Soul Flier

How could you have grown up so fast, when the day you were born, you, grown up, seemed a million years away? 

Syd and me when she was about 13.
Photo credit: Jon Aronin

How did you get so capable, because when you were two, you needed me for everything? 

How could you have needed me for everything, then barged ahead anyway, my pigheaded angel-face, convinced that you needed me for nothing? 

And how did you get so strong, my fairy warrior princess, when there was a time that you worried about everything?

Remember that day on the bed? You said you were so afraid to die. I tried to think what could have made you that anxious. Then, you spoke of stresses from school, your parents' divorce, and unreliable friends. You cried about missing your grandma, leaving your childhood, losing your home, and growing old. 

No wonder you were frightened; you'd worried yourself full circle to confront your own mortality. And we went around and around and around, I trying to comfort you and you still not comforted.

Then I, a discontented agnostic, struggling to believe, said the last thing I could think of that might help, that after I died, I would watch over you, and that when you died, I would watch then, too, and fly down from Heaven just in time to catch your soul, that I would hold it tight against me and pilot it to Heaven. 

So far, my help hadn't helped, so I braced for your scoff. 

But you said, "You promise?"

And I said, "I promise."

A Duckling at Sea

Getting a feeling that your two-year-old has more sense than you do isn't pleasant. I had that feeling at a party for my daughter's fifth birthday. 

Jon at another party, probably the same year.

I've never known why the face-painter put that

dot on his forehead. Photo copyright protected.

My then-husband and I threw this party with the parents of one of our daughter's friends whose birthday was at about the same time. Since we were saving money by splitting the costs, the four of us decided to spring for a moon bounce. This one was purple and built to look like a storybook castle. 

That moon bounce was the delight of every moppet at the party; they were jumping, tumbling and fanny-dropping within its mesh-y, net confines and squealing with delight. But by the end of the day, the moppets were tired and the moon bounce sat empty as the children ate or entertained themselves more sedately elsewhere. 

One of the other mommies at the party slipped over to me and whispered, "The moon bounce is empty and the rental company's on its way to get it. Let's go play in it!" And even though my fellow mommy and I were curvy, good-sized women, we saw nothing amiss in the two of us frolicking in the moon bounce as though we were forty-pound five-year-olds.     

We left the house and giggled ourselves over to the side yard where the moon bounce sat, seemingly glum. The sunlight, which earlier gleamed from its purple hide, was now dimming into dusk. It was obvious to us that the moon bounce was lonely and needed two grown women in it, so we slipped off our shoes and clamored in. I was surprised at how much work it was to hop around in there, and though I was getting winded, I was having fun. A few minutes later, my son, Jon who was two, toddled over and laboriously hauled himself up into the moon bounce.

"Hi, there, Jon!" I called. The exertion and bouncing made my words come out in breathy chunks. He sat near the moon bounce entrance, rolling and bobbing, a duckling at sea. "Did you come to bounce with us?"
     
"Uh-huh," he smiled. He struggled to gain his footing but fell on his bottom every time one of us mommies landed; still, he remained good-natured about it. 

Suddenly, the other mommy lost her balance. She fell backward into the net wall which proceeded to stretch several feet in an ominous, yawning bulge then snap back to fling her across the entire width of the moon bounce. She slammed against the opposite wall which also stretched and bulged before flinging her in a sweaty heap to the middle of the moon bounce floor.

Jon, still on his fanny, placidly watched as the mommy went hurtling. Then he looked at me calmly, the lips on his little gnome face parted, and he spoke these very wise words: "I gettin' outta here, Mommy."

With that, he flipped onto his tummy, swung his legs out of the moon bounce, and with a little thump, plopped onto the grass. He padded away leaving me with the troubling notion that there went a two-year-old who had more smarts than his mother. 

And I wondered how many years I had before he'd notice.  

Starstruck Marta and the Torch Song

Their names were Marta and Joe. They were born in Poland before 1920 and met in the U.S. while still very young. According to Marta, they’d been married forever.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

I met them in 1980, I believe. It was when they showed up at the Hollywood Hills office of Forrest J Ackerman, whose many idiosyncrasies included shunning the period after his middle initial. He was a literary agent and editor of "Famous Monsters of Filmland," a magazine children had been clamoring for since 1958. I worked for him during my summer vacations from college. 

Marta was slim, almost frail, and elegant with her soft voice, her white, free-flowing hair and her loose and gauzy garments. Joe fit her perfectly. Slim, neatly dressed, and with a pencil mustache, he could have been a movie director in the silent age of Hollywood - and she a leading lady. 

Unaware of Forry's sci-fi and horror niche, they had come hoping to find a literary agent for a book of poems by Marta. They were about her heart, her husband, her sons, her gratitude, and the buckets of wonder she could wring from a single ray of sunlight.

That sunlight was important because Marta was supposed to be deep down in the dark by now. She had been ill for most of her adult life with a heart condition doctors said would kill her before she could grow old. They also said she should never have children, but she defied the doctors and the odds, acing pregnancy with the birth of a healthy son. One of her poems was about the bright and perfect joy of hearing that baby cry for the first time.

Soon after, Marta aced another pregnancy and gave birth to another healthy son. Joe stood by her through it all, doting and protective. Joe, who had survived a pogrom and seen someone killed right in front of him, found himself partnered for life with a woman whose experience with death was just as threatening and, astonishing as it sounds, far more personal because the threat came from her own heart.

The couple was in their late sixties the day I met them, and they proceeded to “adopt” me, this apple-cheeked college kid from the Midwest. One Friday, they ventured from their home, a sleek, one-level mid-century modern in the California desert, to L.A. to pick me up for the weekend. Settled in for the evening, Marta, who adored Joe's voice, begged him to sing for us. Eventually he gave in with an acapella performance of an old torch song about the agonies of love, "I’ve Got to Pass Your House to Get to My House."

A little recent Googling revealed some history on that strange song I’d never heard before and hadn’t heard since. Released in 1934 on the Columbia label, it was recorded by a young Bing Crosby. The genre was "pop," which is a little hard to believe when you hear the song. 

That weekend was filled with white wine, delicious food and talk of everything from sex (which I had yet to experience), to desert weather, to writing, and there was lots of talk of writing. It was one of the first times anyone had treated me as a fully formed adult equal.

They both had so much to say, and every other word wore a fresh coat of grace. As to that old song, it may have been recorded by Bing Crosby, but you haven't heard it until you've heard it sung by Joe to a thrilled and starstruck Marta. 

Tales of the Unexpected

Sometimes a snappy retort is welcomed and sometimes, not so much. Sometimes what comes from a loved one's mouth in our time of need is not what we expected to hear, and sometimes what comes out of our mouths is not what our loved ones expect either. 

Syd and Jon at that retort-ish stage.
Photo by Teece Aronin, all rights reserved. 

A few winters ago, during one of the worst winters on record, as huge swaths of the U.S. suffered through a polar vortex, I left work at 4 p.m. to take my son, Jon for an allergy shot. Then we hit the post office, tried to find our way back to an ice cream shop we like (I have no sane reason for that in the midst of a polar vortex), got lost, gave up on the ice cream shop, picked up my daughter, Syd, went to the store, then pulled into our apartment house parking lot four hours later. Everyone was a little on edge because the weather was truly awful. We sat in the car, dreaded getting out, and then I snapped.

"Great! We've been driving around for hours and now the whole evening is shot!" Jon looked over and said, "Mom, it's just one night out of thousands in your life. It's okay." I complimented Jon on being so wise. When we got out of the car, the wind hit us smack in the face. It felt like fistfuls of razor blades hurled by an unseen sadist.

"Oh, maaan!" Jon wailed. "I forgot I have to walk the stupid dog!" Watching him hustle up the walk, miserable from the cold, I called after him, "Jon! It’s just one night out of thousands in your life!" He flat-out ignored me and kept walking. I apologized later because using a child’s words of comfort against him is a low thing to do, but I was exhausted, cranky, and after all, it was a polar vortex.

One day, after I got rear-ended and my back was killing me, I asked Syd to bring me a glass of ice water and some ibuprofen. I was still a little loopy from a pain pill I'd had earlier, so as she handed the pills to me, I said, "Oh, thank you. Having you was such a good idea. Now I'm extra glad I did."

Syd smiled placidly and replied, "I'm not sure if you getting high on pain meds is a good idea. Kind of scared of what you'll say next.”

If I had thought she would say, "Aw, Mom, I love you," I was mistaken. 

This same kid sat in a high school classroom one first day of school as a girl came in, crying. Syd didn't know her, but she got up from her desk, walked to the girl and asked what happened. The girl explained that she'd just been bullied. "Do you need a hug?" Syd asked. The girl said she did, so Syd hugged her then stepped back and quipped, "Who do you want me to beat up?" I expect that show of support to her classmate will get her off the hook with the Universe for what she said when she handed me my pain pill.

Being a later life parent has its challenges but rarely do you expect them to come in the form of age-related sarcasm from your own kids. I was crossing the room one day when Jon, lying on the floor watching TV, reached out and wrapped his arms around my ankles. I smiled down at him, expecting an affectionate remark. What I didn't expect was, "I got your legs! Well, not exactly - maybe in another 40 years!"

Jon was an experienced quipster by that time, having tried out his early material on his grandmother when he was three. He was sick and I left him in the car with my mother while I ran into the pharmacy to pick up his prescription.

"Grandma," he said, "I'm gonna throw up."

"Just a minute, Jon," my mother said, scrambling around and searching for something he could vomit into. It took a minute, but she came up with an empty fast food bag, got out of the car using her cane, opened his door, leaned in and heard, "But not today."

Could there ever come a time when thinking of those moments with my kids won't make me smile? Maybe.

"But not today."

Certainly not today.

Feeding the Christmas Beast

I've had an epiphany: Christmas is a bit too commercialized, and some of us spend a bit too much.

Christmas Beast, copyright, Teece Aronin

Every January I start budgeting to feed the Christmas beast, the tinseled, bulbed behemoth already lurking at the end of the year. Christmas, for a lot of us, has become akin to a fluffy white snowball rolling toward us down a mountain, getting bigger and bigger and badder and badder, until it rolls right over us and stops. Then we're expected to dig ourselves out and start pushing it back up the mountain again.  

But the good news? Every Christmas you have the next 364 days to do it - if you start right away. It's like a pinball game automatically resetting and demanding $700 from you for the privilege of losing again.

Then there's online shopping which is great in a lot of ways, but not so great in others. For instance, it's still surprisingly hard work. Nothing tightens up those shoulder muscles like opening an email from Amazon alerting you to the fact that your order of 47 items was cancelled because your "payment method" has expired, and you try to straighten things out on a glitchy cell phone while waiting in line at UPS and pushing two 40-pound boxes along with your feet. 

I don't think this is how Christ would want us to celebrate his birth.

Another thing I doubt is that he'd want us giving children hundreds of dollars worth of presents they'll be too polite to say they hate, but you can tell they do anyway. This sad circumstance sets us up to discover vast Christmas gift graveyards that sprawl under kids' beds and bone piles of unwanted toys that lie heaped in their closets. What a waste. 

As my kids got older (my son is 17 and my daughter 19), it all changed, but not for the better. Instead of telling me what they wanted, or handing me a list, they would text me links to things, mostly tech products with purposes I didn't understand, things that Oppenheimer would've asked his mother for if he'd been a Millennial. And I don't blame my kids; it was a natural outgrowth of what we'd come to as they got older and more tech-savvy and I shopped more often online. Having them do that actually made my shopping a lot easier. Easier, but somehow colder.  

Today I'm pledging to kill the Christmas beast by refusing to feed it. I'm not alone, by the way. Lots of people are cutting way back on the amounts of gifts they buy - even for their kids. And some people have stopped buying their kids any gifts. If an article I read recently is true, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher are two of them. Many parents now opt for gifts requiring more time and imagination than money, like  buying a kid art supplies and then committing an afternoon to making art with said kid. 

Also according to that article, some kids, and even some adults, have gotten pretty testy during the adjustment/withdrawal phase, but a lot of families feel their lives are on a healthier track now that they're doing things differently.

When I told my son what I was thinking, he said he could really get behind it. When I mentioned it to my daughter, she said, "I think that's a good idea, but can I think about it?"

I said, "Nope, you're already handling it a lot better than some people, so I'm taking your answer as a yes."

Besides, it's not as though I plan to go all Kutcher-Kunis on them. What I'm thinking is $100 each in presents plus treats and surprises spread throughout the year, like an afternoon playing my son's computer games with him then dinner at his favorite restaurant.

The idea is to give more from your heart than from your wallet and to give your kid a memory because those can't get lost under a bed.

Then again, if you saw my kids' rooms . . .

Stand Still, Bright Eyes

The docent met my daughter, my friend, and me at the back door where a sign instructed visitors to ring the bell. She showed us through the old home and told us of the family who had lived there when it was new. 

A Victorian couple pose on either side of
their deceased daughter. Notice the 
parents' images are slightly blurred.This 
happened due to long exposure times 
required by cameras of that era and was 
caused when a subject moved even slightly. 
Notice also that the image of the deceased 
is much clearer. Boo.

Now the house, a beautiful orange brick Victorian, serves as a museum and wedding venue. It was decorated for Halloween with orange lights winding up the banister in the main hall and mannequins clad in vintage-style masks and gauzy or satin-y period costumes.

The docent pointed out a photograph of what we took to be two parents and their daughter (see photo at right). The daughter, seated between her parents, appeared to be in her early twenties, and her posture and facial expression struck me as a little apathetic. Then the docent explained. The girl was dead, sitting up, eyes wide open.

There were similar photos planted around the room, and I failed to grasp why photographing dead family members like this made sense, which, it turns out, it does. 

So the first thing out of my mouth was, "Why would people do this?"

Shockingly, it was my daughter who piped up:

"It's called Victorian era postmortem photography," she explained. "Back then, photography was new, and people couldn't always afford to have pictures taken unless there was a good reason. And because the exposure time needed to take a photograph was so long, people looked blurry if someone tried to take their picture goofing around in the yard or something. Even if they moved just a little, they'd look blurry. That's why so many of the photos from that time period were portraits. And if someone died, a postmortem photo might be a family's only picture of them."

I stared at her. She's 19 for Heaven's sake. "How do you know all that?" 

She shrugged. "I read."  

I knew that deceased family members are often photographed. We have such photos in my own family. But what I didn't understand was why Victorians propped them up with their eyes open. Then again, as Syd explained, Victorians held a unique position in time, when photography was there, but not really there. If they wanted a photo of their dead loved one in something resembling a living state, this was often the only way to go. 

Later, I did some Googling and found more photos, purportedly of dead Victoreans, and these upset me for days because these subjects were standing with the aid of a special device, the base of which was visible near their feet. Then I did some more research and learned that it's unlikely these subjects were dead. According to Wikipedia, thank God,  ". . . it is untrue that metal stands and other devices were used to pose the dead as though they were living. The use by photographers of a stand or arm rest (sometimes referred to as a Brady stand) which aided living persons to remain still long enough for the camera's lengthy exposure time, has given rise to this myth. While 19th-century people may have wished their loved ones to look their best in a memorial photograph, evidence of a metal stand should be understood as proof that the subject was a living person."

All of the photos below were said to be postmortem photos. That's why I was so glad I'd read that Wikipedia entry when I found this: 

and this,

and especially this:

It's likely that the only grief associated with this photo was that the parents had to pay for it.

If you happen to do your own research on Victorian era postmortem photography, be warned, it can be unsettling, and to this day I get cheery little teasers from Instagram saying they've found more postmortem photography I might like. And there's a lot of hoo-hah out there about living people being corpses and a lot of photos of perfectly healthy kids that someone will try to convince you are tragically dead. 


Even this photo (immediate right) which an eagle-eyed reader pointed out is not of the Victorian era (noting the woman's dress and visible knee), I'll leave here to prove some points. First, as with the claim that Victorians sometimes had their dead photographed "standing," you can't believe everything you read on the Internet - like me falling for someone's claim that this photo was of Victorians.

Second, whoever posted the photo wrote that the baby was dead and his eyes had been painted onto the photograph. Let's say the photo was Victorian, doesn't it make more sense that the baby is alive but with no clue what that contraption is that some stranger is pointing at him? And if you'd never seen a camera flash before, wouldn't your face look like that too? And in those days, as with the photo above of the girl with the closed eyes and lolling head, sometimes people had to settle for less than the ideal photo. 

So anyway, the next time you find yourself on a paintball field, cursing that paintball that really, really stung, be grateful that some Victorian photographer wasn't aiming at you. 

Treats

I have a history of eating dog treats, and I never seemed to find them; they seemed to find me. 

Image: Teece Aronin

When I was about two years-old, our next-door neighbor plopped me down in the grass of her backyard, face-to-face with her cocker spaniel, Reggie. Then she shook some crunchy, colorful dog treats into my tiny, cupped palms. 

"Reggie loves treats," she said, and walked away. 

I looked at Reggie. Reggie looked at me. I took one of the treats between my finger and thumb and held it in front of Reggie's black-lipped, drool-y muzzle, at which point, he tilted his head, leaned in, and gently took it. Cheerfully, he crunched it up, then looked expectantly at me.

He must be waiting for me to take my turn, I decided, so I put one of the treats in my mouth and chewed. The dog looked crestfallen. 

Then, I gave a treat to him, and the dog cheered up. When I took my next turn; the dog looked devastated. 

And so it was that Reggie learned to share. Reggie's owner moved away a few years later and couldn't take him along. Knowing how much I loved him, she asked my parents to take him in. They did, and he was my heart for many years.

One night a few months ago, my daughter, Sydney invited her friend, Maddy to a sleepover. Syd and Maddy are "dog people," and since I ate enough dog treats with Reggie that day to become part dog, my daughter might have earned her dog person status partly through genetics. 

It was early Saturday morning when I stumbled into the dimly lit kitchen, yawning and rumpled. Both girls were asleep in the living room. On the counter were these cute little ginger snappish things, and without thinking, I popped one in my mouth. It turned out to have come from a box of treats Maddy brought over for our dog. 

"Rule Number One:" lectured a friend," If it's in your kitchen but you don't know how it got there, do NOT put it in your mouth."

Actually, it didn't taste that bad, and it brought back memories of when I was plopped down in the grass and told that Reggie loved treats.

Due to Budget Constraints, No Sardines Will Be Purchased Until Tuesday

I have a budget, which is big talk from someone without any money. But now that I have a budget, I'm counting on the money to follow. 

Graphic: Copyright, Teece Aronin

My budget is calculated by taking each bi-weekly paycheck and setting aside at least half of what I need for each fixed monthly expense. Then I pull out what I need for groceries and personal care expenses for the kids and me and put it in envelopes. This keeps me on the straight and narrow and curbs the temptation to buy three shoes instead of two - you know, like people do. 

Sticking with a budget also means sticking to your guns. When the kids beg, "Please Mom, can't we have cake and chips for this weekend?" I calmly explain that they must then decide what they are willing to give up: toilet paper or heat. Notice the flexibility I employ in my willingness to dip into the fixed monthly expenses allotment in order to buy the cake and chips as long as they are prepared to sacrifice a bit on their end. I think this helps them to better appreciate the value of a dollar and to respect their mother's financial agility. 

If nothing else, they know that a woman with budget smarts and determination is in charge and that gives them a sense of safety when it comes to money. 

 My own personal finance hero is a woman I know who double checks the cost of what's in her cart before getting into the check-out line. If she's over budget, she swaps out or puts back items until she's at her limit again. She doesn't feel depressed or deprived over it because she knows the greater good is being achieved by being in control of her money. 

Being careful with my expenditures allows me to funnel more money into my vacation and entertainment accounts, and the kids appreciate that too. No more staying in independently owned hotel franchises with no elevators, no coffee and no door locks. This summer we'll be checking into a Holiday Inn, baby, and won't it be fine? 

Ah yes, the best is yet to come. 

Aging into Beauty

My son, Jon and I were at a mall food court eating sushi one day. A man at the next table, a roughened, Sam Elliott type, said to Jon, "You look an awful lot like your mother, son."

My parents, young and old - and me, top left and middle right.
Image copyright, Teece Aronin. 

I thanked the man, Jon smiled at him, and then the man said, "Someday you'll age into her beauty." Seconds later, the man was gone, leaving Jon and me baffled and staring at each other. 

"So, which of us should feel more insulted?" I asked. Jon wasn't sure so we finished our sushi and went home.

Looking back, I see how I missed the point in a huge way. Worse, my question to Jon fueled all kinds of stereotypes and outmoded thinking. One can be male and beautiful, and older and beautiful. 

As the mother of an adolescent son, I want his ideas of beauty, aging, and gender to be as inclusive as possible, but is that how I acted? No. Jon should have thrown a salmon roll at his mother's head. 

I'm not talking about sixty-something celebs with stables full of plastic surgeons being beautiful; I'm talking about the beauty in real people - older, male, female, LGBTQIA - anyone, everyone.

While we're at it, why not push the envelope and assert that one can be flat out old and beautiful? The older I get, the more convinced I am that it's true. Then again, I have a dog in this race - an old dog - a beautiful, old dog.

And when are we going to stop using the word old as an insult? 

Here's my list of the old and immensely beautiful:

• The translucent skin of my mother's 91-year-old hands
• My father's face lighting up when I'd visit him in hospice
• My aunt, sick and weak in a nursing home, laughing herself to tears when Jon accidentally ran over my foot with her wheelchair
• Another aunt, dying and deeply religious, smiling at the nieces and nephews bustling around her room and proclaiming, "Oh, I'm having the most wonderful death!"
• Canadian singer, songwriter and poet, Leonard Cohen, who stayed sexy as all get-out until his death at age 82

When Cohen was in his fifties, he wrote a very funny, very sexy song titled, "I'm Your Man." A snippet of the lyrics goes like this:

Ah, but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I'd crawl to you baby, and I'd fall at your feet
And I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat
And I'd claw at your heart and I'd tear at your sheet
I'd say please
I'm your man

To my mind, the older Cohen got, the sexier he became. 

I once read that the lover Cohen references in Chelsea Hotel was Janice Joplin. With that in mind, consider these lyrics from that haunting, lilting, groundbreaking song:

You told me again, you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception,
And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
You fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind; We are ugly but we have the music."

Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying, "Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art."

True beauty is covered in crosshatch designs and marked up with scribbled arrows pointing every which way, and you learn eventually that looks, age, and attraction don't have much to do with each other. What counts is character, experience, a grasp of what's sensual, and who has the music.

While Black

I was standing in a hotel elevator in Columbia, Maryland headed to the lobby. A black adolescent male stepped in shepherding a gaggle of five or six kids; cousins and siblings, I assumed. His charges were no older than eight with the smallest, the only girl, about four. The adolescent doing all the shepherding was as tall as a man, but his facial features said he was about 15. All of them were dressed for the pool. The elevator doors closed.

Image Copyright, Teece Aronin

"Wow, it looks like you guys are going swimming," I said to the younger ones.

"Yeah!" the goslings chorused.

"You are so lucky," I said. "I'm hoping that I get to go tomorrow."

The young man and I exchanged smiles. He spoke to the goslings softly and with a tone of bottomless patience.

"Now, listen to me very carefully," he said, and amazingly  they fell silent and all the little faces tipped attentively to his. "When we get to the lobby, we're going to be very quiet." His index finger rested gently against his lips and the thought struck me that this was a kid who lived his whole life gently.

"Okay!" the gaggle promised.

The young man looked at me and sighed. "All I can do is tell them, and know that it probably won't go well."

"You are doing a really great job," I told him.

When the doors opened onto the lobby I waited because one of the little boys was darting off the elevator. The young man in charge stopped him.

"We let the lady go first," he explained.

As I stepped off the elevator, the words, "Thank you sir," exited my mouth as naturally as if the young man had been an old one.

Behind me, the gosling protested. "Why did I have to wait?"

"Always be a gentleman," I heard as I walked away.

I got in my car thinking of a neighborhood boy who was a friend of my kids in what felt like another lifetime. His name was Paris and like the young man on the elevator, Paris was black, tall and mannish-looking. The last time I saw him he was 12. He was a little younger than my daughter, Sydney and a little older than my son, Jon. He spoke softly and had a dry sense of humor.

One day I was driving with the three of them in the backseat. Jon found a cereal bowl back there and put it on his head.

"Look! I have a bowl for a hat!"

Drawled Paris wistfully, "I wish there was milk in it."

Paris had a younger sister named Maya. Maya was very little and hadn't been around me much, so at her birthday party, fully expecting her to shy away, I asked, "May I pick you up?" And Maya shot her arms up in the air as happily as if I'd offered to take her for an airplane ride. 

One time my then-husband and I took Paris with us on a weekend trip. He, Jon and I were watching the news where one of the top stories was about someone's insistence on using the N word as part of his right to free speech.

"Jon, change the channel please," I said.

Paris' expression was even more serious than usual. "Thank you, Mrs. Aronin. You know, that word is offensive to people like me."

"It's offensive to me, too, Paris."

"What do you mean, people like you?" asked Jon.

"Black people," explained Paris.

Jon leaned back for a better view of his friend and looked astonished. "You're black?" he gasped, dead serious.

Not long after Paris' weekend away with us, his mother learned she had terminal cancer. She moved out-of-state with Paris and Maya to where they had family.

The night they left, Paris gave each of us something to remember him by; I got a "rock formation" from his aquarium and a can of Planter's peanuts. Maya gave the kids her hula hoop. When Paris' mother put the kids in the moving van and literally drove into the sunset, it was one the bleakest times the kids and I had ever known.

Paris' mother died soon after, and Paris and Maya moved in with the extended family. He and the kids keep in touch, but only sporadically.

The day after my exchange with the goslings, my daughter and I were in the hotel lobby. In walked the young man with four of his charges. 

"Syd, that's the kid I told you about," I whispered. "Doesn't he remind you of Paris? I still can't get over how well he handled all those kids."

"You really should go speak to him, Mom," she said. They were in a snack shop near the hotel entrance. The young man was patiently guiding the younger ones through their choices. I walked up to them.

"Excuse me," I said. Despite my smile, they all looked a little startled so I addressed the goslings first. "I was in the elevator with you last night, and I just wanted to compliment each of you on how grown up you all acted. You guys are pretty impressive kids."

"Thank the lady," the young man prompted.

"Thank you!" they chimed.

The little girl put her arms around my waist and laid her head against my side.

"And I wanted to tell you," I said, looking at the young man, "that you have a gift for working with little ones and it's obvious how much they respect you."

He looked shocked, then relieved, then delighted. Did he think I was about to criticize him? He put his hand over his heart and thanked me. I walked back to my daughter.

"Whoa, Mom, the woman working at the front desk was eyeing you like you would not believe."

I glanced over and saw that she was a young black woman.

"Probably thought I was harassing them for 'shopping while black,'" I said. "You know what I mean, right? Driving while black, running while black, walking while black. She probably thought that white woman better not accuse those kids of stealing."

"She was right to be suspicious," Syd sighed. 

"Yup, I know." I sighed too.

I wondered if that young man's parents had felt the need to teach him what so many black parents teach their already law-abiding kids: to keep their hands out of their pockets whenever they're in stores, to keep them visible if pulled over by a cop, and to be careful where and how they run. I'm sure there are lots of other lessons, too, ones I'm too white to have thought of. 

You know, we can argue until we're blue in the face, instead of whatever color we were born with, about the past acts of both sides, but children like Paris, and that kid at the hotel have to live through the present before they can live in the future and be the kinds of young, black men who'll help break the stereotypes.  

Paris was awfully young when his mother died. I hope she had time to teach him all the lessons.

The Long Arm of the Law

What do Matt Dillon, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and my mother have in common? Each could put the fear of God into any gunslinger, or in the case of my mother, into her runny-nosed, mercurochromed, wisenheimer kids every time one of them lipped off at another. None of us would have dared lip off at Mom. 

You could be in any room in our house and my mother could rap you in the back of your head from any other room in the house, and not take so much as one step in your direction.

You'd be standing in the middle of the living room basking in the glow of having just called your brother a sticky stalactite booger, Mom would be in the kitchen and WHAP.

She could bounce braids with one of those four-fingered love taps, love taps that seemed devoid of any love short of the kind in Scared Straight. These raps in the head never hurt, but they got our attention. And in truth we knew she loved us with everything she had.

Eventually my brothers and I resorted to experimental methods of insulting each other hoping to fly under our mother's radar.

We tried whispering our insults upstairs when Mom was sweeping the sidewalk . . . and WHAP.

We passed notes to each other in the basement while Mom was in the bathtub and . . . WHAP.

We coded messages to each other using secret decoder rings while Mom was next door having coffee and . . . WHAP. 


I wish I could describe to you what these encounters with our mother looked like, but it's a little like that problem people have after near death experiences when they find human speech wobbly, puny and inadequate to the task of describing something so astonishing.


One day, years after we'd grown up, my brother was driving somewhere with his kids, my mother, and me. My little nephew was on the driver's side in the back seat and my mother was on the passenger side up front. Then my nephew said something of which my mother disapproved and  . . . WHAP. My nephew never saw it coming.

"Whoa! What was that?" he yelped, not hurt, but surprised.

"That son," said his father, "was the long arm of the law."

Defending Facebook: My "Charmed" Life

If Facebook gets you down, makes you feel your relationships, your family, your furniture, your holidays don't quite measure up, or if you think everyone on there is a shallow bunch of fakers, please understand: You aren't privy to everybody's backstory. 

On one of many road trips back to see my mother. 
Photo copyright, Teece Aronin

I post pictures of my kids baking cookies as the dog watches with flour on her face. I make sure you wake to photos of my cat, stretched in feline repose across my bed. I choose pictures that show most cheerfully or poignantly or humorously how well my kids and I get along.

What you don't see is everything that came before, like a tsunami crushing our lives. Life fell apart, and what you see on Facebook is the repair work, the reassembly, the cleanup - with me, the mother, who never knew a damned thing about how to do any of this - as team captain by default.

There was the end of a marriage to the man who fathered these children, who helped build a home only the most tangled of crossed stars could destroy and did. There was me scrambling to find a better job before our house sold out from under us. There was me networking in two different states, first the kids' home state and next mine, to find that job. 

There was the kids having to leave their father. There was the kids having to leave their grandmother. There was me having to leave my mother when I'd always planned to be there as she aged. There was the night before we left when she broke the "no open flame" rule at her assisted living facility, lit a votive, and joined hands with us around the flame. Then she spoke with a smile of how grateful she was that we had been near her all those years and how she would pray for our trip to be safe.

Then there was the 500-mile move away from every warm thing my kids had ever known.

There were the months on end where I swore I was piloting the kids through hell only to learn that they were guiding me. There were the endless kindnesses of family and friends who took us in, shored us up, and gave us hope.

There was Facebook, which became a way to document the restoration. The place I laid our trips to cider mills and pickle festivals and county fairs as though they were flowers and Facebook was an altar. 

It was a place where the Facebook friends who truly knew me tracked our progress and supported the effort, and where those whose newsfeed I clogged, viewed the work, neither knowing nor caring that there was any work in it.

It was the place I showed off my new sofa with framed Rothko prints hung perfectly level right above - and where at least five nail holes hid behind each print even though I measured. It was a place where few knew it took five years to save the money for that sofa because I was terrified of credit card debt. It was somewhere just a handful of people were aware that the sofa's predecessor had belonged to my aunt, was chewed up by our dog, and that the prints came from a thrift shop and cost $12 each.

I, who loved to write and aspired to be a blogger, developed my "voice" on Facebook, found rhythms for my words, and learned how good it felt when my posts made people laugh. It was a place where my friends nurtured the writer sapling until it was strong enough to launch that blog. 

Anyone who didn't know me well might have thought: 'What a great little family; I wonder what happened to the marriage.'

For the record, the marriage was lost in the tsunami.

But I had Facebook where I documented our trips to see my mother and my ex-husband, where friends could see how well he and I worked together for the sake of our children, and everyone could wonder just how much was exactly as it seemed.