A Boy and His Toys

When I went to visit Will on Sunday in Burlington, he took his accustomed seat behind the wheel of my car, and we set off for lunch. As I chattered away about radio programs I had listened to on my drive over, he maneuvered the car into a parking garage. We paused before a green John Deere machine of some kind with a blade on the front.

"I drive that," he said. We rolled on up to the roof like a marble going backwards up a ramp and he pointed. "I push the snow up here and over the edge there."

We wound through Burlington and on over to Richmond, wheeling through parking lots where he plows during the winter or mows islands of grass during the summer. Machines were everywhere: crawlers and backhoes, and I remembered a childhood litany that accompanied his road building forays through the sandbox:"Loader, backhoe, dumput, excavator, crane, brrrumm, brrrumm." He had a favorite book featuring a stocky truck driver named Joe who drove tractor trailers, Peterbilt, I think. I got him to eat his peas because the fictitious Joe ate his. Joe ate spinach and butternut squash too. We went to Santa Monica when he was about 3 and as we walked the sidewalks he chanted, "Corvette, Volkswagon, sedan, Chevy, Lamborghini, four wheel drive, Mercedes Benz."

The matchbox cars he clutched in both fists became permanent appendages. We were going into Stein's Stationery on Long Island for a tiny shiny red fire truck when his big sister Katherine was hit by a car driven by a little old lady whose head barely peeked over the top of the steering column. The car was blue, a Ford Fairlane. Will and I rode in a real ambulance to the trauma center, while Katherine flew above us in a helicopter. As she lay immobilized in traction for several weeks, recovering from a spiral fracture of the right femur and a broken pelvis, Will drove his toy trucks up and down the sheet mountains on her bed.

When he was a freshman in college, he called to announce he was going to take flying lessons. My heart rose in my chest like a hot air balloon. I made a few inquiries at the flying school.

"No, ma'am, he'll only be a passenger. The pilot flies the plane," someone assured me.

"Mom! Mom! I flew the plane, a Cessna 172!" he exclaimed after his first flight. "The pilot said I had natural aptitude. Oh, and they told me you called. Don't ever do that again." He emailed photos of the instrument panel. I saw the plane once, silver wings folded like an insect's. He made touch-downs and executed fly-bys. As I pictured his cloud-skimming flights, my heart clenched and released. I let him go.

He calls from the cabs of really big machines. He cuts brush in the woods and carts it away by truck or skidder. He plants trees at UVM.

We had steaming bowls of mushroom bisque at The Ice House served by a tall young waitress with long dark hair and lambent brown eyes.

"Do you want me to pay?" he smiled playfully, reaching for his wallet.

"No, I got it," I said.

As we drove back to his place, I asked him if he had plans for Valentine's Day. He shook his head.

"No, but I thought our waitress was kinda cute," he said. "Wonder if she's busy."

It Can Be Complicated

We went to see It's Complicated last night, muttering beforehand that it would be (sigh) an obvious Hollywood movie, another romantic comedy for old folks. We are movie snobs who prefer Indies and foreign films, but on a drear Sunday night in St. Johnsbury Vermont, after a spate of recent bone numbing temperature plunges had triggered mid-winter blues and strange eating neuroses, it was an alternative to couch sprawling and really bad tv.

The plot, however, is disturbingly familiar: After many years of divorce, and even though one of the couple has since re-married, lechery is sparked and an intense comic affair ensues.

During a trial separation from ex#2, I wondered if I had made a mistake in divorcing #1, the father of my children. I had been so busy hating him - plotting tire-slashing and house demolishing revenge - perhaps, I mused, the flip side of all that murderous passion was love. Within seconds of my having phoned him, we were cavorting on my dining room table. For days fountainous bouquets of flowers fell on my doorstep. We plotted a weekend rendezvous in the Adirondacks with the brilliant idea of carting our then 7 year-old son along.

"You're w-what?" my highschool age daughter Katherine stammered.

"We're seeing each other," I said meekly.

"Oh, boy."

During the drive from southern Vermont to the rustic romantic cabin owned by my uncle in the heart of the North Woods - a place where in years past our family had fed deer by hand, hiked among towering ancient conifers, and fished for trout - our son remained mostly silent. He had been 2 when we divorced and his memories of us together were dim.

"Did I lie on my stomach on the kitchen counter with my face in a tomato once?" he asked finally.

"Yes," we said.

"Did I stomp blueberries into the floor and then sit in them?"

"You did."

"I remember lying on a giant yellow sponge in the bath tub," he added thoughtfully.

"You had chicken pox."

"And taking the hinges off the closet door."

"Yes! Yes!" we chorused.

Grappling on the dining room table or living room rug is one thing, but sharing a room with the ex in front of the family - some of whom, nostalgic for inebriate poker games and vacations to Culebra, wanted us back together - was awkward.

When we took Will for a hike, he stode ahead of us dragging a stick. When we suggested fishing, he put on his own orange life preserver and went solo in a canoe as we trailed behind in a row boat. While we offered paddling direction, he glowered. While we struggled to make sense of us, he caught a shimmering rainbow trout with his cousin. He fed corn to deer as his sisters had, pre-divorce.

I wanted to give him his family, untarnished. I wanted him to know his parents without eye rolling, without hurling, "You know how crazy your mother/father is!" at him, without shouting and slammed doors and tears. I wanted us whole. Intact.

The experiment failed. The we I sought was truly gone, and I went back to my husband. For a little while, anyway.

Last summer, our daughter was married. Following the ceremony, her proud papa and I led the guests down a garden path into the Japanese lantern festooned tent arm in arm. We boogied with the wedding party and he escorted me gracefully back to my seat. We gave toasts. Mine was better. At Christmas time, there was some confusion about trees. I had just taken Buddhist refuge vows, so a Christmas tree felt wrong somehow. When I went into his florist shop looking for poinsettias, he came out from behind the counter with a tiny table top boxwood tree in both hands.

"Will tells me you're not doing a tree this year," he said gruffly.

I didn't tell him I had bought 2 Norfolk Pines.

As I opened my mouth to say thank-you, he interrupted.

"Now you've got one," he said.

Today I asked my 22 year-old son if he remembered the North Woods weekend, so I could steal his emotions for my blog.

"I don't remember feeling anything," he said. "But that rainbow trout stayed in Dad's freezer for 5 years."