My Mother Bought Me a Crucifix

I hadn’t been to church in months. I didn’t plan on ever going again. It was just something I had decided like to drink only two nights a week instead of five. So, when my mother and father came to visit, she picked up a palm-size crucifix from one of the small Amish shops on the way.

After I had ripped the tissue paper away from Jesus’s thin wooden legs and arms, I said, “thank you” and poured myself two glasses of wine—one for my mother too.

“I thought you probably wouldn’t want it . . .” she began as I handed her the glass.

“No,” I took a swig, “thank you.”

I have only ever returned/turned down one gift in my life: a Hanson t-shirt that I got for Christmas from my father. I regretted returning it a year later and still do. It was one of the few things he had ever picked out for me by himself.

After they left, I tacked Jesus above my bed adjacent to the dream catcher that hovered. . . . I still have nightmares. I can only hope that the crucifix won’t be dud either.

Singing an Elegy in the Sumac

I had this favorite sumac that I used to climb when I was little. It was the tallest and thickest one out of the grove. It was just beyond our property line on a small gorge that dipped down into the crick that ran down from the ledge and then alongside our lawn and the neighbor’s.

I could sit between the two wishbone-shaped branches perfectly like I was the corner piece that the slender tree had been missing until I found it.

It was different from the spruce that I climbed where my father buried our first dog, Smokey beneath; different than the purple maple that Uncle Alex had to trim and cover the nubs with tar because it was diseased. When I seated myself in the sumac, it was as though I sat on the very edge of something I knew everything about and nothing about.

The tree’s branches, like forearm-thick jump ropes, allowed me to swing, sway, and sing over this line. At any minute they could snap. I could have broken my neck. But, that feeling of being in control and out of control, at the same time, can never be reproduced beyond the climbing of that sumac. It was naturally dark.

Chocolate for Supper, Cigarettes for Dessert, and a Pot of Coffee as a Nightcap

My grandmother—the one who lives off chocolate, cigarettes, and pots of coffee—never puts up with bullshit even from a three-year-old having a fit.

My parents called me a sensitive child. I liked to call it never truly satisfied even though I had a tendency to cry if you looked at me wrong. (A lot of people looked at me wrong.)

While my mother tried to comfort me during my outburst, Grandma Kate scooped me up from the living room floor and plopped me down on the steps outside. “When you’re done crying, you can come back inside,” she had said.

When Grandma opened her mouth, you listened. She was not only Irish, she looked Irish. Made you shut your mouth.

There are times in our lives when we can’t stop crying, stop pitying ourselves. This is when we need a tough, thick, blue-eyed, blond hair woman to put us in our place.

Everyone needs a Grandma Kate to let us know that you are responsible for your emotions—no one else, no matter if you are three or twenty-seven.