pumpkins, fairies, and the prayers of Mother Cabrini

 
T H E   S A D N E S S   O F   K I D S
Barbara Ras

No archaeology. No ladders. Our bodies smooth
as tube balloons the guy at the fair twists
into any shape you'd like. A little scrape
and tears ready at the surface, Gimme that band-aid,
I'm bored, Get me out of this line
where the candy is at eye-level and I've already touched
each piece many times, my penance for being small,
six Lifesavers, ten gums, four sugarless, six not,
and all of the countless packages I've never gotten
inside of. Who needs language, faucets
out of reach, grownups—why do their hearts beat
so slow in such big bodies?—always with their hands
on things, knives, keys, preoccupied with heat,
moving parts, all the appliances that break
anyway, making them angry, their mouths busy forming
holes you can't put your fingers into or shut tight—
inventing new arsenals of no's, don't touch,
hurry up, a big favorite—occasionally a story, little
bears, big meatballs, stuff you can understand,
though you gotta stop them at the best words,
skipper, rooty-toot-toot, make them show you the place
so you can see they're not making it up,
like those old lines: Thunder is the mallet and you are the drum
and Garlic is good, it'll make your guts grow.
I know some things they don't.
Like hummingbirds feel fatigue. Like the gazebo at the farm
is for have sex outside. In my poem,
the pumpkins wait and wait.

© 1998 by Barbara Ras, from Every Bite Sorrow

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Anyone with small children, or who remembers being small themselves, knows about fingered drugstore candy. This poem captures so much of what it is to be small observing the world of adults. And although I don't understand the last line exactly—it reminds me of the way a kid might end the poem, and perhaps this is the authors intention. (What are the pumpkins waiting for, after all? For a couple to come out to the gazebo? For city children to arrive on hay bales pulled by tractors and unleashed in a field to chose one? For the Great Pumpkin?)

Life has been crowded with work and responsibilities, taking care of myself has gone to the bottom of the list. I can't continue this way, my skin feels rough and tired and I long to go to the salon and the gym. And yet there is a joy in just doing, in moving from activity to activity when you know that each task is a good one, one you ultimately want to be doing. My design work for SVS Press has always come with this reward, and now too my work for The Wooden Button.

The Wooden Button has attracted a bit of negative attention lately, rumors and gossip mostly. For example, the silly accusation that all the students have to wear neutral colors to school. But let's face it: Waldorf schools can be a bit odd. I am helping run that odd school, with all its kooky Waldorfiness, and I'm fine with that. I've always found it easier to be part of a subculture than to mainstream myself, and running a Waldorf school fits perfectly. Our lovely teachers are ever gently preaching about the problems of children and media exposure. This rubs some people the wrong way apparently, but I don't even hear it. I've been preached to about the problems of media exposure my entire life; heck, I'm a product of limited media exposure. Gossip away. I myself am a little suspicious of all the Waldorf talk about fairies and gnomies. But every kid believes in fairies, just like kids believe in Jesus and Santa Claus. It was a sad day when I realized that the characters from the Chronicles of Narnia were not real, and didn't live somewhere. Fairies and gnomies are the least of my problems.

But the sad fact is, that despite the general enthusiasm, not everybody wants the school to thrive—perhaps some are envious of or threatened by it. And honestly, school options in New York City are so politicized, so competitive, so ruthless, that I am not exactly surprised by this. We, the moms running the school, were complaining about this bad energy to our highly-trained, calm-spoken, Waldorf teachers last week. Their response? A little delighted: "Of course! It's taken people this long to start gossiping? It means we're doing out job! Don't mind it at all." And then one teacher said something that really stuck with me. She said, "We're not located in a shrine for nothing."

Our school is located in a shrine! Somehow I'd forgotten this in all the bustle of starting the school. Our classroom is in the building where the body of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini lies. A Catholic missionary nun who—among other things—founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880, started Mother Cabrini High School in 1899 (just one of the 67 different institutions she founded), and became a naturalized citizen in 1909. And did I mention the street we live on bears her name? She was canonized a saint in the Catholic Church in 1946, 29 years after her death.  Whenever I walk through the gate, past the substantial stone walls that surround the grounds of Mother Cabrini, I sense a calm presence, a joyful watchfulness even. I've always been delighted by this, and only now has it occurred to me that what I sense is her prayers and her life, her presence there. With faith and tireless work for the poor, she and the sisters hallowed the grounds where our children now play.

After dropping off the children this morning I went to the Shrine's gift shop. One of the women who runs the shine was at the desk and I told her I wanted to buy a small icon of Mother Cabrini for my icon corner. I said we needed her prayers for our school. She smiled, and proceeded to tell me that her daughter has been a Waldorf teacher for ten years and that she is so delighted that our school is located in the shrine. She said if she could raise her children all over again she would have put them in a Waldorf school. Then she mentioned she'd put up our flyers in her building to spread the news about The Wooden Button.

I've always felt that our school has moved forward for reasons beyond our control. It was meant in some way to be: at times when doors could easily have closed instead they opened. There was energy behind our plans that gently pushed us forward, wind in sails so to speak. This miraculously continues. And so I add Mother Cabrini to my prayer corner, asking her prayers, but also suspecting that she may have been helping us all along.

{   p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y   }

washing the elephant

photo on left taken by Jim Forest, diptych by Amber Schley Iragui

Tonight the elephants march under the East River. A herd of pachyderms trudge into Manhattan through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to Madison Square Gardens en route to their next circus venue. People line up along 34th street around midnight for a glimpse of the annual spectacle. Someday, when Ike is old enough, I will take him to see them. But it is raining tonight, and lightening sends shadows along the darkened wall of my bedroom.

Yesterday I read a poem in this week's New Yorker titled "Washing the Elephant." It was a longish poem, and it seemed disjointed at first. But it hung there in the air after I finished it, unraveling itself, and with it my heart. I remembered my own elephant, that is, an elephant of memory. A man who held the phone out the window of his tiny apartment to let me hear the thunder crack in a city on the other side of the globe. But I'll back up. Getting a divorce in your late twenties can leave you reeling, at least it left me so. The tidy force of my life suddenly swinging in all directions, it took three years to feel the earth solid under me again. Gone was the simplicity of romantic love, and in its place a frighteningly open place inhabited by all kinds of emotions and experiences. You doubt yourself after a divorce, and you don't want to make the same mistake again--and there is a lot of trial and error involved in the process of not making the same mistake again. By the time I met my now-husband, Charles, this process had left my heart a little pock-marked.

Charles once told me that women need a romantic story about meeting the love-of-their-life. I agree with him, although it annoyed me a little when he said it. But when you get divorced, and then you date for five years, and you fall in love with some of the people you date, you might get confused about how the story is going to go, and whether you know what love is anymore. You might start imagining up a story, a brilliant story full of twinkling lights and meaningful glances. And after awhile that story is a good deal more compelling than the people you are dating.

Which brings me back to why my heart was unraveling there in my living room. Because what I imagined for myself was not how things turned out. Not the way I'd imagined it when I was 24 and getting married to my college boyfriend, not when I was 28 and divorcing that same boy, not when I was 32 and tiring of the New York dating scene. None of those grand stories panned out. Instead I have this everyday reality: fragile, tenacious, beautiful, conflicted. And I have my memories, which on occasion may need some washing.

W A S H I N G   T H E   E L E P H A N T

by Barbara Ras

It isn't always the heart that wants to wash
the elephant, begging the body to do it
with soap and water, a ladder, hands,
in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas
of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,
the cratered full moon's light fuelling
the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, "Of course you'll recognize
your parents in Heaven," instead of
"Being one with God will make your mother and father
pointless." That was back when I was young enough
to love them absolutely though still fear for their place
in Heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full
of something resembling street water after rain.

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,
to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies
about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them
as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkerchief of coins
to the grocer when my mother send me for a loaf of Wonder,
Land of Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.
Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading
through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants
made to walk though the Queens-Midtown Tunnel
and down Thirty-fourth Street to the Garden.
So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking
after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined
for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken
pathos.

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,
the few real loves-of-your-life, and how much of the rest--
the mad breaking-heart stickiness--falls away, slowly,
unnoticed, they way you lose your taste for things
like popsicles unthinkingly.
And though dailiness may have no place
for the ones who have etched themselves themselves in the laugh lines
and frown lines on the face that's harder and harder
to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life
will appear in a dream, arriving
with the weight and certitude of an elephant,
and it's always the heart that wants to go out and wash
the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories
that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.

{ P O E T R Y   W E D N E S D A Y }