Category: Fragile Life

Posted in Fathers, Fragile Life, Insight, Round Two, School, Teens

Late for School

Posted on by Kelly (and the Buck)

Beyond the awakening is the fragility to which i am most attuned;
Because hasn’t spring brought both love & heartache, conception & loss, burials and re-births?

How do I explain what it is to see a parent outside the highschool, pacing back and forth on her cellphone. Or another, a father, walking briskly toward the building with cleats in his arms. Or my own cheek still charged with the bristle of my son’s as he kissed me goodbye and hopped out of the driver’s seat… the car emptied of his breakfast, his music, his overbearing book bag.

I remain still. Bound to the passenger side of this empty vehicle.

Waiting? Watching? What?

The speed of time?

How suddenly the landscape becomes lush?

No matter how inconvenienced we are. These children. These lives. Ready to fly. Are everything.

Even as we let them go. Little by little. And then all at once. Holding on to the simplest ways to say:

We are.

We were once.

One.

Posted in Fragile Life, Insight, Legacy, Takes a Village

a boy my son’s age

Posted on by Kelly (and the Buck)

~This is the face of a boy about the age of my youngest son Aidan.

~This is the face of a boy who became my neighbor’s father.

~This is the face of a boy who became the grandfather of one my son’s earliest friends (who is now his co-captain on the highschool frisbee team.)

~This is also the face of a Jew on the day he was arrested and brought to Buchenwald with his brother, a Tuesday in early June, in the year 1944.

The NY Times said that the Holocaust is Fading from Memory, while a candidate for office in this nation claims it never happened.

We must do what Germany did.

The study of the Holocaust was made a mandatory part of the curriculum in their schools, as they continue to make reparations as a nation.

How might we as a people turn to face our own past? Can we commit to remembering that which we have inflicted on the inhabits here? Indigenous. Black. Japanese. Woman. Child.

Whenever we assign “other,” we seed the unthinkable, like the shooting up of a classroom of first-graders or highschoolers or the perpetuation of years of institutionalized sexual assault.

There is light and shadow to each of us and to each nation, and to ignore it is to participate in the legacy of suffering.

Because he was liberated from Buchenwald by US troops, Mr. Rosner, #1364472, will celebrate his 90th birthday this year.

He cannot deny or forget,
because he was there.

Posted in Fathers, Fragile Life, Milestone Moments, Nuts & Bolts, Round Two, Teens

aidan sick

Posted on by Kelly (and the Buck)

i pulled the socks from his feet and rubbed peppermint cream into his soles, while his father went in search of tylenol. and as i rubbed, i said to myself, whose feet are these? they’re so huge! even the toes! and i wondered, was I wrapped in his feverish delusions too? and later, when we brought him into our bed, and he tucked his shivering body against mine, and i wrapped my arms around him like i had when he was a boy, i was surprised to find a broad back and big boned shoulders, and i reached further still to be sure i wasn’t touching my husband; while my baby, at 16 & a half to the day, oblivious to his child-to-giant transformation, went on tossing and turning and sweating, between us, until we brought him to the shower, and his father, seeing his body, as if for the first time, said to me: how have we missed this?

(february2017)