverage his jaw could muster to break into the sugar rock.

While he bore down on the candy the girls at the table giggled, tittered in high-pitched squeals, and I smiled back at them amused, recalling the trip on the train we took in Turkey last year. We had rented the car from hell, from Hell make that, and had, with the exception of the car rental, the most spectacular vacation driving around the southwest of Turkey. Eventually all good things come to an end, as you know, and that buggar died on us outside of Ankara, outside of anywhere actually, and so we walked to get help, all four of us. It wasn’t too far, and my Turkish got us a tow truck to Ankara and Nescafe and a shared meal with the highway department. In Ankara we were able to hop a sleeper train back to Istanbul, our home at the time. On the train, the next cabin down were two young Japanese girls who spoke perhaps three or four English words, no Turkish, all Japanese. There was only international make-it-up-as-you-go sign language between us. And a never ending stream of high-pitched giggles from them. At first it was humorous. Then a curiosity. Then, I was looking for ear plugs in my purse. As was the case in other places we’d been, they were very intrigued with our boys. The girls wanted to photograph them. My children were novelties. This was the biggest culture shock to me: my loud progeny, one who habitually picks his nose, the other who chews the collar of his shirt; my boys, one who has the greatest respect for the word butt, the other for the word diarrhea; my offspring, one who sees his personal hygiene as meant as a race against his younger brother, the other who sees that the race concluded even before he stepped to the start line and skips any contest altogether: these are the subject of novelty?

Apparently so. Today again at the candy table I could see how fond these young kids were of Quinn. Funny. But wonderful. What a shame if cultures one day all melded into one.

As we made our way back to the car, we passed the very spot where we had been walking with the four Japanese women. There to my right was a black metal fence with people standing in front of it in the rain taking pictures. Son of a gun. I know that fence. We walked a few more steps and the White House emerged from behind some big bushes. There she was. Had we been able to see it from where we were walking earlier? Were we on this same exact path? Either way, I live in this metropolitan area. Shouldn’t I at least know where the darned White House is? It felt chastised, as if I didn’t know the words to the Pledge of Allegiance.

We made it to the car where Bill and Max were warming up, but alas, skipped the Corcoran.

Lately, after bath time Max has become especially interested in the special ways he can get his hair to react to the push and pull, drag and twirl of a comb. In front of a large mirror in the upstairs bathroom he will spend the length of time his thick head of hair retains moisture creating up-dos for himself like the proper Texan woman that he isn’t. The first time I walked in on the child to find him primping so intently I felt the stun one might feel at stumbling upon a raccoon dealing five card stud to the neighborhood nocturnes, or, waking to four feet of snow in the middle of July (in our neck of the woods), or even, turning on the news and hearing that George Bush had just fired a few of his staff.

You get the picture: since when does a five year old boy care about the presentation of his hair? Well, since at least the last time there was a five year old boy in our house actually. Now that I think about it, my older son did the very same thing. To deconstruct my sons’ interest in their hair you’d have to examine the intense determination they reserve for attempting to maintain a sheer vertical sweep of the top portion of their hair at all times, no holds barred, no matter what, come hell or high water, god forbid. All manner of perturbation ensues should the ninety degree angle droop to anything slightly less visually impactful. But, of course, hair dries, and some nights post-bath it’s all I can do not to shave a sorry little head to the scalp, military style.

This obsession with “sticking-up hair” ultimately leads me to conclude that in fact my boys are not interested in their appearance for appearance’s sake, but see their hair more as a newfound part of themselves to be manipulated, where the act of altering gives the greater pleasure. It’s kind of like Play-doh played out on the skull. This is an age where they are exploring their bodies and hair falls onto the list. They instinctually can sense this age old ritual, body manipulation, and have joined the party.

I say, more power to them.

Because . . . just watching my young son conjurs images of some powerful individuals for whom the act of altering has given argueably, quite counter-intuitively, iconic status.