MindSpinner

Today the owner of a local furniture and appliance store came to replace the baking element in the oven. Dark-haired daughter swears we should have replaced the dryer first. Jeans shrunk skin tight in the dryer are apparently more important than food to a sixteen year old. On the other hand, she who pays the bills counters that clothes get dry with or without a dryer, while baking without an oven remains a hit-or-miss affair dependent on sunny midday hours. Moreover, one cannot fit a pizza, a blueberry pie, or a full-size sheet of chocolate chip cookies in a Sun Oven. Also relevant is the fact that one oven heating element costs much less than an entire dryer, though more than one would like to pay - $120, to be exact. She who pays the bills also notes that dark-haired daughter has not suggested that she and her friends should forego the mewithoutYou concert in order to divert money to a dryer fund. Nobody is suggesting that. We have our priorities.

Today, then, is officially declared to be Oven Day, and we are celebrating by baking brownies. You just can’t accomplish that with a dryer .

It’s a done deal. Tickets are on the way. A room has been reserved at a Holiday Inn in Indianapolis. Dark-haired daughter, two of her friends and I are headed to a mewithoutYou concert on the 27th. Now I will get to hear in person the people who sing the songs that are constantly playing on the car CD player, courtesy of my offspring, who are appalled to discover that I now know all the lyrics and can sing along.

Mom singing lyrics can make songs decidedly less cool. Do you suppose resident mewithoutYou fans know that lead singer Aaron Weiss and guitarist Mike Weiss are both English majors licensed to teach that subject in the state of Pennsylvania? Perhaps not.

Of all the mewithoutYou songs we listen to while driving from here to there, the one that sticks in my head is this one. I like it, except for the ending, for the images and the lilt of the words and music.

In a sweater poorly knit, and an unsuspecting smile
Little Moses drifts downstream in the Nile
A fumbling reply — an awkward, rigid laugh
I’m carried helpless by my floating basket raft

Your flavor in my mind swings back and forth between,
sweeter than any wine, and bitter as mustard greens
Light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickle bread
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

As you plow some other field, try and forget my name,
see what harvest yields, and, supposing I’d do the same
I planted rows of peas, but by the first week of july –
they should have come up to my knees but they were maybe ankle high

Take the fingers from your flute to weave your colored yarns,
and boil down your fruit to preserves in mason jars
But now the books are overdue and the goats are underfed…
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

You’re a door-without-a-key, a field-without-a-fence
You made a holy fool of me, and I’ve thanked you ever since
If she comes circling back, we’ll end where we’d begun
Like two pennies on the train track the train crushed into one

Or if I’m a crown without a king, if I’m a broken, open seed
If I come without a thing, I come with all I need
No boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

I
do
not
exist
only
you
exist

I’m still processing the snake episode. For my children, killing the big snake was some sort of heroic adventure, like slaying a dragon. They’ve even been Sunday-Schooled into associating snakes with evil.

I was appalled at the size of the thing, at the three or four broken places along its length, at the smear of blood and mud on the blade of a machete I bought for whacking overgrown weeds. I can tolerate little snakes, but bigger ones unnerve me to a degree, and cobras, in particular, appall. (Can the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi really effect all this? Or the Habu - Mongoose fight in the sultry tent at the fair in Okinawa?) Whether by instinct or training or both, I have been programmed to fear and out of fear to want to quell the life that animates the snake, for it is not only the form of the snake that inspires fear but the way it moves.

But my visceral reaction to a sizable snake is disturbingly out of sync with how I want to see the world. If Friday’s snake was a rat snake, then there was no reason to see it dead. If it was, on the other hand, somebody’s escaped monocled cobra (a far-fetched possibility), then it was in entirely the wrong place, a neighborhood where children play.

Friday’s snake made two incontrovertible points. We live in a world with snakes, with that which we fear, sometimes reasonably and sometimes unreasonably, and we live in a world where our fears and our instinct to survive can nimbly overtake our judgment and effect destruction.

What is it that appalls me most about the snake - the snake itself or what it discovers in me and in my children? And does not the snake question apply whenever we act out of fear? Is it possible that what we have most to fear is not what frightens us in the first place but instead what we may allow ourselves to become when we feel threatened?

While I was at school finishing the very last yearbook spread, my children undertook a favor for me by planting my currants in the back yard. (I will have to redo this before they wake this morning - they hadn’t a clue and planted them without soil amendments about four inches below ground level. But they did remember to water.) An afternoon adventure found them in the form of a snake sunning itself on the sewer access, a concrete slab with a manhole cover near where they were planting. Catapult Kid slew it with a machete while Dark-Haired Daughter bonked it with a shovel until it was dead and deader than that. They threw its head out of the yard, across the fence and down by the railroad tracks, which is where I’ll have to go if I really want to find out what kind of snake it was. In fact, I do - I’m curious that way. They told me it was a cobra with a circle on its hood. Yeah, they’d tell me that. They haven’t watched Indiana Jones and Snakes on Plane for nothing. The remaining 4.5 feet of it I can’t identify - a solid brown back with whitish underbelly, no pronounced pattern. Maybe a rat snake?

After they’d shown me their conquest, Catapult Kid had a notion to burn it - heaven only knows why - some ritualistic sacrifice reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. And to that end, he brought it, draped over the end of the machete, up to the house and laid it on the deck. Next thing I knew he was preparing to fire up the sacrificial altar, our rusted Smoky Joe Grill, with the sacrificial fuel, MatchLight Charcoal.

Newly minted, nominal adults possessed of a bad idea and a sense of humor sometimes presume to overrule somewhat shrieky maternal vetoes along the lines of “You are not going to cook that damned snake on our grill!,” and so it came to pass that I picked up the snake on the end of the machete and tore out through the kitchen garden for the back fence, with Catapult Kid in pursuit and closing in fast. Remembering his considerable prowess in middle school football, I gauged my timing and swung the machete, slinging the snake in a graceful arc across the fence but, alas, not out of sight. It landed conspicuously in leaves at the base of a tree, white belly up.

“Oh,” he laughed. “That should be easy enough to find.” Suddenly an impromptu outing for dinner and a movie sounded like the best and most timely of ideas, and so we left the snake in the woods, the charcoal in the grill, and the currants only somewhat planted, hopped in the car, and managed to stay gone until well after dark. And now that it’s morning, I think I’ll just sneak out to the woods wearing a good pair of boots, find that snake, and bury it somewhere.

This is the second day Catapult Kid has spent out in the cold with his Guard unit. Surely there are heaters in the tents. Surely. I putter in a warm house and think of what it must be to spend all night in the cold. I think of the thousands who do this every night in the city by the river. I read about a man who carries propane to people weathering winter in tents in Ocean County, New Jersey. I find I am not quite prepared to think all at once of thousands more in each of hundreds of cities. I live in a house with more rooms than people and every one of those rooms heated to a quite bearable 67 degrees.

I wash my son’s sheets and replace them on his bed. Clean sheets, a hot bath, fresh-baked bread and a bowl of chili will welcome him home.