It was Saturday, that August day.
Hour after hour, what I then called stars, burned, blazed, and silently blasted across the northeastern sky.
Earth is fearless. Every summer she barges into Swift-Tuttle’s elliptical territory where a gang, a shower, of its offspring loiter, kicking stones around the galaxy
On it goes with blood, bricks, and bowls flying between young intellectual elites in this Harvard College food fight.
“You can call it a Tulip tree if you choose to, but that’s no Tulip tree. It’s a Magnolia.” So said the university student with snobby certitude.
We had invited this preppy girl to our home for Sunday dinner (thinking she might be a suitable date for our bachelor son). She stood in our kitchen, looked outside with us through broad windows at our huge Tulip tree standing guard at lawn’s edge, and smartly straighten us out. Our Magnolia, our Dinnerplate Magnolia, was just off to the north, at the edge of our wooden deck.
“What do you see here, Scooter?”
“I didn’t do that.”
“No, you didn’t. You aren’t in trouble. What is it you see?”
“Lilly.”
“Lilly? Oh, no, not what do you smell. Turn off your nose and tell me what you see?”
One stinking letter off on the FIFTH try! ONE Stink’n letter. It’s got to be an ‘M’ or a ‘K.’ Which?
How do we answer, Scooter? People are asking, ‘How’s the training going?’ What do we say?
“What’s the chemical action when water boils?” I asked. I waited for some profound molecular explanation.
Not that stuff,” Scooter sniffed. He held his chin intentionally high, his eyes focused on the tippy top shelf. He sat stock still.
“You like my new haircut?” he asked, using the sense of his middle name, Sublime, as style.
It’s that sound,” signaled his body.
“Ah, Scooter, it’s terrible, isn’t it.”
“And Cats?
“What?”
It was crazy dangerous, this Aliyah Bet thing. Still, over two decades, more than 100,00 people, 70,000 of them Holocaust survivors, dared to sign on. Let’s call it: Adventure.
I don’t remember which port it was where they picked up a container “Said to contain panties de senora, five and a half tons.”
I remembered being coaxed, sweet-talked, to the center of the Columbus Junction swinging bridge. Big cracks between wooden slats.
Let’s be fair. My darling flat-nosed infancy ended a good while ago. Even adolescence is behind me—what with adventures under the sofa and mattress, the deaths of Lambchops, those months during which my nose, body, and voice grew, and for the first time, things got clipped: my heavy coat, my toenails, and, well, my little boy balls. So goes growing up