A Morning With Frittata

I have a small pink onion in my hand, smaller than the brown onions still in the refrigerator drawer, and I think about the swiss chard lying on the cutting board. It's the right size, has a good weight in my hand. Five cloves of garlic join the onion. These are always the first, the beginning step of this preparation of frittata.

I rummage around in the next drawer of the fridge, and my fingers find some remnant chunks of pecorino romano cheese and some aged goat and cow's milk cheddar from a local dairy. I picked it out a month or two ago at the farmer's market. I size it up, feel its heft, know it's right for the recipe. There's a small head of Italian swiss chard from a farm in Watsonville, another product of the farmer's market. Chard is a hardy plant that grows with a kind of resolve and firmness that resides within its leaves even after cut. It is not a delicate plant, and I like that about it.

A carton of milk, another of eggs, a memory of cooking quiches and frittatas years ago for people I love. It's as if just touching the food products clicks a projector on in my mind's eye. Sounds, words, fragrances and admonitions by an older woman who taught me to cook emerge in my presence as if they had been sensed only seconds before. As I was told, I keep the heat "low, low, low" and use only the merest amount of olive oil in my heated skillet. Minced garlic becomes golden as it cooks. I salt it and grind in some pepper. The little pink onion is minced also and hisses as it meets the hot pan. "You heat it too much? It's bitter. It's no good." Once the onion is wilted and has released its sugars, the heat is turned off. The savory mixture rests and cools for a bit while I take the knife to the chard and cut its leaves down to even squares.

Four eggs and some milk look golden in my big yellow bowl. The fork clicks against the sides as I beat the mixture rapidly. I chose to use a fork on purpose, not a whisk, although a whisk is fine to use, believe me. But, my grandma did not use a whisk; she used a fork. She used a fork, so I use a fork.

The memory of my grandma beating eggs with a fork, its tines clacking against her bowl, overtakes me. She taught me all this. Or that is, I copied all her movements and watched her carefully when I had the chance. Her cooking wisdom and her flavor opinions became mine as much as I could make them mine. Of all the people I knew as I was growing up, her cooking stood as the most exemplary, the most awe inspiring, to me. It was absolutely my intention to make food like my grandma made her food. I memorized flavors, layers of seasonings, inhaled fragrances to the deepest part of my mind, the primitive core of myself, where they must have met inherited wisdom passed from the women before me who knew how to cook food so that their families would thrive and be content.

Cooking my frittata this morning, I re-experienced my grandma's movements, voice, sounds, beliefs about what is good and bad in the kitchen. I have been asked how I know which herbs to use when I cook something. Well, I just know. But, I know because I watched and tasted carefully, attentively, with absolute belief that what I could learn was the best that anyone could teach, and it was my heritage, my job to learn. It was my responsibility. I felt like a relay runner being handed a baton from many hands before me, back in time.

This food knowledge was mostly practical, involved frugality and cleverness, represented a resiliency in the face of adversity. She called it "poor man's food" a lot. Bait fish breaded, fried, eaten crisp and whole. Sausages ground and packed right in the kitchen. Albacore that far exceeded any canned product I've ever had in my life since, cooked and bottled in her kitchen, accented with Meyer lemons from her tree. She needed some greens once, to make a little salad to go with our fish, so she went out into her yard and came back with what I thought were weeds but were most likely dandelion greens, miner's lettuce, and who knows what else. She dressed them lightly in olive oil, "a little vinegar, a little salt and pepper." She was strong but had a light hand with seasoning. She winked at me while she sopped up extra juices on her plate with a crust of good french bread, conspiratorially, letting me know we had put one over on the rich people who had no idea how good "junk fish" tasted with weeds from the garden.

I smile about that as I scrape my skillet clean of every last bit of chard and onion. The chard is lying in its casserole pan now. I pour the golden egg and milk over it and the grated romano and cheddar and scatter the remaining cheese over it all. It looks good. It smells right. Into the oven it goes for about 30 minutes.

I like that I have not measured anything, done it by memory, by feel, that I have the baton in my hand and am running with it. I was right to have learned her, to become essentially her when I cook and experience food. The learning honored the heritage of all the women before her who all knew. They just knew. Right down to their bones.

Getting Going

Get out of bed, walk to the kitchen, reach for a coffee mug and fill it with hot coffee. Sit down. Get up again and use bathroom, blow nose, inspect sleep-worn face. Nothing new. Walk back to the kitchen, retrieve coffee mug. Still hot, dear liquid.

Read thin morning paper, growl at sports editor, never prints relevant information about local swimmers, certainly none about the best coaches or team in the area. Whose fault is that? Stare out of window and give the stink eye to the frisky and well-fed crow lining up his rear end over cute little car parked down below on the street. The crow flies away, does not splatter the car this time.

Back to the sports page. Young Irish kid kills the US Open more dead than when Tiger killed it years ago. Phenomenal. Phelps loses 200 Fly by a hundredth. He's tired, not tapered. He'll be a different swimmer in Shanghai. Lots of foreign swimmers at the meet. Aussies, Canadians, Koreans, Mexicans. How many train in the US? Young Canadian team trained here a few weeks ago and then elite group prepping for the meet swam here for three days, long course. Seem to have done well. I want to swim. Can't. Have a cold. Have to get well. Sigh.

Read the weather report.  Sun today, patchy sun tomorrow, decreasing temperatures over the course of the week. Gotta get out into the sun and daylight today. Sun does not make itself known often enough during the summertime on California's central coast.  Read the horoscope:  "Pisces, you may or may not have someone important to deal with today. Best let events unfold before you make any judgements about them. Tonight: Be yourself."  Be myself. Get up and refill coffee mug, get out two pieces of sourdough whole wheat bread. Chew on them, bit by bit. Toast would hurt throat too much. Plain is better. Look for potato chips. Damn, no potato chips. Need salt, need a healthy throat and no more cold. Being sick is the pits.

Make oatmeal. Irish oatmeal, coarse and real. Add honey and a dab of butter. Good with coffee. Nice coffee. Check emails on iPhone. Must answer some soon. Note to self: Remember things.

Clear table, fill sink, squirt dish soap, wash dishes. Grandma did this. Remember the little dish set, a gift as a child, pretending to wash dishes and arranging them this way and that. Bubbles in iridescent mounds that pop softly and reflect the ceiling light, swirling pink and blue glazing them before they explode into exclamation points of wet surprise.

Go out to garden wearing gloves and crocs, carry small trimming clippers. The roses need dead-heading, the alyssum look stressed, and the bougainvillea just will not come into color. Bracts are not forming, looks diseased once again. Time to kill it? Try to revive it again? Stand and water, wipe sweat off face. A horse does not sweat this much; it is not human to resemble a faucet when standing still on a tepid morning.

Pull weeds, haul hose around yard, water all the pots. Riots of color, lots of pruning coming due soon. Plan it, get it done. Sun's overhead, nearly summer solstice. Fine day so far. Sepia memory, dainty curtains over French windows. Willow tree over lawn and sleepy cats stretching, rearranging paws and dusty fur, claws extended and then retracted languidly, sleep overcoming them again. That summer. A brother and three sisters, banging doors, wind chimes tinkling like today. The beginning of something unforeseen and dark.

Kick off crocs, put away gardening tools, squint at sun on flowers, hose snarled in the yard. Fix it later. Fix it later.

Back to the bathroom, use more Kleenex, drink more liquid, time to rest. Small sounds barely heard. Sound is more noticed when it is absent than when it is present, when it is so familiar and so gentle. Open laptop, hear Mac opening chord, read more emails, think about writing. No good. Nothing. Think of exercises learned at writers' retreat. Interrupt own thinking with impulse to get a snack. So that's it. That's the pattern. Fall into the lull, the mental switch from deliberate thinking to free flow.  Or not.  If there's room for writing, writing can happen.

Notice crows cawing outside, glance out window and see crow above cute little car again, aiming. Don't look. Just clean up the mess later, park somewhere else. Devil bird.

In Jail With Pill Bugs

I was in fifth grade in a small elementary school with kids I'd grown up with.  I had confidence and felt as secure as a kid can be who knows nothing about the world at large but believes they do.  While we were learning times tables or history or something one hot day, Anna picked her nose two aisles over, I watched dust motes turning like thin little fish in midair, and Mr. Sinclair sat at his desk while we sat at ours.  The dust motes were high overhead, and my head lolled to the left to see them. I thought of outer space where the motes surely came from.  The light fixtures looked like space ships, and a limp flag hung at the front of the class that we saluted every morning.  There were holes made in the ceiling tiles that were meant to absorb sounds, and I had an idea that if the sounds could be retrieved and played on a phonograph, they would reveal all sorts of jumbled and mixed messages, that no words were ever lost at school.

The fifth graders at work in the class bent to their work, the little drudges.  I, on the other hand, could not get my head in the game and looked about for something to entertain myself.  I looked left and right, peeked up at the teacher who sat grading papers at his desk in the front right corner of the class.  High up on the wall over his head, arrayed in a long row of panes, was an open window. A kid got picked every day to be the window monitor and pull them open with a long pole equipped with a hook at its tip.  It was hot and the windows were tilted open into the class.  The dust motes danced in slow motion.  I glanced at Anna, a skinny blonde girl with plastic headband raked through her hair. I was feeling a little sour and irritable. I sighed heavily.  Mr. Sinclair looked up and then down again at the papers.  Erasers scrubbed at papers and feet scuffled the floor.  The clock on the wall ticked its hands mechanically into the next minute position.  2:21 it said tediously.

I noticed Anna again and felt disgusted with the finger mining the interior reaches of her nasal passages.  I wondered if there were boogers on my own desk from whoever had sat there the period before.  I wanted to get out of there, leave a trailing swirl of dust motes behind me like a cluster of reporters asking after the escapee.  Don, a plump and usually good-natured boy with a bristling buzz of hair on his round head was at the desk in front of me.  He wore a thin cotton plaid shirt that stretched across his wide back.  Idly, I picked up my pencil and twirled it.  The tip was nicely pointed and I felt its taper in my fingertip.  I reached forward and poked Don in the back almost as if my hand had decided all on its own to take the stab, without malice, without forethought.  I could have been poking a board for all the interest I had in the action.

Don screamed instantly and whirled wildly around to face me.  He swept my books off the top of my desk to the floor where they landed with a crash.  The teacher jumped up and moved swiftly to Don, grabbing him as if he had suddenly become insane without provocation and needed restraint.

"Stop that! Go outside and don't make a sound!"

"She stabbed me!" Don looked crazed, and I was thrilled, amazed at what had just happened.  I started giggling at the absurd sound of a boy screaming exactly like a girl and the sight of my books strewn on the floor.

"You go outside, too!  I don't want any noise out there from either of you or you're going to the office."

We went out to stand in the heat and doldrums of midday.  Don, whom I'd actually considered to be a friend of a sort up to now, said his back was fine and why did I stab him with my pencil.  I shrugged.  We stood looking at one another and started kicking pebbles, both of us now in jail, hoping for a shiv or a way to be freed for good.  Don said he was glad he didn't have to be in the classroom anymore and that his back was okay.  Me too, I said, and we were friends again.

I looked down at the cement walkway.  We were in an outdoor space covered by a wide overhang of the roof.  Pill bugs that we called rolley pollies - surely invented by God to amuse kids - were moving around down by my feet, so I picked some up and made them roll up.  I saw the open window up at the top of the wall and motioned to Don to aim for it.  We started lobbing pill bugs in through the window, with the only concern being that we make the shot each time.  It was the best fun of the day so far and beat times tables by a long shot.  Then the pill bugs were all gone, thrown to their fate through the open window. Next, we found pebbles and tossed them up and in, never hitting the window pane once.  We became very accurate with every pebble arcing up and through the window space, disappearing into the dark interior of the classroom.

Suddenly the door was pushed open and Mr. Sinclair was standing there with a reddened face.  "Do you know what's been landing on my desk?"

"No."  I tried my winning smile, all my charm, certain he would smile back at me.

"Don, come in here," Mr. Sinclair growled.  Don walked to the door and glanced back at me, grinning, then waved adios.

I was left on my own out in the hall, oblivious to the little havoc I was wreaking, submerged in my boredom and aimlessness.

The door opened again, and I was motioned in by the red-faced Mr. Sinclair.

"Sit down."  I sat and looked around.  Anna wasn't picking her nose anymore.  Kids were staring at me. I looked at the floor and saw pill bug carcasses littering it, a few pebbles.  Don had his back to me.

"Apologize to the class for your disruption."

"Sorry," I said.  I was not sorry.  I wanted to stick Don in the back again and hear him scream.  It was quite a sound he'd made and he'd gone wild in a very exciting way.

"I didn't hear you."  Mr. Sinclair was looking at me, and I looked back at him.  I was pretty sure he was trying not to smile, clenching his teeth, making the ridges of muscle stand out on his jawline.  He was a teacher I generally ignored as best I could, a man with not much imagination but who seemed fair enough.

"I'm sorry," I said, only sorry the bell had not yet rung and set us free.

"Will you ever stab Dod again?" he asked.

"No."

"Don, say you're sorry to her," Mr. Sinclair said.

"She stabbed me with her pencil!" Don shrilled.

"That's enough."

"She did!"

"You threw her books on the floor.  I want an apology or we are all going to be here until I get one."

Don heaved back into his chair, disgusted, "I'm sorry I threw your books onto the floor after you stabbed me with your pencil," he stated, not looking at me.  Mr. Sinclair glared.  The class was silent.  A kid next to me eyed my pencil tip.  I suppose he was looking for blood although I hadn't poked Don hard enough to draw anything more than the reaction.

Inside I was happy with this development, surprised Don had had to apologize, satisfied with the entertainment I'd stirred up, and glad not to see Anna picking her nose anymore.  We scattered at the bell and the day's heat gathered us into it's suffocating arms.  Don gave me a wide berth after that and I found no more opportunities to lob bugs or raise cain.

Yellow Potatoes in a Big Blue Chair

I'm going to eat some yellow hot potatoes, steaming hot, nice and hot, with butter.  They need a little smash, so I'll take my fork and a shake of salt and pepper.  I'm going to take and sit myself in the warm bright sun and eat them hot, with memories on the side.  I can see them now.

I'm going to sit on my big blue chair, low to the ground, made of wood and painted blue as the ocean in the tropics, sit there on that nice blue chair and wiggle my toes while I savor those yellow hot bites of potatoes and butter.  The big blue chair I painted with a friend who told me stories about her wedding and all the cats gone wild and yowling in the middle of the night.  We waved blue paint on our brushes and made the chair shine, and our words had colors, some of them blue, back then.  I'm going to sit on that chair in the warm white sun and hold my brown bowl and have a pile of memories and potatoes on the side.

I'm going to hold my big brown bowl, thrown with my own hands long years ago.  My young brown hands turned pale clay red on the spinning red wheel, turning on a wheel of red-stained metal and music playing high up in the room,  black speakers thumping, my eyes down close to see the grooves of my fingertips in that soft red clay.  The bowl rose up from the wedged brown blob and then all squashed down in a wet curve out with my red-brown palms and slim brown hands.  I heard the Beatles sing while the soft clay climbed, rounded down and its a big brown bowl.

I'm going to wear my dark green sweater my grandma made when I was young, made with her strong smart hands and clicking long needles, sitting while Lassie barked on her huge TV console. Ed Sullivan said it was a really fine shoe and here from England are the Beatles to the screaming girls, and I smiled and my grandma's hands made the dark green sweater and her mouth pinched tight and her head shook that's awful noise from those girls tonight.  I'm going to wear that dark green sweater that I still have now because my grandma cooked all kinds of potatoes and smashed them too with her old silver fork and shook down salt and pepper.  Shook it down and it landed, sprinkled and fine, like some food-colored memories with love on the side.  

Frog Songs Silent Now

"Hi, frog."

The small frog waited, blinking slowly, breathing.  It simply existed, with damp and leathery skin, a speckled, curious-looking creature.  I watched it for a long time, waiting for something to happen.  Hey! It sprang away as if a trigger had been released and sent it awkwardly up, out and then splashing down into the swamp water beside its soggy dirt-clod perch.

I heard the frogs all stop creak-croaking, all at once, when my shoes shushed and swished in the grasses and sucking mud at the marsh bank, their silence resounding in contrast to the wide chorus they formed throughout the rushes and soggy grasses.  I set my lunch box down, walked with slow exaggerated steps on tuffets of grass in the seeping drain water, looking for more frogs.  They held their voices and sat stock still, hidden.

The frogs who were not close by, the distant ones in the marshy swamp, continued their creaking frog calls.  Their long strings of eggs were suspended in slimy ropes attached to the mud banks and trailed in the drain water like iridescent bubbled ribbons.  Tadpoles, eggs, frogs, slime, moss, water and mud intermingled, a rich earthy soup of frogs, insects, and microscopic life.  I squatted down and looked for the tadpole gangs wriggling in masses, dark and simple looking with two eyes and a lashing tail.  The trailing sinuous moss swept in the stream's current looked like dark-green, wet hair.  It was repulsive, more so than frogs were.

I uncapped a jelly jar and scooped a good measure of muddy water, tadpoles and some grass and held it up.  Yes, six or eight tadpoles had slithered inside and I was their master now.

I stood still and waited for the chorus to resume, and it did when the frogs had heard no movement for a time.  First one, then two or three frogs who were at scattered distances, one from another, hesitantly began to call.  In a spreading ease, frog voices called to one another, high pitched and droning pleasantly.  These were small frogs mostly, but some had deeper voices that held to a lower register of sound.

This marshy swamp we called The Polliwog Pong was a bog of runoff water.  I could trace it upstream to a rivulet that bordered our school tennis courts to the northeast and before that from a neighborhood and low hills further east.  The swampy field southwest of our school where the frogs sang was open and free of human intrusion because it was boggy, of uncertain footing most of the time, and consisted of repulsive slime and unwanted creatures, rude and homely little things with no known friends.

At twilight and early evening, crickets and singing frogs croaked, buzzed and buggrummmed.  We always heard them in our rural community, making that combined single-note chirring chorus that is now nearly totally silenced forever.  It was sweet and steady and was the sound dimension of the night world, joined by screech owls, the hesitant soft crunch of deer hooves on crisp leaves in the yard after the moon rose, the needling squeak of bats, and whispering leaves on the night breeze.

I walked home with my jelly jar of tadpoles and intended to watch their back legs grow, then their front legs as their tails shrank down and they became frogs, but, as usual, they eventually died.  I didn't know enough about them to give them good frog food or plenty of frog room to grow or to just simply let them alone.

The bog was so plentiful a frog marsh that it seemed the amphibians' slimy numbers were endless.  Most children disdained them, playing with them like toys, teasing them, shrieking with hilarity, entertained at their expense.  Our ignorance ruined them, all the frogs who science now regard as bellwethers of environmental change.  They were forced out by steady encroachment and appropriation of their marsh so that a park could be built next to the school.

I walk outside in the dark when I have the chance, and I listen for frogs or crickets or bats singing their high wild songs, calling for mates and offspring.  It's rare to hear them.  You only hear people, cars, and a lonesome emptiness ringing far and wide.

Mary in Darkness - 2

On Saturday morning, when the air was still cool and damp with dew, I slipped out of bed, past sleeping sisters, through the middle of the house to the kitchen.  The air felt like hope, fresh and light.   Morning birds were not yet calling, and our cats were still in small heaps, piled onto each other for warmth.

I tiptoed lightly and slowly around the kitchen, waking up in time to my breaths and heartbeats.  My thoughts gradually cleared.  Mary, huddled last night, afraid to go home.  I was safe, and she was not.  I felt I was rich, and I knew she was not.  Her home had screams and terror, and I did not know what sounded like.

I was nine and Mary was ten.  Grownups had found her and talked about her and kept their voices down low.  I knew Johnny, her brother, might be at his house and might want to run away, too.  I'd always seen him moving disjointedly, awkward, mute and strange in the classroom.  He might want to cry.  But, I'd never heard him cry nor heard Mary cry or even sniffle.

I went to our laundry room and looked around for ideas, things, salvation to give.  If we found a stray cat or small bird, we gave it a box with a rag to be safe inside.  Maybe Mary was just like the cats we had found, even though I knew she was an older girl than I.  She was alone and had no friends.  She needed things and warmth, I thought.

I found our collection of our old, clean towels in a stack, took two and looked around for something else to put with them.  Candles.  We had old leftover candles.  I took a fat low candle, a red one.  I found odds and ends, rolled them all in the towels like a saddle roll. I'd seen cowboys in TV westerns crossing the great plains with their cattle. All they needed was a tin cup and a roll of supplies.  I found a plastic cup and stole it from the kitchen.  I found the matches and stole them, too.

With the bundle under my arm, I set out for the post office, walking up a small hill on our street, around a bend up into the village and then along the main street two blocks to the post office.  My mind was racing with ideas about fear and pain, angry parents, rage, but they were vague and brief.  Mary was so deer-like to me, so defenseless, so quiet.  What had happened, I repeated, what was it like in her house?  I tried to conjure huge pain that would make me run and hide, but I always got to a point of blankness and anxiety.  Mary's fear was a doorway to a world beyond the village where I was living, a doorway to an obscure and odd world.

At the post office, I stood looking at its glass and aluminum door.  I tested it.  It was open. The lobby where the brass-doored boxes lined the three walls was passive, silent, official.  No Mary.  I had been imagining her left alone there by the grownups because she had brought herself there.  Where else would they make her go?  I got the sudden shock that she might have been brought back home and hurt some more.  It sickened me.  I was seeing Mary as a hurt cat, the only other helpless thing I'd ever known.  Silent skinny Mary needed help and I wanted to give it to her, keep her from the dark anger of her house.

I trotted back home with my bundle and set it down under my bed, shoved out of sight.  I heard my mother, awake now, in the kitchen.

"Such a shame," she said.

"What's a shame? I was alert for clues, some way to know what had happened.

"Beaten children.  No one should live like that."  She stirred her coffee and began a pot of oatmeal at the stove.

"Where is she?" I stood at her side and peered over the edge of the pot, watched the salt tossed into the water and the blue flames touching the bottom of the pot.  She smelled like lavender.

"They took her in to town, to a different parish.  You might not see her for a while."  Her hand was  holding the wooden spoon and stirring the warming water in a figure eight.  "You mustn't think badly of her.  She's been through a lot and she needs to heal."

"Badly?"  I watched the oats pour down in an arc from the cardboard Quaker box.  "Is she going to need towels?"  The oats were slowly sinking into the water.  "You know, stuff?"

"I suppose she will.  The family's destitute.  Something very bad has happened, and she couldn't help it.  It's her daddy.  He's a mean drunk, a filthy mean drunk who beats his wife and children.  He ought to go to jail for that, and now maybe he will.  Mary was very brave, but she's afraid and hungry, and she needs understanding and kindness.  Go wash your hands and get your sisters.  Breakfast is ready."

"What's destitute?"

"It's when you have nothing at all.  You against the world in a way.  Go on.  Oatmeal's ready," my mother said and bent down to kiss my head and then smoothed my hair.

"What if we get destitute?"  I was thinking about the bundle under my bed.

"We won't.  We have each other and we're good people.  Her daddy is not a good person, and he could have killed her.  Everyone's very worried about her.  It's very complicated.  I'm going to eat this oatmeal by myself unless you kids come in here and help me."  She sat down at the table and looked at me, raising her eyebrows.  "Hungry?"



"That's what destitute means, not having anything.  You said it twice, so that's redundant.  She's being taken care of.  She's not destitute anymore, but she was.  You cannot give her your oatmeal.  We will help her some other way.  You going hungry will not help her."

My mother was beautiful to me, but I was not getting anywhere, and we were both hungry now.  My sisters trailed into the kitchen, like hungry cats themselves, sleep in their eyes, hair in rumpled tangles.

(to be continued)

Small Kittens Playing In Summer

I woke up feeling rested today, optimistic, and my mood was matched by the sunlight beaming into the bedroom.  Sunlight, which is different than foglight because it includes warmth and throws shadows, filled all the corners of the room.  I thought of the summer mornings when I was small, how the sunlight looked in the cool of the morning before the heat rose, sunny heat that flattened our cats into torpid mats of warm fur, slowly breathing as they dreamed.

We had a few raggedy cats that were fed Friskies Cat Food from cans and caught gophers on our property.  Buzzy was a big gray and white male who strolled his territory like a Mafia don.  He had some rakish scars on his nose and a few nicks in his ears and a surprisingly high weak voice.  He was burly and handsome and roamed far from our house into the neighborhood.  It became evident that our neighbors were taking better care of him then we were.  He'd come back to our yard brushed and fluffed, grateful for pleasantries and snacks when we provided them.  He was a scrapper and ran off other cats, demanded respect from them.  "Buzzy's in a fight!" we'd yell and run to witness a sound thumping by our hero tomcat.  Dust would fly and a few clumps of fur lifted on the breeze when he was done.  It was a simple thing to us; we didn't know any better than to just watch and see what would happen.  He lived a long time, to his credit and not ours.

Tinkerbell was the female we had the longest.  (I shudder to think how little we knew about taking proper care of pets back then.)  She had litters of kittens that were raised in flattened tunnels of golden grasses that grew on our property, a rural and semi-wild area in the early years of my childhood.  Tinkerbell was attentive to her kittens.  I spent hours watching their interplay, listening to her little sounds as she responded to their squeals and cries, tiny mews.  She licked them clean and nursed them to their hearts' content and looked immensely pleased with herself as they suckled.  Those were sweet quiet hours to witness and experience feline instincts and behavior, and I was fascinated.  The kittens looked so small and weak as they pawed and groped for a nipple with tiny pink paws and mouths, and then nursed quietly with their eyes tight shut, ears back and forth with the motion of drinking.  They smelled of dusty fur, half damp from the licking, and staggered under the force of her busy tongue when she raked it across their flanks and heads.  I'd stick my finger into the path of a tongue stroke and feel the coarse surface clean it indiscriminately.  She kept her eyes closed as she did the cleaning and didn't care if she had washed a finger or a kitten.

I imitated the way Tinkerbell would grasp a kitten by the nape of its neck and lift it up so it hung down, a kitten ball, patiently waiting to be deposited somewhere else.  I saw its instinctive curl-up with tail tucked between its legs passively.  I mimicked her voice that called kittens to her, and the kittens came to me.  I pretended I was one of the little ones, calling her as if I were lost and needed help, and she came to me anxiously.  It was like magic, and the cats trusted me; I knew this was an honor and very special.

I most loved to watch the gang of kittens playing wildly on the small back lawn under the willow tree and liquid maple where they scooted around in the leaves and clumps of grass.  There's nothing funnier and more entertaining than the antics of kittens at play.  They were chasing, tackling, dancing on their hind legs in surprise when a sister or brother attacks from behind a small clump or twig.  They worried and chewed each other's bellies and legs, raising squeals of protest and then all would run pell-mell to another area or a few feet up a tree trunk, dropping down on the chaser and squashing them momentarily.

Then, exhausted by all the mania and false terror, they'd call Tinkerbell who had been resting idly in the shade, unconcerned by the feints and attacks of kittens gamboling and tumbling in the yard.  She'd rouse herself and call them to her with a peculiar purring mrrowwww, and they'd trot lightly over to her.  With their fur combed backwards by her rough tongue again and sleep lowering their eyelids, they'd flop down in the shade and flake out flat, unconscious in a twitching sleep very soon after.

The warm sun, like this morning's sun, in the midafternoon hours, burned hot and wrapped the summer days in lazy splendor, a time of perfection and ease.

Puff! A Dragon Returns

I wandered in the backyard long ago, when I was very young, and I sang out loud, lost in the inner realm of magic, song and aimless play.  I was cast adrift, on the loose, at the mercy of my changing moods and ideas.  Happy usually, preoccupied with dreams, oblivious at first to the bigger world.  My world was simple and promised to be endless.

"PUFF! the magic dragon lived by the sea..."

I walked in deep powdery silt, fine as flour, stamping my bare feet to make it shoot up between my toes in puffs while I sang loudly as my voice could go.  "PUFF!"  I had my own large dragon when I sang.  Or, I was a dragon, too, and yelled my own name out loud.  "PUFF!"  We flew around of course, taking turns to ride or fly; we traded forms and places.  Magic dragons do that.  The one I imagined was beautiful, muscular and sinuous, could move like a flash of light.  His skin glittered like the shiniest thing I could imagine:  Tin foil Christmas tree light reflectors, all different colors, brilliant and true.

I danced on the rainbows of innocence, full of myself, certain I could live in the treetops, leap from mountain top to mountain top.  Napkins became sails that filled with a gusting golden wind, puddles were lakes with fantastic waterworks and furniture made fortresses on rainy days.

"PUFF! the magic dragon lived by the sea, and frolicked in the autumn mist..."

I created my universe, flew in my dreams as easily as a dandelion lifts on the wind.  It was all possible, without end, infinite in joy and sweetness.  All things were absolutely real and timelessly changeable.

I was seven years and had no idea about anything uncertain, devious, ugly or mean.  I was a little girl then and knew just enough about adult life to realize that I wanted no part of it, had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up - on purpose.  Adults lived behind a curtain of mystery and strangeness, came and went, said things that made no sense in my world.

"Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff..."  But his green scales fell like rain.  Doubt sifted into the corners of my reality.  Large things gradually became smaller, less magical, but I resisted it strongly, sadly, even angrily at times.

I yelled "PUFF! the magic dragon!" to counter the tears, give him courage and embolden his heart.  There were other kids besides Jackie for Puff to hang out with, kids who would not abandon their fantasies and magic friends.  Like me.  Puff, I'll play with you, I promised.  Forever.  I am not going to be a grownup.  Ever.  I will never do the things grownups do, will never be odd, or frightening or cruel.  I will always run, sing and dance.  I will always tell the truth, no matter what.

Something was gradually pulling me away from everything I loved and wanted to do, to know.  Criticism, judgement, my own imperfection was revealed to me in small nuances and hints.  Was this what adulthood was going to mean for me?

The song changed me.  I never wanted to hear the last part, only the first.  The realization that something was ahead for me, a sadness, melancholia, seemed so wrong, so upsetting that I was angry whenever I heard the ending verses.  I countered them by singing the first verse loudly with my own fearless roar, as a cheer for wild freedom and innocence, safety from ugliness and devious harms.  I'd loved my unlimited exploration of the world around me so much that limits I felt settling around my wrists and ankles, gossamer shackles placed by culture and expectation, gave me as much urge and need to escape as a wild horse does when first roped.

"PUFF! The magic dragon!"

Years later, when I was 30 or so, I was in an audience on the lawn on a summer night in San Diego.  Paul Stookey was singing the old song, just like he had when I was seven.  There was a roar coming from deep in the bones of every person standing, all rocking from left to right and back again, moving in a trance of nearly forgotten flight on the back of dragons they'd had in childhood.  Every time the song got to the magic word PUFF, we all yelled it and then paused, listening to it echo on the hills.  Tears flowed down every cheek, trails of memories begun in the early 60s when magic was not yet stolen from our hands.

I say puff very lightly now, but I hear the echoing shouts of a few thousand grown and aged children who had wandered far from their younger days, hardly aware of leaving them behind, sad that they'd had to.  Puff, and it's gone, just like morning mist on a warming summer day, turning the corner to autumn.