Critters and Kids

Previously published on thesouthernc.com- August 8,2012

               “You’re a sweetheart to the max. I love you like Crispy Critters.”- Wesley Willis

    People like to say down here in the South that if you can fry it, well…. you can surely eat it. I don’t know about that seeing as it was my brother who inherited my PaPa’s .22, his deep fryer, and a shared affinity for wild, domestic, and backyard game. See, in tribute to the gentility of the stoic Peach state and, of course, concern for the fairer sex, I got the oak china cabinet and the crystal. Trust me, social stereotypes aside, I’m not complaining.

    But what I did become heir to was an appreciation of what you hunt, you eat. What manages to get away, well….that’s where all the good stories come from.

    Rabbit stew, venison jerky and 1950’s cordial glasses aside, it seems this has all fallen on deaf ears, or more correctly, on the freckled, tiny earring pierced ones of my eleven year old daughter with her two index fingers firmly shoved in deep.

   We’ve talked food chain, overpopulation, protein, and malnutrition. It doesn’t matter. There isn’t a caterpillar too fuzzy, a pig too fat, nor a bee too busy. Every creature-big or small- she encounters is not only worthy of life, but of a more prosperous one at that. She will not stop until the “meek” have inherited the earth, or at least her room, our porch, and every Tupperware container out of the kitchen.

   And that’s what I love about her the most.

   We’ve rescued lady bugs, turtles, frogs, dogs. We’ve resuscitated stunned birds, hermit crabs, sand dollars, cats, and a trio of three legged lizards.

    We’ve formed triages on the trampoline, emergency medivacs from kite string, and recovery rooms out of coolers equipped with the finest bottles of water straight from the freshest of springs.

   This summer was no exception up on Lake Winnipesaukee.

   “Baby, no, no, no. Don’t cry,” says my friend Nick to my daughter as she spots something suffering, then bends over to pick up a crumpled dragonfly off the swim dock they have just hoisted themselves onto. “Whatever you do darlin’, just don’t name him.”

   He knows her too well.

  “But his name is Chocolate,” she wails.

   I watch Nick shrug his shoulders across the water. It’s done.

   The next hour is a frantic blur of E.R. reality TV proportions as we hunt for iPhones for research purposes, fill empty beer bottles with fresh lake water, huddle in and around an empty chicken salad container that contains a working IV, a twisted up insect and half a dozen fresh picked wild blueberries...oh yeah, and prepare for the worst.

   It doesn’t take long.

   “For the LOVE of God,” Gramma yells over her knitting and Michael Phelps going for gold on the TV. “Someone pronounce the thing dead already.”

   The fact that my daughter has used her iPad as a sound machine near Chocolate’s ICU bed and is simulating noises from the woodland forest probably doesn’t help matters…or her grandmother’s sanity….or mine for that matter, either. But yet, she still isn’t ready to give up.

   “Shouldn’t someone tell her it’s dead,” whispers her Aunt Alicia, as we all peer into the plastic abyss of uneaten blueberries and lost hope. “It’s the humane thing to do.”

   But I can’t.

   “It can wait until the morning.”

   It was a restless night. Especially, I am sure, for Livi, who kept vigil over both of her two broken things: her dragonfly and her heart.

   The summer sun rises especially early in New England (around 4:30) and with it all sorts of critters: loons, ducks, insects, small children.

   I tip-toed downstairs.

   “Mom, guess what,” Livi pops up from the sofa. “Come look!”

   Sure enough, Chocolate was perched on top of a curling piece of birch bark, bright eyed and bushy tailed, flapping his once crumpled and mangled wings in a quick and steady rhythm like a heartbeat.

   “Come on, Mom.” She reaches for my hand. “Let’s go outside and let him go.”

   People who can feel someone else’s pain and tragedy and importance on this planet-I mean really feel it, not just pontificate on empty words and failed promises- are the ones who have the strength and endurance to stand by and to help. Of this, I am sure. And of this, I am hopeful.

   I think of my PaPa often. I picture him with his rifle, hunting squirrels and tending to his garden. I am grateful for the ultimate intangible gift he has given me: life and the continuation of it.

   No matter how great or how small.

The Real World

                                  previously published in the Coastal Illustrated- July 25, 2012

   I’m a huge fan of "The Real World."  The MTV reality show, that is. It’s been a safe place for two decades where people (usually cute, single, and self-absorbed twenty somethings) “stop being polite and start being real.”

   I was there in the beginning, in New York, a young 20-year-old myself; a loyal couch side voyeur into the “colliding worlds” of seven strangers living in an ultra-hip SOHO apartment rent free where they talked “smack” and tried to bring about world peace.

   I was sitting right there with Kevin, the angst-ridden poet, and the Jersey City, beeper wearing, rap record seeker named Heather B. I watched sweet, small town, Southern Julie traverse the scary Manhattan landscape in her schrunchie and acid-washed jeans.

   I was there, on Lombard Street (the most crooked street in the world), a junior at Georgia, watching the cast of "Real World: San Francisco" tackle issues such as HIV, post-graduation post-partum, and the trials and tribulations of living with a bicycle messenger, named Puck, with no redeeming social skills whatsoever and the nasty habit of putting the peanut butter knife back in the jar after he licked it clean.

   And here I find myself today, 20 years later, still fascinated as I watch seven strangers live together in a million dollar home, on a private island, in the Virgin Islands, you know, “being real," soaking up the sun and drinking rum punch like bonefide VIPS.

   Everything is the same, year after year after year. Except, I have come to realize: me.

   “Why are you yelling at the TV?” my husband asks from the kitchen where I like to pretend he is loading the dinner dishes into the dishwasher instead of downing Captain Crunch like he is leaving for a seven-month voyage out to sea. “You’ll wake up the kids.”

   “Look! Just look at this,” I plead, pausing the show. “Tell me, for the love of all things wise and wonderful…….…tell me. Tell me what do you see?”

   “A redheaded skinny dude passed out on a weird looking swing and a girl in a bikini putting peanut butter on him.”

   “Ughhhh! A weird looking swing?” I hop up from my yellow chair, wilding pointing at it frozen in the frame. “It’s a custom made porch swing made out of an old refurbished row boat with custom cushions on a custom made settee! That’s probably worth eight grand! What kind of person rubs peanut butter all over an 8,000 dollar swing?!”

   He didn’t know the answer either. It may be time to stop watching the “real world,” or at least that would be the advice I would get from my OB….with my high blood pressure and all that. But seriously y’all, it gets harder and harder to watch two 25 year olds banter back and forth about how unfair life is while drinking vodka-laced Hawaiian Punch on a four hundred count, perfectly white, perfectly pristine, silk duvet and matching European shams encasing the finest of Egyptian cotton.

  Yes, get over it, life is unfair…..and so is a $2,000 dollar comforter set that no matter how many times they tell you is pre-treated, will never come back from the dry cleaners stain free.

 See, the real, “real” world is not what you ever thought it would turn out to be. For me, this is a rather perplexing thought as I prepare my oldest to leave the safety of the candy-colored tiled path of elementary school and straight into the scary scuffed up, smelly sneaker, locker clanging hall of middle school-ville.

 

  What words of wisdom do I give her? How to I make the crushing blows of faltering, not fitting in, fear of failure, not hurt so much? How do you encourage and guide your child to adulthood while preparing them for life’s let downs?

  We were all told the same things: the world’s our oyster….only we never really knew that literally, and figuratively, the price would cost as much as the market could bear.

  We were informed of “Oh, all the places you’ll go” but most of us at the time we’re not thinking a ranch in the suburbs with a mortgage, two car payments and student loans.

  Even those words we all absorbed as adolescents like a rich wine, the ones about being your own individual and “taking the road least traveled by” and that would make all the difference wasn’t even…”sigh”…. the poets intended meaning. 

  If we had read it more closely and with greater perspective, the poem would read as the poet intended; a nostalgic view of a man looking back on his life and contemplating the weight of the choices he made and do they really matter. The path was already chosen; you cannot go back and choose again.

  I have been thinking about that a lot this past week as I write this from a porch overlooking Lake Winnipesaukee and the woods of North Eastern New Hampshire. Especially, as I prepare my daughter for the first days of middle school come August.

  We have hiked these woods together, the same ones our poet Robert Frost walked for most of his adult life, since she was two years old. There is something eerily majestic and wise and dangerous about them. No, no two paths ever look the exact same. But there are tricky similarities that make you pause and wonder what you might miss depending on the path you’ve taken. As Frost tells us, there is not much you can do fretting about it; choice is an inevitability, a sure bed rock of life like the passing of time.

  Sometimes, the path turns rocky and steep in a hurry and we have no choice but to turn back. I hope she realizes that to retrace ones steps does not equate to failure. It stands for being smart and safe about her choices.

  Other times, the path is not particularly challenging and quiet and sparse. I hope she learns to not be disappointed but to keep going, you never know what you will find -a gentle pond, a great river, a regal mountain- if you stay the course.

  But always, no matter what mossy, rocky, footstep trodden path she takes…..the road will always lead home. And I will always be waiting.

  As adults, we learn to live with regret. Toss it around, shake it out and then put it back up, in its rightful place, out of reach. For a child, regret is a foreign concept too soon learned… for their own good.

  I only wish she learns the real world is what she makes of it. Hopefully, for her, that will make all the difference.