A Part of the World

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Arker

This post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: Patriotism.

In the beginning, Lydia could not help but be moved by the emotion of the song. Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light...It swelled up on currents of pride and straight-backed decency that brought a trembling wetness to the eyes of those around her. She watched. This tradition was alien to her and so dear to the hearts of those around her. She sang quietly, a smile teasing up the corners of her lips. Even she did not know what the smile was for. She felt confused.

"It's the flag from the Star Spangled Banner!" Peter would exclaim, clamoring to show as they entered the Post Office door. "Look, Mommy. It's the Grand Old Flag."

"Yes," she agreed. "The flag of the United States."

Lydia had not been raised in another country. She had merely been raised on a commune on the winding seacoast of California. She was, for all that, raised in a different America altogether: America the aggressor, an America who helped to take down democratically elected Salvador Allende and install Pinochet, America of the Long Walk and the Trail of Tears, America of the internment camps, the America of Joseph McCarthy.

Growing up, she did not sing the Star-Spangled Banner. She had never learned the song.

Now things were different. They lived in a small town, in a world where towers fallen still left rubble in the landscape of the nation's mind, and she had chosen to place her only child in public school.

"When they say the pledge," she told Peter," stand up. Put your hand on your heart. Show respect."

"Humph," said Lydia's mother loudly, when she came for Christmas. "Why should he show respect? What is there to respect?"

"He should show respect, " Lydia answered, "because he is five. He doesn't know anything about Vietnam or Watergate or President George W. Bush. He doesn't know about Napalm. He is in kindergarten and he is learning to follow the rules."

A still anger for a moment crossed Lydia's mother's face. "You are teaching him to be a part of something that I worked all my life to pull away from!"

Lydia dropped her eyes. "I want him to be a part of the world."

"I see what you want, " replied her mother and empathy touched her voice. "But I want you to know that it isn't patriotism."

Lydia thought about this for some time, after the holiday decorations had been packed away, as the subject had been dropped and as her mother got on a plane and flew back to California.

She thought about her childhood. It had not been a bad one. She had run like a wild thing amongst oak trees, making tiny dolls of acorns and lichens. She had learned to listen to ravens, to catch bullfrogs. She had taught herself to read, three years too late and grade levels higher than her peers. There had been space. So much space you could lose yourself in it, like tule fog. She had lived in a world that was just as good, but utterly separate. Learning to navigate this one had been hard, the rules obscured and tucked under. She constantly had to tease them out.

This world apart, this abandonment of America inside America, was not patriotism either.

Patriotism, she thought, is something that is rare. It is a quality that cannot be found in a five year-old child, cannot be imparted by curricula or evoked with the use of flags. It is cultivated in the bold consumption of truth and the identification of an enormous group as a family of which one is a part. It is present when the criticism of a nation is self-criticism and joins together with continued hope for something more.

This saluting of a flag, this National Anthem, all of it is immaterial and it is ceremony. There is no reason not to play along. Every group has its traditions. They are part of how we belong.

At the New Year's concert, the school music director began, as always with the National Anthem. Lydia sang louder. It just didn't matter. So she sang as loud as she could.


What does patriotism mean to you? How is patriotism different from nationalism and is patriotism, by necessity, a responsibility that we have as Americans? Is it impossible to be critical of our own country and be patriotic?

The Tale of Princess Faith

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a kingdom far, far away (somewhere in the neighborhood of Barstow, California, which is the same as saying Nowhere Really) there lived a princess. Her name was Princess Faith.

Faith was not a princess by inheritance. She was a princess in her own mind. When she was seven, a tiara made of flesh sprouted above her ears and she herself painted it gold and bedecked it with cheapish jewels. Far from being royalty, her mother was a fish-seller and her father was one of the two swindlers who sold the emperor of another kingdom some fabric that wasn't really there. He was in prison during most of Faith's growing up. Faith had one sister who was not a princess, but instead made apple pies and sold them in the market square.

Faith's most favorite thing in the whole world was to write. To get ideas for her writing, she sat at the pond in the enchanted forest and looked. And this pond into which she looked was the very same pond in which Narcissus lost himself, my dear reader. It was a magical pond, all set about with narcissus plants and satyrs and sorcery and spells. Faith's writing went like this: when she had looked and looked and looked, she would pull out her reflection and turn it into ink. Dipping her pen into it, she spread it on a page. Very happily, Princess Faith did this for many years.

Until, one day, gentle reader, an evil witch came upon her at the pond (that pond of Narcissus). And this was the same witch who is always stirring up trouble. This was the witch who makes gold into straw, turns princes into frogs and is the creator of Jersey Shore. She saw Faith and what she was doing and this witch, she thought to herself, Too much self is never a good thing.

Do you know what she did? She took that image straight out of that pond. (And I suspect she sold it to a Hollywood producer, probably with movie rights, as well.)

Poor Faith! She, who was so sure of the worthiness of her own self to have actually made a crown right out of flesh, to be without her own image! She looked and looked, but there was nothing in the pond she knew how to write! Nothing from which she could make ink. She sobbed great tears that rolled into the pond, making it larger, but still no reflection was there. None but the trees about the pond.

"I am not a landscape artist," sobbed Faith.

"Go to see the Wise Woman of the Woods" advised her sister. "She will be able to tell you what to do. Have a slice of pie."

Faith had not known there was such a woman. She spent most of her time at the pond, unaware of the other features of the magical woods.

"Of course," she told her sister. "I was already thinking of that."

She took a pie of pie and left.

The Wise Woman of the Woods sat on a stump. She looked like a stump herself, wrinkled and tangled and hard as bark. Her hair was like lichen, and with a hand like a gnarled branch, she waved Faith toward her and, with effort, formed her lips into a twisting smile.

"What can I do ya for, my dear?" she croaked.

"My reflection is gone. It has been stolen by a witch!" Faith told her story. She added dramatic elements, and showed rather than told. She spun a tragedy and laid the weaving down.

The Wise Woman blinked and yawned.

"Perhaps it is for the best," she said. "How many tales can one tell all featuring the story of one self-made princess, the daughter of a prisoner, whose hands still smell of fish? I'll tell you what. You go and sit back in that same spot in the forest, but turn your attention away from the pond. Look at what's in the woods around you. Write about the satyrs and the demons and the fae. Write about the dryads and the hamadryads. If you do this for one month, I expect you will begin to be able to see yourself again."

"One month!" gasped Faith. "Hamadryads...Thank you, Wise Woman."

And off she ran.

Back at the pond, she sat and looked at the forest. She watched the stirrings of the creatures in the sylvan deep. And she turned their stories into ink. Without speaking a word to anyone, she spun their images into tales, making up what they were saying and doing and thinking out of the whisperings of the leaves. And she waited for the end of October, the magical month of October. She hoped that either the Wise Woman's words were true and her reflection would appear again or that she could learn to love the stories of the wood people.

She never noticed as the crown began to melt back into her skull.

Note: I hate this story, but I have started three things and not been able to finish any of them, so I am going to go ahead and publish this anyway. 

On Obedience to Authority: A Waiting Room Full of Dogs

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Alvimann

The first thing that put her on edge were the dogs.

When she opened the door to the waiting room, there were poodles. Shitzus. Papillons. Or something else. Both of them were something that stood on their hind legs, yipped, pretended to snarl and then wanted to be petted. Something that nature dictated would nudge her pen while she filled out forms, race 'round her feet in circles and sniff.

She couldn't help thinking there should not be dogs. Not here, in the physical therapy office. And this made her wonder if she was curmudgeonly—a dog-hater, a grouch. I have a dog, she thought to herself.

"Yip," warned one of the poodle-shitzu-papillons.

At first, no one else was there. Just the dogs. It was 12:45 and the air was redolent with the smell of cooked microwave lasagna. A soap opera could be heard in another room. Unsure what to do, she went back out to the car and retrieved her jacket. Having killed thirty seconds, she went back in. This time there was a man. She explained to him her purpose and he provided her with forms, which the dogs assisted her to fill out. Other staff began to emerge.

A woman behind the counter took her insurance card and attempted to copy it, explaining that the desk help was not present, for reasons no one seemed to know. She copied it several times, incorrectly and then returned it.

"The office help is not here," she repeated. "I will try again later."

Several more patients came in. Soon, there were more patients than there were chairs. This, she thought, was difficult. In a physical therapy office, who has to go without a chair? Stubbornly, she sat in hers, despite her outward appearance of health, daring anyone to make her relinquish the relative comfort and stand, muscles in screaming pain, to wait.

At some point, the dogs were put away in another room.

The therapist arrived for her and she went with her into a room. It was a small corner of a place—including an examination table with a face doughnut and a chair. Just beyond that was a large, ugly curtain, like you might find in an emergency room. Loud country music was playing. Schoolroom fluorescent light fixtures blared from the ceiling, flickering and pulsing their sickly light.

"So, what are you seeing us for today?" asked the therapist.

"Headache," she replied. "I've had a headache every day for two months."

It took several minutes to find a light bulb for the light fixture in the corner of the room, so that the fluorescents could be turned off  and, shortly, upon a commercial break, the music was eliminated as well.

"My jaw is in spasm," she further expounded, "so I was told to go to physical therapy by my oral surgeon."

Measurements were taken. She was told to make a funny face and then another while rulers were inserted between her teeth. It was mentioned that her back was too flat and that there was winging of her shoulder blades. This sounded glamorous and strangely gorgeous. She glanced at the floor, expecting to see feathers dropping off.

"Well," said the physical therapist. "I will teach you some exercises to do. But I want you to tell me if they hurt."

Everything hurt. This left both of them soon with few options for making the situation better.

"Just do the two sets of jaw exercises. I won't use the ultrasound or do the massage. I'm going to leave you with some heat around your neck and these electrodes on your face and arms. There is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory on the pads."

She lay there, obediently. The hot towel felt pleasant and the electrodes caused no sensation. She wondered how much time had passed.

After a few minutes, a door opened. Voices which seemed strangely loud began to fill up the air in the room. On the other side of the curtain, a patient and another physical therapist had arrived. The patient, it seemed, was a teenage boy. She listened. There was nothing else to listen to. They talked about his head pain, about his grades and he explained to the physical therapist, in a somewhat quieter voice, that he was bipolar.

"Take your medication," the PT advised.

She began to feel tense. She was the unwitting eavesdropper on a child. Without thinking, she carefully kept her body still, her breathing quiet. She felt she had done something wrong, just lying there. After a time, something beeped. It beeped again. The physical therapist from the other side of the curtain poked a head into the sanctity of her space.

"You beeped," she said.

At that point, her own therapist arrived. She moved one electrode to the other side of her face, asked her how she was dong and bustled off again.

She continued to lie. She felt ridiculous. She was quietly lying on a table in an office full of dogs, in pursuit of pain relief and having already performed countless exercises which hurt. The prescribed ultrasound therapy and massage could not be used at all due to her extreme sensitivity. She was lurking in the dark while a child confessed his mental illness to a medical professional, and the appointment, which was supposed to be an hour, was clearly taking up almost two.

The teenager did his exercises. She listened as his back popped and he rated his pain. She listened and wished she didn't have to listen.

She began slowly to be aware of a creeping sensation of burning pain arising from her lower back. As this continued, her bladder suddenly felt on fire, and her legs started to cramp. The sensation worked its way up her body.  She noticed that the hand with the electrode had gone numb and shook it awake. It fell asleep again. I am lying on my back too long, she thought. It is messing with everything. I should change position. I should get up.

She didn't.

The hand went numb again and again. The other hand went numb. Her legs spiked electrical sensations that traveled up her spine. What time is it? she wondered desperately. I should just get up.

The experiment requires that you continue.

I will wait for the beep. It will come soon enough. It's not, she thought, as if I can't bear pain.

She stayed. Minutes rolled on. The teenager spoke. The pain increased. The beep did not come until, finally, it did.

She felt at once defeated and relieved.

A woman she had not met before came in and unceremoniously ripped the electrodes from her skin.

"That was horrible," she managed to get out.

"I'll tell your therapist," came the reply, with some alarm. Returning in a moment, the unknown woman assured her that the electrode procedure would not be done again.

"Make an appointment for twice next week," she said, politely. "We'll get you feeling better."

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

"We'll see you Tuesday!" said the woman at the desk, who had returned from wherever she had gone before.

Yes, she thought. You will.

The Cobwebs of Summerland

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Simon Atkins

Dear Ann,

I have wanted to write you ever since I arrived. Grandma has clearly fallen off her beam. It has been clear, really, from the moment I set foot in Summerland House, but I have been kept so busy with the wreckage of this domicile, I have hardly had time to breathe, much less write to you, dear cousin.

Grandma every day sits in her rocker by a window that looks out upon her expansive lawn. I must remember you have not been to Summerland. (This is not to say that you are missing much, but it did amuse us when we were very young.) I will describe the view for you from that window. The lawn rolls out for seeming miles of un-raked leaves and veers into thickets of rowan, where it erupts into strange toadstools in the deep shade. Red, phosphorescent yellow, green. Striped, spotted and rayed like exploding stars. An otherworldly rainbow exists there after rain.

The place is frankly odd. Things seem to move in the grasses as if the hills of green were water full of menacing fish which shift as the eyes passes over them. It's nothing I'd want to look at—mostly un-pruned hedges and flowers that have escaped their beds and creep across the landscape like soldiers on their bellies, petals dragging in the dirt and leaves going to grey. But there she sits. Hours after hours, from before the dawn breaks until well after breakfast, and she asks me to bring her tea and various blankets. She says nothing else. And she looks. At what?

About the inside of the house, things have gone to wreck. Dust jumps in clouds off of mantelpieces where a book is set. Splotches of a purply-grey mildew span the tile in the guest bathroom. I have had to clean it with what I could find, which wasn't much—chiefly lemon juice and baking powder under the sink. When I shower in there, it's difficult to feel as if it might not leap onto me and become something of a leprosy or a measles, a damning rash splashed across the canvass of my skin. I wash my hair and get out as fast I can do.

The worst thing, though, has got to be the cobwebs. They are all about the place—not just along ceiling beams, higher than I can find a tool to reach, but on the furniture, on the edges of quilts in un-used rooms and on various oddments about the place. The place is wrapped up like a corpse in a shroud! I can't seem to get all of it. You have to realize the largeness of this old house. It's a small castle, really. Three stories. Nine bedrooms. Four bathrooms. Two kitchens. Drawing rooms. Hearth rooms. The lot. The places for cobwebs to settle are infinite indeed.

Here is what really bothers me, Ann. I can't quite make out what happened to Grandma. She shows no sign of stroke. Doctors can find, really, nothing outwardly wrong with her. And yet she sits, speaking little. I know you hardly know my father's mother, but you will have to remember that my Grandma was quite a talker. She kept, as well, a neat house. She permitted a spiderweb or two, I'll grant. This drove my mother to fits of shivers, but Grandma persisted. My father, having grown up with it, was the same.

"Spiders need a home as well as you do, Lydia," they would both tell my mother at Thanksgiving.

My mother of course would grimace, argue or grow silent and morose. But the spiderwebs remained. Grandma must have cleaned up the old ones, though—those that had been abandoned by spiders, because I never remember the place like this. Grandma spent most of her time sketching, writing and cooking, but she did clean. And she had help then, of course. Where the household help can have gone to, I don't know. Certainly, none were old enough to have died when I last was here a year and a half ago. And Grandma has the money to pay them. Her bank account statement, if nothing else, proves that to be the case.

I hope, dear cousin, to leave here within a week, as soon as I can complete the cleaning process and hire some new help. I suppose I should put Grandma in some sort of hospital, but it seems too cruel, somehow. She is a part of this house and land as much as a toadstool from the soil beneath those rowan trees. Besides which, what would I do with Summerland? I'll have to make the drive back up regularly to see that she's OK and ask the staff the write of there is the slightest problem as well.

Please tell our employer that I will be back as soon as I can.

Much love,

Alice

This letter, I'm sorry to say, was found in the drawing room of Summerland a week after Alice failed to return to her job as expected. Upon arrival, friends, including the aforementioned cousin Ann Ridley, found her as if asleep under a copse of rowan trees. Her body was wrapped in cobwebs completely as if shrouded for her burial, still and cold, but showing no sign either of harm or of disease or decay. Her grandmother, one Eleanor Alice Summer, was seated in her rocker at the large front window overlooking the lawn, where, upon the arrival of the search party, she quietly continued to rock and to hum. 

Fact vs. Fiction

I have decided, without really telling anyone, that I am writing only fiction in October. But I am interrupting this fiction-writing to tell you about this fact: the fact of my fiction-writing.

Are you confused? Me too.

I have been, for a while now, writing a book. It's about my life. Rather, it's a book about the life I remember having, threaded through several layers of muslin, memory and interpretation. I think, on reflection, that it's fiction. Historical fiction, maybe. The main character is either a prophet or a tortured soul. It reads like the life of a saint before they reach salvation. You keep waiting, hoping, and rooting for the character, counting moments 'til the quiescent bliss that comes at the other side of  revelation. But this character instead has thousands of revelations as commonplace as small grey flies. She changes, grows, responds to life's circumstances, and all the while remains frustratingly the same.

How does one end such a thing?

I have waded in too deep, gotten right up to the present time. Here I am then, standing in water up to my neck, afraid if I step down off my tip-toes I might end up sucking down H2O. I am surrounded by my ego, by my current story-line, by a self I cannot fully see, a life I do not know yet is fiction.

Fact? It seemed time to take a break. So I decided to write fiction, to take scissors and chop up the world into stories that go where I want them to go. I decided to draw characters and see what I can learn from them. I am not a fiction writer. It's a bit as if I took a break to learn to play golf.

So, bear with me, gentle readers in October. And be vewy, vewy quiet. I am writing fiction. 

...consciously, for once.

*The above image, by the way, was done for me by the inimitable Merisha Lemmer and will ultimately become the banner for a complete blog re-design. Pretty awesome, huh? You should totally hire her.

Please don't steal my words or images. All rights reserved. 

Flash Fiction Attempt #3: The Old Man

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: Picture Prompt!

"I need to talk," said Lissandre, settling into a seat.

The old man shifted on his cafe chair, set down his newspaper, and looked at her, his merry eyes driving beams into her heart. He took a sip of his coffee.

She coughed.

"I need to know what to do," she began.

She heard stammering in her voice; the echoing back of a simpering female courting the wisdom of a patriarch. Momentarily, she was repelled by the whole scene. And yet...

"No one can ever tell you what to do," replied the old man, and his eyes twinkled.

He took another sip of coffee and, for a moment, beads of coffee pearled upon his mustache and his beard before he wiped them off.

"Here I am," Lissandre pronounced. She extended her arms wide to include the world beyond the tables outside Starbucks. "I feel stuck. In my marriage. Do I stay with Leo? Do I leave?"

She looked at the old man. He was watching her. His eyes twinkled merry; not unsympathetic, but still somehow amused.

"Leaving," she continued, "seems exhausting. Dividing up the house, the debt, the kids." On that last word, she stopped with a faint shudder. "But is it wrong to stay simply because it is too hard to leave?"

Behind the old man, a small phantom of wind grabbed a pile of fall leaves and lifted them up, lofting them skyward, like one-dimensional colored birds. The autumn played on the awnings of shops, made of them an instrument, grabbed flags and lashed the sky with them. A single red leaf landed on Lissandre's hand.

"There is no more joy to be found on the pavement than on a tree," the old man told Lissandre. "The trick," he continued, "is to remain whole."

With his booted foot, he gestured an inch to a leaf like a skeleton sewn of lace, a doily of a leaf, its architecture revealed. He crushed it into dust under the weight of a heavy heel.

Lissandre rose from the table, her heart alive in her chest. She was alert, full of adrenaline and, at the same time, calm. Her limbs knew what to do.

"Thank you," she told the old man. "Thank you so much."

He nodded, took a sip of coffee and lifted the newspaper again from the table. He began to read.

As Lisandre walked away from the table, Leo exited Starbucks, his long coat whipping behind him and two hot drinks clutched in his hands.

"That line must have been half a mile," he lamented. "But here is your skinny vanilla macchiato."
He handed her the drink. "I thought I saw you talking, but I couldn't see who you were talking to."
He looked around.

"I was talking to that old man," Lissandre told him. "The one who sits outside Starbucks every day. He's such a nice man. I feel I've known him all my life."

Leo looked around.

"Well, there's nobody there now, Lissa."

And nobody was. So she she simply gave Leo the red leaf.

Exploring Point of View: Early Morning

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Jade

GBE2 WEEK #72 (9-30-12to 10-6-12): Exploring POV

This week's post is a task set by Beth, aka Word Nerd. The assignment: to write a short piece first from the first person and then from the third. I decided to write fiction and to attempt, for once, to write from a male point-of-view. See what you think.

First Person

Monday I woke up to the bomb blast of an alarm rupturing the dark.  The alarm sat on a nightstand across the bed—on the other end of an emptiness where covers lay almost undisturbed, a pillow still neat and fluffed, a vacancy. I dragged myself there on my abdomen, like a pissed-off nudibranch or a purposeful caterpillar, in search of the button.  I hit snooze instead of cancel. God fucking damn it. Behind me lay wrinkled sheets coiled up about my body like foam around a rock, the neatness of her absence now despoiled. 5 AM. The first words from my lips a curse.

Downstairs, the coffee was brewing. I had needed to remember to set it up last night. That was her job. She set up coffee. I unloaded dishes. How bizarre it seemed now that a marriage should be so much of classroom job assignments and so little of holding hands and jumping together in falling leaves, screwing in hot tubs and pouring out the contents of one another’s soul. Neglect to unload the dishwasher and forget about a smile from your teacher, much less a slap on the ass.

Bitter. The coffee tasted bitter. And the half and half was spoiled, curdling chunks of cottage cheese in my mug. At least there was plenty of coffee. I’d made enough for two.

Third Person

Monday morning Ethan woke like every Monday morning, angry. Maybe angrier than usual. Maybe sad as well. He beat up his alarm clock as if his arm were the extension of a baseball bat. For all his rage, he appeared impotent—a bedraggled man of forty-five, with hair in need of cutting and a face that needed shaved, attacking banal technology as if it might have been the cause of all his ire. He sat upright for a bit and stared hauntedly at his bedroom, at his king-sized bed, now gone to wreck, and then scooted off the mattress and stood, tucking anger under hospital corners of control, to straighten the sheets. When the bed was restored to perfection, he left the room.

Downstairs, the coffee was brewing for Ethan. A cat mewled outside and he didn't hear. Lisa let the cat in every morning, fed it, petted it. Ethan hated cats. He simply didn't hear it. It wasn't there. He had put in too much of the grounds and they had leaked into the carafe, had settled into mud. He didn't see this either. He didn't smell the off-ness of the turning cream. He poured it into his coffee and it rose to the top, forming solid pieces of corruption. He took a sip and then stared at what he was drinking. For a moment, a look of realization was etched upon his lined and tired face, as if frozen in time, coffee in hand, still. He stood this way, second after second, unbearably still. Then, slowly, Ethan lowered the coffee to the counter. A tear rolled down his cheek.

A Little Flash Fiction: Whatever is Best

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Sideshowmom

Edie wore her hair in a bun and, once you knew her, this seemed an obvious cliche. Pulled back not so tight that it strained her face, it was still tight enough to prevent a wisp or strand from slipping down onto her cheekbones, from obscuring the lenses of her glasses, from walking like a tickling caterpillar onto her lips. One time—only once—Kate had seen it down, as Edie got ready to set about coiling it back up. It hung in untamed ringlets of auburn curl to her elbows, begging to be touched. Without her bun, Edie had looked vulnerable, younger and playful. It was a sight Kate could not shake from her mind.

"Arthur, you're filthy!" Edie exclaimed in horror, evaluating her five year-old son.

His arms were caked with wet sand, buried deep into the substrate of the playground. To Kate, he looked like your average five year-old. They get dirty, she thought. You clean them off. The two women stood side by side on the playground, silently at odds over this simple matter.

"I think we'll need to strip you off before you walk in the house," Edie pronounced, dusting him off.

Kate wondered if this wasn't why her house was always so in need of being swept. Children—filthy children—tromped in and out of it, boots on as often as off, trailing wet sand, scattering fall leaves, leaving a wake of garden soil. It seemed so much effort to pursue them around spitting strong adjectives and attempting to halt the entropy they blew like bubbles from their happy lips.

"I'm hungry, Mama," Arthur began to whine.

"Me, too," said Aster, who arrived like a bolt from somewhere else—where was she?—and spinning around Kate's legs.

Kate, always so ill-prepared for hunger outside the home, had cereal bars in her minivan.  Cereal bars, in a box crumpled and ill-used. Maybe juice boxes. Neither would be acceptable for Arthur and Aster would have to eat them under his watchful and jealous stares, while Edie reminded Arthur that bread products and juice made him hyperactive and unpleasant. On this count, Kate suspected, Edie might be right. Our modern diet is so unnatural. And yet it seems a shame to raise a child only to continually tell him no. Why, Kate wondered, do I have cereal bars and juice boxes? Laziness? Stupidity?

"I have raw almonds in my backpack," Edie volunteered. "In the front zippered pocket. Make sure to close it back up, please."

Arthur fetched these and, happily, he and Aster shared. Not for the first time, Kate felt immensely grateful for Aster's willingness to try any food, for her love of things she recognized as grown in nature and for her stunning lack of memory for things like cereal bars in her close-by minivan, filled with jam.

"So, in a few months, these two start kindergarten," Kate observed, mainly to interrupt her own uncomfortable train of thought.

"Yes," said Edie, carefully. "They do. I hope it will go OK. I have to say I wasn't that impressed at the orientation. Maybe things will be fine when we get him in. It could just be that it was one of those things because they had to present to everyone. I hope they'll be able to meet his needs."

"What was it that bothered you?" Kate wondered. She had quite liked the kindergarten classrooms. Of course, Fiona and Sebastian had gone there, many moons ago. Maybe she was blind to something.

"It all seemed so..." Edie struggled to find the words. "So pre-school. Invented spelling. Letter names. Letter sounds. Isn't that what they've been learning already? At what point are they going to teach them to spell things correctly, to compose something that makes sense? I recognize they're all in different places. I just don't want it to be a complete waste of Arthur's year. We're thinking of homeschooling him, to tell you the truth."

Kindergarten. Once Kate had volunteered in Fiona's class all year, twice a week, for much of the day, when the school couldn't afford a teacher's aide. It seemed to her that a  great deal was being learned there that had nothing to do with letters, sounds, or writing at all. Children who, perhaps, had never before been asked to defer a desire for the greater welfare of the group, in kindergarten learned to do so. Children learned not to steal Legos, not to eat their Hostess cupcakes before their sandwich. They learned to listen to adults who were not their parents. They learned to make friends, to get along, to solve their own problems, when possible, on the playground, rather than running to an adult five times a recess to complain that so-and-so was being mean. They learned to take pride in their work. They learned to like school.

Kate struggled to find a way to express this and choked on her feeling that Arthur needed badly to get away from Edie's watchful eye, that he needed to get dirty, he needed to eat something sweet without her knowing, he needed to poke another child and sit in time-out, he needed to spell "kid" with a "c" and have an adult around him who would not react with horror and alarm.

Kate remembered when Sebastian was little and she would not buy him cake for his first birthday. She remembered when she asked that people purchase only wooden toys. Everyone ignored her. In the end, looking at thirteen year-old Sebastian—worldly, tainted, popular and able to negotiate the cosmos of middle school with just enough of pop culture to fit in and enough of her values, perhaps, to save his soul—she was glad. She was glad that she let him eat cake.

"Well," said Kate, quietly. "I'm sure you will do whatever's best."