Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

A View of Eternity

 

It was the kind of October day that lulls a person into complacency.  The warm Indian summer sun betrayed any sense that winter was coming.  It could be warm like this forever.

The sun on the changing leaves made lacy patterns on the cool dirt path, and brittle bittersweet crackled orange against the bright blue sky.  The sky was endless, like an ocean, cool like waters that go on forever, and as I walked, I stared up into the cloudless vastness and tried to see the bottom.  It was the kind of day that made me think I could see eternity if I just looked hard enough.

The coolness of the trees ended abruptly at the edge of the world where the horizon melted into the waters so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.  On stormy days, the water was moody and brooding and grey like sadness.  But today, the waters of the Atlantic were stretched out shamelessly, asleep in the sun.

A sandy sidewalk and a narrow, New England road came between my path and the beach.  I stood there, debating whether or not to bother with crossing.  The kids were going to need dinner soon, and the dog would just chase the seagulls.  I looked down at Sampson, my boss’s shaggy black Newfoundland waiting by the side of the double stroller, and wondered if he was feeling obedient…or not.

But it was the kind of day that begs you to cross the street, the kind of day when simply living isn’t enough.  It was the kind of day that makes you want to soak up the minutes into your skin and breathe them into your lungs and hold them there forever.

I crossed the street.  The edge of the ocean was guarded by sleek condos and multimillion dollar homes which wore BMWs like jewelry on perfectly manicured driveways.  Their glossy windows reflected the day coldly, turning the beautiful shades of blue into something dark and limited, like the great expanse of the ocean had been scaled down and cropped into something that could fit into a realtor’s brochure.  Here, the ocean had a price tag.

Tourists drove by and craned their necks to look at the homes where the somebodies lived, and said things that began with “Who do you suppose…” and “What if…”

But I had not come to stare.  I walked up the street to where the iron gates ended.  There, in between the condos and the mansions, sat a grand old house, three stories high.  The wrap-around porch sunk in places and the grass poked through.  What was left of the white paint flaked off the hand-carved columns, revealing the weathered grey of old wood underneath.  The only thing new was the bright red front door, which looked as brazen and out-of-place as lipstick on a preacher’s wife.

In the front, the wildflowers and beach grass grew uninhibited, and the ocean was allowed into the house, pouring its soul into every room through the wavy glass of the single-paned windows.  You could stand on the sidewalk and look right through the house and into the sea.  Even the sand had blown up around it as if the beach had long ago reconciled itself to this intruder, and now it belonged.

But as much as the house belonged on the beach, it was shockingly out-of-place among the wealthy neighbors that had grown up around it.  I imagined more than one developer had offered a small fortune for that piece of property.  But somebody in the house couldn’t be bought.

On this day, when the ocean beckoned me across the street, I saw an elderly man shuffling out the bright red door and down the overgrown walkway on his way to get the mail.  A glass of iced tea sat by a gold and green striped recliner on the front porch, waiting.

The old man looked at me suspiciously and frowned at the dog.  Sampson had trotted right into his yard and was sniffing around.

“I love your house,” I said by way of apology and gave Sampson’s leash a yank, which the dog ignored.

“It’s not for sale,” he retorted.

“Oh, I don’t want to buy it!” I said.

He thought I was lying.

“I mean, I couldn’t afford to even if I wanted to.  Your house is worth millions, and I’m just a nanny.”

“Hogwash.  The house isn’t worth two cents,” he retorted.  “The view is worth millions.”

“You’re probably right,” I laughed, “but I love it all the same.”

He softened just a little.  Glancing at the babies in the stroller, he asked, “These your twins?”

“No.  They’re not twins.  This one’s my daughter, and this one’s my boss,” I explained.  “I think I’d go crazy if I had twins.”

“Hmpf.”  He got his mail from the box, the only mailbox on the street.  It looked like it would have fallen apart if not for the wire and duct tape holding it together.  “Take this to the porch for me,” he commanded and handed me the mail.

“Oh, okay…,”  I shifted the dog leash to the other hand and grabbed the mail obediently as he turned around and slowly shuffled back up the path to his front steps.  I was thankful he couldn’t see me try to juggle the mail, drag the dog, and push the stroller up the walkway behind him.  But it was worth it for the opportunity to get a closer look at the house.

With painful effort, the old man climbed his front steps and lowered his heavy body into the chair.

“Do you live here by yourself?” I asked, concerned about how he was managing.

“Yes ma’am.  I was born in this house, and I’ll die in this house, and I’m not selling it to anyone!”  He gave me a threatening look.

“I’m not trying to buy your house,” I reminded him, handing over his mail.  “I think you should be able to stay, if you want,” I said, but now I really was lying.  He looked about as sturdy as his mailbox only without the benefit of the duct tape.

“You should tell that to my daughter.  She comes around every week, clucking like a hen.  She put in a new door, saying I shouldn’t be living here with a door that doesn’t lock.”

“That sounds reasonable to me…”

“Too bad this forgetful old man lost the keys already” he smirked impishly.  “What do you think of that?”

“I think you’re a troublemaker,” I said with a laugh.

He grinned.  “Let me tell you something,” he said, leaning forward in his chair.  “I didn’t get this far in life without being a little bit of a troublemaker.”

The old man squinted up at me.  “How old do you think I am?”

I shifted my weight a little and hoped he’d just tell me.  He didn’t.  He looked ancient.  Was that close enough?

“I bet you’re eighty-three,” I said, but that was a lie too.  He looked at least ten years older than that.

“Ha!” he shouted, slapping the arm of his recliner.  “I’ll be ninety-eight in a month!”

I smiled.  “No wonder you’re ornery.”

His eyes held a smirk as he sipped his tea.  “You see those houses there?” he asked, pointing to the string of mansions that bordered his property.  “None of those were here when I was a kid.  That house was nothing but a field where we’d play stick ball after school.

“Sometimes, we’d play hooky so we could watch the ships come in to the harbor.  I used to wait for my father’s ship to come home, so I could be the first to tell my mother that he was back.  But one year, the ship went out, and it never came back.”

He stopped for a second and looked out over the water.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  I paused respectfully before asking, “You lived here your whole life, then?”

“When I wasn’t out at sea.  I spent most of my life on the water.”

“Even though your father died out there?”

“There’s worse things than dying out at sea,” he said.

I wasn’t so sure.

“Besides,” he explained, “the sea was all I knew.  It’s all any of us boys knew.  We were just a poor fishing town back then.  It’s not like it is now.”

“It’s not much of a fishing town anymore, I guess.”

“You ask any kid growing up what time the tide was coming in and they could tell you.  It’s not like that anymore.  They want to knock down my house and put up condos so the rich people can sit out in the sun and say, ‘Oh, what a view!’ and then turn around and complain about how much seagulls poop and dead fish stink.”

“Is that why you stay?” I asked.  “So they can’t build here?”

“Nah.  You want to know why I stay?” he asked in a way that made me think I didn’t.  “Let me show you.”

To my surprise, he stood up.  He turned the doorknob on his brand-new front door.  “See?  Don’t even need a key,” he chuckled.  “Come with me.  I’m not a serial killer.”

“It makes me feel better just hearing you say that,” I said wryly.

“I like you,” he laughed.  “Follow me.”

He pushed the front door wide open and stepped aside.  I gasped.

From his front entry, I could see the entire horizon.  The east side of his house was a jumble of windows, and all of them were full of the ocean.

“It’s the view,” he said.

“It’s amazing,” I breathed.

“Yes.”

“And beautiful.”

“No,” he said sternly.  “It’s terrible.”

I tried to hide my confusion.  “Well…” I began.

“I have spent my whole life on the ocean and I have come to know that it is terrible.  I lost my father to that ocean, and more friends than I can count.  You must know it is terrible first, and beautiful second.  Otherwise, you won’t respect its power and you won’t appreciate its beauty.  And that will kill you.  Or worse.”

“Worse?”

“Worse.  You’ll think the ocean is something you can have, and you’ll put up big, fancy houses and look out at it every day through your sunglasses and never really see it, never really know it.  At least if it kills you, you’ll know something about it before you go.”

I nodded, but I felt insecure.  “I’m afraid I don’t really know the ocean very well,” I confessed.

The old man took my hand in his and pressed it to his lips.  “My dear,” he said, “that’s the most truthful thing you could have said.”

He was quiet for a minute.  The dog whined at a crab and the kids kicked in the stroller.

“I’m just an old fisherman, and I’m afraid I must say the same thing: I don’t really know the ocean very well.”  He shrugged and then added simply, “Some things are too big to know in this life.”

“Then why do you stay?”

He looked out over the water with a longing in his eyes.  “What if you got to the end of your life and realized that all you ever tried to know could be known, just by looking, and you never even thought about anything that couldn’t be seen with your own eyes?  What if all you ever chased was something that could be caught?”

“I’d say that’s the way most people live.”

“Probably.  I guess that’s the troublemaker in me!  I don’t see much difference between living and dying, if you live like that.  I want to live—and die–pursuing something bigger than myself.  I’ve spent my entire life on that water, looking at it, feeling it, tasting it.  Every time I think I know it, I find there is more to know.  And that’s just the way I think it should be.  So I stay here, and I look out there and remind myself that there is something bigger than me, something that’ll take all of eternity to know.”

“It doesn’t sound like you need that reminder,” I said with a smile.

“We all need that reminder,” he countered.  “Otherwise, our eyes will blind us and we’ll forget to look beyond what we can see, and we’ll only get what can be gotten in this world.”

We listened to the gulls and the sound of the tide coming in.  He added softly, “It’s very close now.”

“What is?” I wondered.

“Eternity.  You look out there, and you can almost see it.”

I looked.

The sky had turned into a brilliant opal, reflecting red and orange and green across the cirrus clouds that had formed in the cool of the evening.  It no longer looked like an ocean, but more like a jewel.  He was right.  If I looked hard enough, I could see something of eternity on that warm October day when the ocean begged me to cross the street.

 

The Discovery

This story is the second in a series of adventures from my childhood.   You can read the first installment, The Contingency Plan, here.

Dedicated to Sarah Engelman.

If you followed the creek downstream, it eventually led to our neighbor’s property.   Her log house perched atop the ridge, nestled so far back among the trees you couldn’t see it from the road.  In the summer, when the trees budded out and the sweet peas were blooming, it was easy to drive right past her gravel driveway without even noticing it was there.

The underbrush along that part of the creek was thick with brambles and nearly impenetrable, unless you were very small or very determined, of which we were both.  We didn’t have a choice, really.  She was the only neighbor within walking distance, which meant that whenever my brothers and I needed to practice spying, we had to endure the perils of stinging nettles and mosquitoes and head downstream.

We spent countless hours gathering intelligence from the safety of the bushes by the edge of the water.  Our neighbor’s life was so mundane and predictable, it could only mean one thing: she was working for the Russians.  Her accent was impeccable and she made chocolate chip cookies better than Betty Crocker.  Just like a spy.  She poked her head out of her house occasionally and called for a co-operative with the code name “Mittens.”  His cover was impenetrable.  We never saw him.  But we did get lots of pictures of a calico with a pink collar.

In between reconnaissance missions, our adventures took us upstream, to the edge of our property where the Mohican Memorial Forest began.  Here, the crackle of fallen leaves and crunching branches changed to the muffle of pine needles.  Our soles were black with sap all summer, until it was time to put on new tennis shoes and head back to school.

It was called a memorial forest because a single, solitary pine tree had been planted for each Ohio soldier who had died in World War II.  The years had passed and the trees had grown, but still they stood in solemn rows as if in constant formation, remembering.

Sometimes, when I walked up the creek alone, I sat by one of the trees that had grown too weary to stand anymore.  It had fallen across the path, blocking the trail.  We often scampered over it and practiced our balance by pushing and shoving our way across it.  But when I came alone, I sat on the trunk and wondered about the soldier who had already fallen once.  I thought maybe being quiet for him was almost like remembering.  I didn’t have the memories.  So I was quiet.

But the creek, like a child, cared nothing for the quiet or the boundary lines between properties.  It ran laughing right through the stillness, and we followed, out of the brightness of the field where the deer liked to graze and into the softness.  The air cooled immediately.   Broad beams of verdant sunshine filtered through the rows of trees and onto the ferns below.  It was quiet here, except for the sound of the water and the occasional rough caw of a tattling jay.

It was the perfect play to play, and in the afternoons when my best friend came home to my house, it was the first place we went.  As soon as we hopped off the bus, Jessica ran down to the creek and put her feet in.  I ripped off my socks and splashed in after her.  The freezing water stung my skin.  I sucked in my breath and counted the painful seconds until my toes went numb.   Our skin looked strangely pale and yellow under the water.

Jessica was my best friend.  At least, she was my best friend whenever she wasn’t being best friends with the other Jessica.  The other Jessica teased me for eating peanut butter and jelly on homemade bread and told me I had lice in hair when it snowed and wouldn’t let me play on the parallel bars.

But when we were best friends, my Jessica and I brought notebooks to the playground and wrote stories and talked about what we’d do when we were famous.  When we were best friends, Jessica shared her pepperoni sticks and told me all about her trip to Myrtle Beach and said she’d bring me along next time, maybe.

Jessica was a teacher’s kid, but her mom taught second grade so no one really cared.   It wasn’t as bad as J.R., whose mom taught the sixth grade.  J.R. had to call his own mother “Mrs. Henry” during school hours, and she never let him have a hall pass, no matter how badly he said he had to go to the bathroom.   “You should have gone at recess, Jeremiah Rutherford,” she said just like a mom.  We cringed.  “Now, who was the twenty-third US President?”  It was the worst thing ever.

Fortunately, Jessica White’s mother was safely tucked away in another building where she couldn’t call Jessica by her full name or threaten to ground her if she ran in the halls.  Mrs. White kept candy on her desk, and when we were best friends, Jessica would go right in and grab handfuls of it for us to share as we walked back to her house after school.

But Jessica’s house didn’t have a creek and a river and a secret spot, although in truth, the secret spot at my house wasn’t all that secret.  That was because whenever Jessica came over, my brothers didn’t have to spy on the neighbor.  It was much easier to spy on us.  But we ignored them and talked about how stupid boys were and they couldn’t do anything about it because spies can’t talk.

While David and Michael watched us from the bushes and communicated with each other using bird calls, Jessica and I worked on our log cabin.  It was more of a lean-to, really, about the size of a Barbie mansion.  But we were still in Phase 1.  If everything went according to our sketches, it would be spectacular.

On that particular day, we were gathering thick pieces of bright green moss to use on the roof.  It came up in long strips as I pulled it away from the soil, leaving bare worms wiggling in the brightness.

Suddenly, I saw something in the ground.  It was dark and flat like a thin piece of stone, but I could tell by the shape of it that it wasn’t just an ordinary rock.  “Hey!  Jessica!” I called.  “I think I found something!”

Jessica hurried over and peered over my shoulder.  “Holy cow!” she gasped.  “It’s an arrowhead!”

Jessica knew a lot about arrowheads.  Her father had a whole collection of them.  I had seen them one day when Jessica and I got to her house before Mrs. White had finished grading papers.  We sneaked into her dad’s room where he kept his collection of Indian artifacts.  They were in a dresser guarded by a  Styrofoam head wearing Mr. White’s Sunday toupee.

Jessica got right down on her knees in the soggy moss, clawing at the outline of the object with her fingernails.  It soon became apparent that we were not digging up an arrowhead.  It was far too big.

“Oh my,” Jessica gasped.  “This could be a spear tip.  It’s way bigger than anything my dad has.”

We dug until our fingertips burned.  Soon we could see an arched shape emerging.  The stone was perfectly smooth and nearly black, with a curved end.  “Maybe it’s some kind of machete, or a sickle.  Did Indians use those?”  We had no idea.   At the arch, the piece was broken.  We could see the layers of stone under the polished surface.

“Someone spent a lot of time on this,” I said.

“No doubt,” Jessica agreed.  “None of my dad’s weapons are this smooth.”

“It must be really rare.  Maybe it belonged to the chief!”

“You know, I’ve seen things like this at museums.  It could be worth millions.”  Her eyes were wide.  We looked at each for a moment.  Then we began to dig even more furiously.

“We’ve gotta find the rest of it!” Jessica gasped, pulling up the moss and looking for signs of another section of smooth rock.  “We’re going to be so famous.  Imagine, two kids finding something like this!”

In point of fact, I was the one who found it, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate to bring it up now that Jessica had ruined a perfectly good pair of shorts by helping me dig in the dirt.  I’d be happy to have her name follow mine in the write-ups.

Soon, we’d found the other half.  It was a mirror image to the first half.  Both pieces were perfectly smooth and formed something like a giant “U” when fitted together.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jessica admitted, and I remembered how she rolled her eyes whenever her dad talked about his artifacts.  It wouldn’t have killed her to be a little more attentive.   “Let’s show your mom” she suggested.  “She’ll know!”

“Let’s go find her!” I shouted, but Jessica was already bolting down the trail with one half of the artifact.

“Don’t drop it!” I yelled, scooping up the remaining piece and running after her.  “You’ll break it!”

“It’s already broken!” she called back.  We scampered over the fallen tree and splashed through the creek, turning the dirt on our knees into muddy streams that ran down our legs.

I started yelling before I even got to the apple tree.  “MOM!”

“Mrs. Barnhill!  We need you!”

My mom came running to the door.  “What is it?  What’s the matter?”  She looked at our mud and pine needle-covered selves and gasped, “What on earth have you girls been doing?”  She couldn’t yell at me now because we had company, and she wouldn’t yell at me later because of what we’d found.

“We found something in the woods,” I explained, panting hard from the sprint.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, and my dad has tons of Indian stuff,” Jessica said.  She wasn’t panting at all because she was on the swim team and would be going to the Olympics someday.

“I think it’s pretty rare to find something like this.  I mean, have you ever seen anything like it?”  I had stubbed my big toe on a root and it was bleeding all over the grass.

My mother didn’t notice.  She opened the screen door and stepped outside.

Jessica grabbed her arm and pulled her in for a better look.  “It’s in two pieces, but that’s okay.  My dad says that signs of wear are important because then you know it’s not a fake.”

“It’s still going to be really valuable because we have both pieces,” I assured her.

“I bet it’s worth a million dollars, at least.  We’re going to take it to some museums and see who will give us the most money.  We’re not going to take the first offer,” Jessica explained.  I didn’t know she was so savvy, but it was thrilling.  We were about to be rich beyond our wildest dreams.

“Well, let me see what you’ve found,” my mom said taking my dirty half.  Squinting her eyes, she gave it a careful examination.

“Do you see how precisely it has been crafted?  It shows amazing skill.”  I liked the authoritative sound of my words in the air.

My mother had a funny look on her face.  I could tell she was having trouble getting her mind around it all.  She was probably wondering how she would feed the team of National Geographic photographers when they came to take our picture.  Moms always worry about stuff like that.  You come home carrying the greatest archeological discovery of the decade and all they can think about is whether or not you brought mud into the house.

“Let me see your part, Jessica.”  Jessica handed over the other half.

Suddenly, my mother began to laugh.  Jessica and I exchanged a smile.  It was good to see my mom so happy.   Our lives were about to change, and she knew it.   I would never have to clean my own room again.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“Yes, we do,” Jessica said confidentially.  “At least, we know it’s old.”

“It’s probably an Indian tool or something,” I added.

“Have you looked at it?” she asked.  Her attempts to limit her chortle to a mere chuckle resulted in a very unladylike snort.

“Of course,” I said, trying not to be offended.  “We discovered it.”

“Here, here, let me lay it out.”  Then she put the pieces together in a horseshoe pattern on the porch boards and started laughing even harder at the sight of it.  “What does that look like?” my mom asked.  She had developed a bad case of the hiccups.

Jessica and I stared.

“I think it goes around a horse’s neck,” I offered.  This sent my mom into hysterics.   Tears streamed down her face.  I made a mental note to buy her some waterproof mascara once the royalty checks started rolling in.

I cleared my throat and continued as professionally as possible, even though some people had no decorum.  “It appears to be made out of some sort of stone.  Based on the, ah, stratif-er-cation you see here,” I said, desperately wishing I had a real pointer, “I would say it’s slate.”

My mom was giddy with excitement.  She laughed so hard, she had to lean against the house to keep from falling over.

“We’ll have to miss some school,” Jessica added, “while we’re making public appearances and giving interviews.”

My mother could not answer.  No sound came out of her open mouth except for an occasional “Hee….Hee…” as she gasped for air.  Black rivers of mascara streamed down her crimson face.   It was not her best moment.

“Look…at…it…” she said pointing at our prize while she tried to regain some sort of composure.   If she acted like this every time I made an archeological discovery, imagine how she was going to behave when I became President.

“I guess it’s more valuable than we thought,” Jessica said, watching my mom with a look of awful fascination.

“There’s no way I can invite her to my inauguration,” I muttered.  It was the honest truth.

Jessica put one hand on my mother’s shoulder and said gently, “Mrs. Barnhill?  My dad knows a lot about Indian artifacts.  He collects them, you know.  Maybe we should just take this to him and he can tell us what it is.  Do you have any bubble wrap?”

My mom succumbed to a new round of spasms.  Three minutes later, she composed herself enough to wheeze, “I’ll give you a hint.”

Now we were getting somewhere.

“Your word is ‘commode.’” Then my mother, a grown woman, collapsed onto the porch in hysterics, frightening the cat out from under the bushes.

And then I knew.   My mother had always said that one day, I’d thank her for making me look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary ad nauseam.

This was not that day.

Jessica’s words broke into my thoughts.  “What does that mean?  Is that good?”

You’d think a teacher’s kid would have a better vocabulary.   I looked at the horseshoe shape on the porch and wondered how I hadn’t seen it before.  Clearly, my mother had been wondering the same thing.

“Well, what is it?” Jessica demanded.  “You know I don’t speak French!”

“Oh, stop, stop!” cried my mother.  She was amazingly merry for someone who was still poor.

It was hard to say the words out loud.  “It’s a toilet seat,” I said, still a little stunned by the truth of it.

Jessica stared at our relic.  “What do you mean?” she cried.  “The Indians didn’t use toilet seats!”

There was no saving my mother at this point.  She writhed around on the porch until I wondered if I should call the paramedics.  “Oh, my!  I can’t breathe!” she gasped, fanning her face like Scarlett O’Hara.

Jessica looked wounded.  She held her piece of the toilet seat and refused to let the boys throw it on the trash heap.  “I just know it’s real,” she sulked.  Lovingly, she brushed the rest of the dirt off her piece.   The words “American Standard” appeared in raised letters underneath.   Her mouth dropped open and I saw the fillings she had gotten the week before.

“What kind of person buries a toilet seat in the woods?!” she shouted at me.

Those were the last words Jessica said to me for at least two weeks.  Somewhere between my house and hers, she remembered that I was the one who discovered it in the first place, which made it all my fault.  She ran off with the other Jessica and talked about Myrtle Beach and drew pictures of palm trees and Olympic rings all over her writing notebook and laughed about the fact that I had toilet seats buried in my backyard.

I found a spot on the cold metal bleachers at the edge of the playground and watched them on the parallel bars.  I didn’t bother asking if I could play too.  Instead, I opened my notebook and grabbed the pencil from behind my ear.  Genius is born out of adversity, I thought, thankful that I had my career as a world-famous writer to fall back on.  Someday, my mailbox would be full of royalty checks.

And when that happened, I’d make sure at least one of them cleared before I told my mother.

The Pasta Plates

It all started with the discovery of a set of pasta making attachments for my Kitchenaid mixer.  They were hidden in a box labeled “Kitchen Things—not important.”  In the chaos of a cross-country move, they had been shoved into a storage room and forgotten for ten years.

Then one day, I went down to our storage room on a quick errand and ended up spending two days organizing, sorting, rearranging, and opening boxes I hadn’t seen in years.   I didn’t expect to find much in the “Kitchen Things” box.  After all, the Sharpie said it was unimportant.

But the Sharpie lied.

There, underneath a few extra pieces of flatware and a stack of manuals, was the box of brand-new pasta plates. These were the pasta plates I wished I had owned, the pasta plates I had drooled over whenever I ventured into the kitchen section of my local Fred Meyer.  These were the pasta plates that could transform this lowly domestic housewife into a bustling Italian grandmother who served up copious amounts of fresh pasta to multiple generations of little Glovers as we gathered around our dinner table in the glow of the setting sun.

Now, that dream was within my reach.

I rushed upstairs and showed the kids.  “Can you really make spaghetti?” Faith asked, wide-eyed.

It was 5:30 pm, but how long could it take to learn how to use my new gadget?  I had watched enough Iron Chef to know that making pasta was child’s play.  I fished the instructions out of the box and soon I was on my way to making some mean linguini.

The kids were anxious to help.  I could almost hear a little violin playing in the background as we ground the sprouted wheat and threw in some fresh eggs and a little water.  Soon we had a lovely dough.  At least it looked lovely, but my inner Italian grandmother was taking a while to warm up, so I wasn’t really sure.

“We’re going to make spaghetti!  We’re going to make spaghetti!” the kids chanted.  All five of them crowded around the machine.  “Put the dough in!”  They pleaded.  I stretched over their heads and dropped in the first ball of dough.  We waited.  Soon little strands of pasta began to appear.  The twins clapped.  It was official: Mommy’s mixer was the coolest Play-doh fun factory of all time.

My husband walked by.  “What are you guys doing?” he asked, peering into the side of the bowl.

“We’re making pasta!” I said cheerfully.

He looked confused.  “Can’t you buy pasta?  At the store?  For like, a dollar?”  I sensed I was about to receive the “Isn’t-your-time-worth-anything?” speech.

“Of course you can buy it at the store,” I said, resisting the urge to smack him in front of the children.  “But look!  I can make it myself!”  I thought that said it all.

“Why?” he asked. The question took me aback.  Why?   Because I can, that’s why!   Isn’t that reason enough?  I thought back to my childhood, where dinnertime discussions often led to a search through an encyclopedia or manual and ended with a trip to the barn to look for just the right scrap that might just work to make that thing that somebody wondered if they could make.  The question of whether or not we could do something was always more fascinating than question of whether or not we should.   We had a litany of successes and failures to prove it.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and tried to come up with an actual, rational reason for making pasta myself.  But before I could, the kids piped up.

“We’re making pasta because it will taste better!” Faith said.

“And it will be better for us!” added Kya.

“Don’t you know that everything Mom makes is better than the store?” Jonathan pointed out the obvious.  I secretly resolved to buy those children a pony.

“We’ll see,” Jeff grinned as the pasta started oozing out of the machine at a frighteningly rapid rate.   For a chaplain, that man has remarkably little faith.

He walked out of the kitchen and left me with my project, which was beginning to take on a life of its own.  The little strands had gotten longer, and longer, and the pasta began to come out faster and faster.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  The instructions cautioned against letting the pasta stick together, so I threw some flour at it whenever it seemed appropriate.

“Mom’s throwing flour!” the kids squealed with delight.

The pasta kept on coming, faster and faster.

“Should I cut it?” I asked my sous chefs.  The instructions hadn’t said anything about cutting the pasta.

“Yes, cut it!” Jonathan shouted.  He was always willing to support any activity that involved knives.

But cutting pasta while it was oozing out of the machine and attempting to keep it from sticking together required more dexterity than I proved to have.  The beautiful linguini clumped together hopelessly.

“Is it supposed to do that?” began the chorus by my side.

“I’ve never seen any pasta that looks like that.”

“It looks like a big pile of worms!”

“Eeeeeeew!”

“Yucky!”

“I’m not eating that!”

“Do you have any macaroni and cheese?  I’m hungry.”

I stared at my pile of pasta.  The kids stared with me.  Many adjectives came to mind, but most of them involved the kinds of words I had banished from our family thesaurus.

“Well,” I said, trying to sound positive, “I guess we let it dry for a bit and then we’ll see.”  But secretly I was thinking, I’ve totally messed this up.  I wasted three cups of flour and an hour of our time and now dinner is going to be hopelessly late and the kids are going to be scarred for life because they will forevermore associate pasta with dried up worms!  What was I thinking?

The magic was over.  The violin players turned back into a Veggie Tales CD, the fresh bread sticks turned back into Cheerios, and my inner Italian was transformed back into an Anglo-Saxon mixed breed who was genetically programed to boil things.  I should have made potatoes.

Instead, I boiled up the pasta and served it piping hot at exactly 7:15.   By then, the children were so hungry, they didn’t mind eating worms.  They chewed through their clumpy strands of pasta with valor, oblivious to the fact that al dente shouldn’t require the use of molars.   Epic failure, I thought to myself.

“I’m sorry the pasta didn’t really turn out,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Jonathan asked between bites.  “It’s the best pasta I’ve ever had!”

“It’s beautiful delicious!” Kya proclaimed, munching happily.
“Mmmm!  Nummy!” Micah said with his mouth full.

Paul just nodded.  The sauce on his face matched his hair.

“And next time we make it, it will be better,” Faith added.  “Not many people get it right the first time,” she said knowingly to Jonathan.

I thought I could hear that violin again.  I looked at my family gathered around my dinner table, and it occurred to me that one day, when I am old and the grandchildren gather around my table and my children tell stories about their mother, they probably won’t remember the time I attempted to make pasta for the first time.  They probably won’t remember how it all clumped together in one massive lump, and how dinner was so late, it almost qualified as breakfast.

But I hope they will remember that their mother was infinitely curious and recklessly determined.  I hope they will remember that their mother was not afraid to try, to investigate, and to learn.  I hope they remember that she threw flour and served worms for dinner.  I hope they will remember that their mother did not always get it right the first time.  But she tried.  And if someone asks them why they make pasta themselves, they won’t have to think up a reason.  I hope they’ll know why.