Somewhere in Ohio

Somewhere in Ohio, I am talking to an Archangel. Actually he is a man who works in my building fixing HVAC. I think it is so fitting that his name is Achangelo…nice warm brown eyes and a very gentle voice. Imagine, an angel fixing burning furnaces. Is that not funny, me Joan again attracted to flames after all these years.

Today, I am in a forgotten city where abandoned houses are boarded with rough plywood in the windows, sprayed with graffiti. The streets have bumps and potholes, deep cracks where the pavement expired and the sidewalks meet. I am looking at a school on East 70^th where children come to eat breakfast and lunch and sometimes learn to read and write by osmosis. I come to this school once a week to tutor a young boy. I don’t like coming to this neighborhood. The insurmountable obstacles that my young friend faces each day weigh on my heart. I can’t do much for him, he is fourteen years old and a willing pupil, bright and good looking but already aware that his world is colliding. We talk about Mozart and pulled a few books from the library. He is curious and mysterious, listening to me and sharing short love notes that he gives to his almost girlfriend Dede. He tells her how much he loves her and I hear an echo from my own receding innocence, when I thought that love for a boy could fill a vacant heart. I am not a good tutor, I don’t teach him to read better or do math problems, we just talk a lot and I listen to his words, and I look at his face and inside I fear for him. But I am respectful of his person, and I show no pity, that would be self-indulgence. He deserves to be treated well and I always tell him that he can call me if he wants but he never does.

Before Christmas I mailed gifts to my sons. Yes, Joan from Ohio has two grown sons living somewhere else in modern America. They must have received them but I have not heard, yet. It was not much, a few pair of socks and a shirt for each but I thought they would look good on them. I bought them at Macy’s and wrapped them in that beautiful thick metallic paper all festive and shiny. I boxed them together so that they could open them the same day, and perhaps I was hoping that it might trigger a remembrance of their childhoods, early Christmas mornings, when they would find treasures under the tree.

It is kind of funny; that I worried so much about them having a relationship with their dad that I never looked at my relationship with them, totally secure that my love was enough. When I was a young mother, I read Kahlil Gibran and believed what he wrote about having children and raising them for the world and not for me totally. It became part of my child rearing philosophy. I would not recommend it. I should have known better than to listen to an Arab telling me how to raise boys.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet : On Children

“And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, "Speak to us of Children."

And he said:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

I succeeded completely in providing my sons with a strong relationship with their father, a relationship that was denied to me with my own father. So I only have myself to blame if they can easily forget about me. I wish it was as simple for me, to make them into memories rather than holding on to a pail of dreams.