It’s “Go Visit Mom in the Mountains Week,” and there’s much prepping to do for the trip today, including dog fence reinforcement. If I dig a trench along the outside of the perimeter and put concrete pavers in from that side, the dogs can’t push them up and out from the inside. Ta da. Best wishes, everybody, for a pleasant week.
Today the little boy
who marched into
ocean waves without fear at two
squared his shoulders again
and marched off
into a different sea
carrying three bags
and a bluebird in a box.
And when I’d cried
and written
and eaten
and cleaned
and day was finally night,
I danced for an hour
to a playlist of 897 songs,
songs slow enough
for dancing to melt the moon,
songs fast enough to
spin memory and sorrow
past and present
fear and hope together
like colors of a twirling top.
In the last decade of his life, my father began buying these for people he cared about, little bluebird figurines - Bluebirds of Happiness. They represented his best wishes for our lives - his blessing. Years ago, my son adopted the one my father had given to me and kept it in his room. A couple of weeks ago, he told me that he’d given it some time back to the girl he’d fallen in love with (and since broken up with at last, once and for all). He had told her that, though he didn’t know why, he really loved it, and he wanted her to have it. Now, he said, he wished he had it back.
I told him where it had come from and what it meant. I had just enough time to track down the figurines on the Internet, order one, and give it to him as a gift last week.
Today, as of a few minutes ago, he’s gone. There was a quick hug for me, a lingering goodbye with his dogs. He hauled all three bags of stuff to his dad’s car and waved goodbye.
Just before he left, he stuffed a few items into the box I’d bought him for stationery, pens, and the like. I’d given him a small Moleskine notebook for his addresses, notes, and stamps. That went in. He could have 5 photographs, no larger than 3″ x 5.” Those went in, too. There were one or two of pictures of friends, I think, and the rest were ships representing his dreams for the future. He’d put in only one personal object - one I’m not sure they’ll let him have at the Academy - his little Bluebird of Happiness. I hope they let him keep it. If they don’t, I told him his dad could bring it back to me, and I’d keep it for him until he gets back.
A state university in our red state has made the courageous move of offering health care coverage to domestic partners. It is the first public university here to do so. Defenders of marriage are, predictably, objecting. I really have no clue what defenders of marriage are defending. Nobody’s stomping on anybody’s right to go get married in the traditional way by opting not to stomp on what should be the rights of domestic partners.
I rather like the notion of “domestic partnership.” It implies an egalitarian arrangement and freedom to negotiate roles. (We have this option within marriage, of course, but the institution doesn’t give us a clean slate to start with. No. There’s a lot of engraved stuff that has to be sanded down before we can even begin to sketch what we actually want to commit to.) And in this part of the country, say you are married - certain segments of society will try to straitjacket you into certain roles and tell you how you ought to live and who’s the head of whom, and other such stuff and nonsense that gives me a headache and makes me claustrophobic.
Yes, given the choice, I’d rather have a “partner” than to buy into an institution so historically problematic as marriage. And if I could wave a magic wand and change the way the world works, states would recognize civil unions between domestic partners in any gender configuration, and marriage would be a kind of add-on option reserved for those who wish to defend it, consecrate it, and enter into it, according it whatever religious and spiritual significance they choose. The law would not care a hoot about whether I’d taken the additional step of making my civil union also a marriage, because marriage would be religious and not a civil institution.
Furthermore, I don’t think that my magic wand, if I had one, would make me an enemy of marriage, because it wouldn’t deter it. It would only be an affirmation of the fact that this nation is intended to be a democracy, not a theocracy. It is only in an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance that religion and its institutions can function without becoming something insidious. When religious doctrine, having insinuated itself into law, prevents partners from visiting a loved one in a hospital or having any legal status whatever in their lives, then it does harm, not good. Thinking people recognize this and are repelled. Indeed, those who would, on the basis of religion, dictate law, serve to sever many thoughtful people from religion altogether - and worse, yet, from the exercise of personal spirituality - because they recognize its fruits as being not faith, hope, and love, but intolerance, injustice and the thwarting of lives instead.
The real way to defend marriage would be to release that attempted doctrinal deathgrip on what it can be so that hearts can freely build together tents of shelter for lives lovingly entwined. Call this enterprise of hearts domestic partnership, call it marriage; it is a fundamental human right that has everything to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and nothing to do with telling other people how they have to live.
I opened my classroom door yesterday to behold a prodigious desk, the likes of which I’ve never seen in a classroom - the same wood tone as the other, the same handles, all drawer fronts intact, not just a desk but an “L” stretching six feet in one direction and a few inches more than that in the other. I’m nicknaming it “The Fortress.”
And then I noticed the chair. The Jolly Green Giant could sit comfortably in that big black executive-style chair. The last sizable office chair I ran across in a classroom was broken so that it pitched me backward whenever I forgot and leaned back. I ditched it for fear I’d end up on my back with my feet sticking up in the air. But this chair you could practically live in.
Talk about wish fulfillment and then some!