MindSpinner

On Thursday I found my tire on the front driver’s side of my car to be flat - not flat as in the rim sitting on the ground but flat as in needing about 25 pounds worth of air. I got around on Thursday and Friday by inflating it twice a day. On Saturday, at Wal-Mart, kindly automotive folk told me I had a damaged rim, beat on it a while, put weights on it this way and that to balance it, and told me they thought I’d be OK, though I’d probably want a new rim sometime soon, because there might be a bit of a wobble when I brake. The tire, supposedly, was fine.

I was happy. I was out only six bucks, and I’d bought some time to scrounge up a wheel rim from a local auto salvage yard. Air conditioner repair can come later, in June, when school’s out.

Today my kids and I were planning to go out to dinner for Mother’s Day. This was big. They, two teenagers, were willing to be seen with their mother in public in a restaurant in a town 30 miles distant. They even had a handmade card and a small gift certificate for me, funded by their allowance. We readied ourselves, locked the front door, and went to the car, prepared to drop by the grocery store for dog and cat food on the way. This time the tire was flat once more, but ever so flat, deflated balloon flat, rim on ground flat. There was no driving the car anywhere at all.

We’re ordering pizza for delivery instead. The dog food and cat food still had to be procured, so I proposed walking to the nearby grocery together and picking up both, along with a movie we’d all enjoy. This, however, would have involved two teenagers walking with their mother where their friends could spot us all together, venturing out as a family. This was unthinkable. So I’m home ordering the pizza, and they’ve gone together to buy the dog food and cat food and to select a movie we will all enjoy.

I’m sure they’ll be just fine. They’ll get there and back again with dog food and cat food, and we’ll have pizza together this Mother’s Day. My only lurking fear concerns what movie I’ll be watching tonight. A recent fav of theirs is Donnie Darko, in which a disturbed adolescent is led by visions of a demented six-foot bunny to do destructive deeds. All right, all right - 950 reviewers at Amazon give it an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars. I can do this.

My big news of the day is that I had to go shopping. I needed outfits I could wear to prom and graduation. I’d managed to get by without buying a dress for so long (years) that my responsibilities as senior sponsor at various occasions require an infusion of dress clothes. My daughter helped. We tried Macy’s first. Their petite department seemed to focus on buyers who are merely short but not small. We found only three dresses in my size. My daughter had me try on a muted green one, a long formal thing - “Come on, Mom, I want to see you in this.” I looked like an over-aged intergalactic goddess left over from the first Star Trek series.

There was a bit of a fright when the zipper stuck.

In the juniors’ department, matters became clear: I could be an over-aged intergalactic goddess, or I could be a slinky seductress in a halter dress who made me think of Leonard Cohen’s line, “She’s a hundred, but she’s wearing somethin’ tight.” At Ann Taylor, I settled for a skirt and top that had the disadvantage of not looking dressy enough for prom (tough) and the advantage of being something I’d actually like to wear on other occasions - a dressy cream-colored sweater over a flared, tiered skirt in a chocolate linen. Dress shoes were yet another hurdle, since size 5’s are seldom to be found. After an hour’s search, I ended up with a pair a little too big - size 6 - but no more loose and difficult to walk in than the two, less suitable size 5’s the shoe salesman managed to muster on his third trip into the store room. Inserts under the balls of my feet made them snug enough so that I think I can walk around as much as I’ll have to. When walking is a no go, I’ll sit, and I’ll bring spare shoes. I’ll never be a clothes fiend. It’s just too hard.

On our way out of the mall, we passed a Macy’s makeover department. Over the buzz of beautification going on below, atop a divider that amounted to a sort of pillar, there presided a mannequin who wasn’t a mannequin at all. She was shaped exactly like one, but she was alive, apparently paid to sit up there in a svelte brown bathing suit and look the part. Her short platinum blond hair was spiked and her virtually expressionless face stylized with make-up, but still she moved her head from time to time to peer around slowly, like some sort of living Barbie doll. One could not guess her thoughts. I wanted to rescue her, to yell at her to jump down and run and to be real, but instead I met her eyes for an instant and tried to say with mine, “I know you’re alive up there.” She probably didn’t want rescuing, wanted the money for the job instead. I don’t think either she or Macy’s intended for her to be embody a modern feminine nightmare, perched above to haunt us while we spend money to look like mannequins do until, perhaps, we become mannequins at last.

I discovered this spring when I neglected to mulch, that if I’d just leave matters up to the garden, my favorite flowers would reseed along with the weeds, so that now when I weed (admittedly, there’s a lot of that to do), I’m finding their seedling children, all ready to be moved to wherever I’d like to see them grow. I think of these as the fruits of benign neglect - or gifts the garden gives back as if to say, “You don’t have to work quite so hard, you know; it’s not as if you’re doing this by yourself.” That’s a good notion for an independent-minded woman to consider.

I put too large a stake, I suspect, in being able to do things by myself. When I was married and my spouse was ever busy, I did lots of things by myself. I put together the crib and then the toddler bed, built the sandbox and the rabbit’s pen, assembled bicycles and basketball goals, planted trees until I hurt my hands so that they were numb when I woke each morning. My tendency to haul off and get something done rather than waiting for help or asking for help was only reinforced as I divorced. Before, when we’d moved, we’d had lots of help. But when I was defecting, that I had to do on my own, and hire movers for the big stuff I couldn’t load into the car. The only people who showed up on moving day were the people bent on convincing me to stay, to uphold my appointed role in the kingdom of God. (I mean no disrespect to them here; they were sincere, but I knew my own spiritual truth as they could not. They were people I cared about, both the ones who will greet me warmly now, and the ones who pretend I do not exist.)

Mostly, I managed.

Then came the day when I had to have a most minor outpatient surgical procedure, and I had to have a ride home because of the anesthesia. I inventoried whom I could ask. Teacher friend was out of town (this was summer); neighbors had small children to take care of, those who weren’t off at work. The idea that I had to impose on someone, depend on someone, even for so simple a thing, upset me. I have this notion that when one accepts favors, one ought to be in the position to return those favors, and my life tends to work like a treadmill that can’t be turned off, so those opportunities do not come as frequently as I’d like.

It would be an OR nurse I’d known from church, a soft-spoken, kind-hearted woman calling to do the pre-op interview, who ascertained that I was searching for the necessary ride home and volunteered to have her husband drop me off. She and her husband brought my car back home after she got off work that day. I was so grateful for their kindness, I was teary-eyed.

Those new flowers filling the bare places in the garden remind me that we do not live and work independently of each other. We are never really all on our own. So today, though I’ve once again got a to-do list longer than I can accomplish, I think I’ll call a friend or two I haven’t talked to for a while :->.

Once upon a time in a small town some distance from you and from me today, it was the boy’s grandmother who came to the meeting at school, the grandmother who had moved her family out of the city where neighborhoods are dangerous and young people die violently. She wiped a tear for the grandson in boot camp, for the child in prison. She wiped a tear for the girl in the city who’d been murdered and burned. Grandmother herself had sustained injuries at the hands of the angry children she was trying to save. Clearly there was no one else she could turn to. Though she was not enough alone, though the boy spurned her in the meeting, she had brought her family to the small town in hopes that they might be saved from what might become of them - or from what they might become. Afterward, she walked away down the hall slowly, love soldiering on.

Three years ago, my bit of earth was a bare half acre, a farm field scraped bare for the coming of a house in an ordinary subdivision. People often buy their first houses here and begin to raise their children. The children in phase one are teenagers now; the children in our cul de sac, the final phase, are not old enough for school, except mine. Everybody else is starting out. I was starting over.

Last week I found more stone for the path that extends beyond the kitchen garden into someday shade garden. If you look closely you can see little specks of shrubs and trees out there. You can’t really make out the stick in the back. The invisible stick is an October Glory Maple. The path will end in a spiral with a small pool at its center. I’ve drawn a picture of what it will be, but my old scanner is not speaking to the new laptop.

Three years ago the kitchen garden was a quantity of topsoil corraled into a space about 30′ by 40′.

The dwarf peach trees were seedlings soon to be for sale from Miller Nurseries.

The Baptisia (False Indigo) was a small brown seed.

There was no place for a bird to visit.

Nothing to seduce a bee.

This sedum grew in the Georgia mountains.

This cat was a kitten.

This rock lay under the earth.

When I divorced five years ago, I wanted more than anything to flee. For a few months I even did my grocery shopping in a nearby town. (This does seem extreme unless you’ve weathered the efforts of well-meaning “save the marriage” committees in your living room quoting scripture and earnest correspondents convinced that you’ve given yourself over to the wiles of Satan). I would gladly have sought a place where I could begin again, just as myself, free of the stigma that comes of leaving a publicly owned marriage in a small community and of the gossip that necessarily fills any vacuum of human curiosity. For a variety of reasons, I did not flee. I commenced to living quietly on my own terms. I reached for life’s beauties where I could. Among these, some of the dearest proved ephemeral, but the garden grew, intimating that, if I just keep gleaning rocks, pulling weeds, and planting this here and that there, I can work in concert with sun, rain, and that life urge of which I and seed alike partake, to grow a small world, to make beauty out of barrenness. Whatever else is not, the garden is, in and out of seasons. And for the season of his life, so is the gray and white cat now napping beside me. I’ve learned deep gratitude for what abides; from what I abides I can derive my strength.