Belief

Last year was the last year

my son let me believe that he believed

in Santa Claus. We suspected he'd known.

He's a smart kid, logical, and wouldn't

be bullshitted for long. The real disappointment

is his disappointment that we are all complicit

in perpetuating this ruse. After all,

if we'd lie about this, what else is a lie?

Religion? Democracy? the promise that you can 

be whatever you want to be when you grow up?

We got a live tree again this year, a Fraser fir

that smells like a childhood Christmas.

My son and I set up the model train

encircling the trunk. I'm not sure

his heart was in it. Perhaps he's still 

disenchanted, I thought, as he raised the lever 

bringing the small locomotive to life.

Then he blew the whistle and smiled at me,

his face illuminated by strings of lights,

a glowing star high above.  Belief, or not

it will soon be Christmas morning.

Ride Along

An Oven Algorithm

She is having her new oven delivered today,
and confides that it is an exciting, if not
emotional time.  She has spent 50 years
with the old one and fears she may cry
when they finally take it away.

I have never owned an oven, or anything
for that matter, for 50 years.  Despite that,
I try to sound sympathetic and empathize,
even though I find it difficult to wrap my mind
around a relationship of that length.

As the phone goes quiet for a moment,
I wonder if there is an algorithm
to determine the average bowls of soup, or
pierogies prepared by a Polish grandmother
over the lifespan of her oven.

She and I simply have a different measure
of time.  She is able to use major appliances
in her calculation.  I will need another 50 years
to understand loss to the degree at which
she has experienced it.

Teaching the Uneven Distribution of Wealth to the Children of the Great Recession

"What is the phrase to describe the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer?"  I asked in review of concepts related to the collapse of the '29 economy and causes of the Great Depression.

"Life." he mumbled from the front row, sarcastic if not somewhat defeated.

I found myself simultaneously depressed and impressed with his analysis of current economic conditions.

I smiled at his answer, decided then that there was little I could teach these kids about an economic downturn that they didn't already know.  I was now in the practice of providing them with a new vocabulary with which to describe their lives.

Indictment

My white cat is staring at me again.

He was just outside and his paws 

are still cold. His look is an accusation.

It's the second week of November

and there's snow on the ground.

He carries his judgement

in front of the heater vent

and I feel unnecessarily guilty.

He has a bath as he warms himself

and his accusation softens.

Now he is looking at me again.

He wants to go back outside.

A Lesson on Armistice Day.

In class today we read aloud
"In Flanders Fields"
eyes closed, imagining
bodies beneath poppies.

Every child in class
raised a hand to indicate
a family member
serving in the military.

My grandfather in Vietnam.
My Dad in Afghanistan.
They told me these things
with the delicate balance

of sorrow and patriotism, an image
in their minds of far off Belgium
"in Flanders fields
where poppies blow."

The afternoon before five months of cloudy weather.

Acorns and the temperature

have conspired to make barefoot

in my backyard impossible.

Migration

Bachelor buttons bloom

blue by the thousands

along the Pennsylvania turnpike.

They remind me of my grandmother

who lets them grow in driveway cracks

despite their status as a weed.

When she was a few years old

her immigrant parents moved from Massachusetts

for the factories of northern Ohio.

As she sped through Pennsylvania,

she looked out a window

at bachelor buttons by the thousands

seeds blown in a swirl of wind

toward a driveway somewhere

distant in the future.