Anthony moved into his own room last weekend. He hadn’t been campaigning (hard) for it, but my parents moved recently (2 hours closer!) and gave us some extra furniture, so we were able to set him up with a twin bed, dresser, and small blue recliner.

He won a bunch of posters at the county fair Sunday, so his new door is plastered with things like “GO AWAY!” “KEEP OUT!” and “NO PARENTS ALLOWED!” His electric guitar sits in one corner, and my old green lava lamp sits on a little table next to his bed. I don’t like the music he listens to, and his buzz-cut dad doesn’t like the hippy length of his hair or the baggy cut of his jeans, so we’re well into the “moody parents of an adolescent” phase. I can’t believe he turns 13 next week!

It seems as though Anthony and Evan fight with each other all the time nowadays. And brother-brother fighting is SO much rougher than the sister-sister or sister-brother fighting I grew up with. It upsets me sometimes to see how rough and mean they are to each other (‘cuz, y’know, I was never that mean to my little sister. She will try to tell you that I pushed her down the stairs once, but all I did was jump out of the way when she lunged at me. She nose-dived down the stairs all on her own power…thud, thud, thud. I’m sorry — it still makes me laugh!).

Where was I? Oh yeah. Sugar and spice and everything nice. I don’t like to see my boys fight, but when they’re tumbling and bellowing across the floor, and I snap at them to “leave each other ALONE!” — they pop up from their respective headlocks, red-faced, panting, grinning, and say in unison: “We were just PLAYIN’, Ma!”

They bait each other, tease each other, torment, pester, punch each other — and each destroyed most of the other’s underwear during a short-lived Atomic Wedgie phase. They’ve shared a bedroom and a bunkbed for nearly 8 years, and both were ecstatic about the new arrangements. Anthony was excited about having his own space, and Evan was thrilled about getting the top bunk, FINALLY.

Monday morning, I went downstairs to wake them up for school. I went into Evan’s room first and looked for him on the bottom bunk. Finding it empty, I remembered the room changes and looked for him on the top. Nuthin’. I looked UNDER the bed next, because he’s been known to end up there during the night somehow. I didn’t find him there or stuck between the bed and the wall or sticking halfway out of the closet. For a split second, I had that panicky feeling I got the morning after Rian stashed a snoring 6-year-old Evan in the bathtub in the hotel room during the middle of the night. Where WAS he??

I opened Anthony’s door, with all its signs shouting at me to stay away, shouting AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I didn’t think “authorized personnel” included pesky little brothers, but there he was, curled up on the blue recliner next to Anthony’s bed. Anthony rolled over and rubbed his eyes sleepily. He didn’t seem too surprised or annoyed to see Evan sleeping in his room. In fact, the next night when I sent them to brush their teeth before bed, I heard Anthony say, “You can sleep in my room again tonight if you wanna.”

Update, June 2005: Evan has been sleeping on Anthony’s recliner for nearly a year now.

Update, post-June 2005: We will never know now how long this would have continued.

A poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music” from Collected Poems © 1928, 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted with permission of Elizabeth Barnett and Holly Peppe, Literary Executors, The Millay Society.

Source: Collected Poems (HarperCollins, 1958)

Anthony & Dad shared birthdays a day apart.

Anthony loved critters of all shapes and sizes. In addition to cuddly dogs and cats, Anthony loved frogs, toads, lady bugs, turtles, lizards, and especially snakes. Starting around the age of 4 or 5, if you asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would tell you “A herpetologist! A snake scientist!”

I was proud of his vocabulary and career aspirations but had secretly hoped he would grow out of wanting a life spent studying creepy crawly things that could bite him.

From 1996 to 1999, we lived on an acreage out in the country. It was surrounded by farmland and bordered by a tumbledown grove of trees that was perfect for exploring and finding all kinds of critters.

One warm summer afternoon when Anthony was little, I was putting laundry away. I went into the boys’ bedroom and opened Anthony’s sock drawer to put away his socks. Curled up in the middle of the drawer was a striped black garter snake. I dropped everything & screamed. I ran outside to find Rian and the boys: “There’s a SNAKE in Anthony’s drawer! Did it get in the house through a vent? Did it get in through the crawlspace! How did it get IN there??”

Anthony said simply: “I wanted to keep him,” as if that was the most logical thing in the world.

From Mom, 9/21/2005

I was sitting at the computer one night in my office when Anthony decided to sneak up on me & scare me. The boys loved martial arts movies and ninjas, and they imagined they were pretty good at being stealthy.

Anthony WAS getting really good at this, but I liked to lurk around corners and scare him, so the score was pretty even.

That night, I had my back to the door, and he had dropped to the ground and started low-crawling through the doorway like a soldier. Stealthily, inch by inch. I had no idea he was there.

What he didn’t realize was that the little dog we were pet-sitting was curled up on top of my feet and had already become very protective of me. This five-pound furball heard him trying to sneak up behind me, and she freaked out… jumped up barking and growling and acting like she was going to tear his head off. Anthony couldn’t get out of there fast enough, scrambling backwards on his hands and feet, trying to get up and get away.

He hadn’t been expecting that!

All 3 of us were startled, but the dog won that round.

From Dad, 10/7/2005

OK, here it goes… remember I’m not an English major… unless a “D” on the report card meant “damn good.”

We used to live in Sanborn in the late 1990s, and I had to drive to Spencer every day to where I worked.

Anyway, “dads” vehicles have always been pieces of crap, according to Anthon,y so it’s pretty common for me to have a dead battery or a door that doesn’t open or to run out of gas a time or two or three.

One morning I went out to the garage to find that my car has developed a flat tire… hey no problem I’ll just go by a can of “fix a flat.” I bought the can for $7, filled my tire and I was on my way. About 3 days later I had another flat on the same tire and after a short drive to town and another 7 dollar can of flat tire fixer I was on my way. Three maybe four days later I had another one, three days later another, and another and another. After the third can of fix a flat, you’d think I’d have got the hint the stuff didn’t work.

I’m thinkin’ “man that must be one big hole” but then why couldn’t I hear anything when I’d air the tire up??? Well that kinda had me stumped, so I dropped the tire off at the tire repair shop. When I got done with work that day, I went to pick up my tire and put it back on my car. I should have known something was up when the mechanic said “Ah! you’re the one.”

I’m the one??? What the hell does that mean??? I didn’t want to be the one. He told me that he had never fixed a tire with more nails in it than the one I had brought in… Ah cmon now how many nails could it have??? 3 maybe 4??? Nope I had just set the world record of 23 nails in my tire. 23 NAILS. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!?!

The entire way home I’m thinkin that it isn’t possible to run over 23 nails in a life time and I hadn’t had those tires for much over six months. He must have miscounted. Well I went thru the garage floor to see if I was somehow parking on a box of nails… no… then I parked at a new spot at work… no nails there and yet I got another flat a week later. I fixed it and now I’m gettin suspicious.

About two days later I found a roofing nail propped up against my tire and I knew who the culprit was…. it was that little turd Anthony. I find Anthony in the house after work and I asked him if he had any idea how many nails it took to make a tire go flat and he just grinned. His butt was sore for longer than if he had stopped at 22 nails and I haven’t had more than two or three flats a year since.

From Mom, 9/30/2005

Last year, I took Anthony shopping for shoes. He picked a pair out, tried them on, and said, “Man, these are TIGHT, Mom.”

“Ok,” I said, “Let me grab a bigger size.”

He grinned and said, “No, Mom, these are TIGHT.”

“Well, if they’re so TIGHT, we need to get you a pair that’s BIGGER, right?”

“Ma, these are tight, like, COOL, ya know? Tight is like cool or awesome.”

“Oh.”

~~~

Today would have been Anthony’s 14th birthday, and we went to his school to give wristbands and cds to his classmates. I hope everyone who wants one gets one…. We played a slideshow with the song “When September Ends,” by Green Day.

When the eighth-graders started walking into the gym, several of them were wearing Anthony’s trademark “TAKE ME HOME & FEED ME” t-shirts, with his handstand picture printed on the back, and several had sweatshirts with a skater, Anthony’s initials, his birthdate, and “Skate on.” I didn’t really see all the detail on the shirts, because it was difficult to take a close look at things like that right then. It was a really tough moment, but good.

And those t-shirts and sweatshirts were TIGHT, y’all.

You guys are great.

Last night for Valentine’s Day, I came home to this.

Anthony had earned some money burning CDs for friends and had ordered flowers for me at school. This involved at least 2-3 weeks of planning on his part.

He said after school yesterday, he and Evan walked to the drug store to buy a card, but the store was closed.

So they came home and painted cards for me with model car paint.

Don’t tell him I told y’all what a sweetheart he is.

Saturday night at the hotel, I thought it’d be fun to pull my boys and their cousins away from the Nintendo for half an hour to play Spoons (the card game, not the musical utensils).

From the way they protested at being “unplugged,” you’d have thought I was disconnecting them from life support. Before we could start, though, I had to find a deck of cards. I went down to the front desk and borrowed a rumpled, tattered-looking deck, and as I stepped into the elevator to go back upstairs, I twisted the rubber band off the cards and started counting to make sure I had a full deck (please keep your comments to yourself). Some of the backs were blue, some were red. Some of the cards were Bicycle, and some were Hoyle. When I looked at their faces, I found that I had 8 aces, 8 kings, 8 queens, 8 jacks, 8 tens, 8 nines and nothing else. My brother said it looked like a double-euchre deck. I brought it back to the front desk, because with those cards, one round of Spoons would be over in 5 seconds.

A few minutes later, I remembered that I had a container of Umbra cards in my car. Obviously, I bought these cards for their nifty oval form (see fig. 1) and NOT their functionality, because I soon discovered that the kids couldn’t figure out how to hold them, and the shape of the deck made it impossible to shuffle. Just as we were going to give up on the whole Spoons thing, my dad remembered that he had a couple of decks in his briefcase, and they weren’t euchre or Umbra cards, thank goodness.

Once I showed the boys how to play the game, they ate it up. I kept wishing out loud that we had more people to play, because as you may know, this game is the most fun when the huge mad scramble for spoons leaves a pile of bodies on the floor along with one or two casualties.

Good times.

Anthony started begging my mom to join, promising that we wouldn’t tackle HER during any scrambles. First, he pestered her with a simple “please-please-please, Grandma.” Then he teased her with various guilt trips: “Don’t you love your grandsons? What kind of grandma would not want to play Spoons with her grandchildren? We’ll be SO SAD if you don’t play, Grandma.” Right on cue, the other boys looked at her with sad, puppy-dog faces.

THEN during one break in the game, Anthony jumped up, struck a theatrical pose, and made a speech à la Return of the King: “A day may come when grandmothers and grandsons no longer play cards together, but it is not this day. An evening, when we sit around doing nothing, but it is not this evening. Tonight, we play!” We all burst out laughing, and oh man, he was just getting warmed up. As we passed cards around the circle, I could see the wheels turning in his head. As soon as one round ended, he would jump up and make another movie-inspired speech:

à la Star Wars: “It is unavoidable, Grandma. Join us. It is your destiny.”

à la Star Trek (I think?): “Resistance is futile. You WILL become one of us.”

à la Finding Nemo: “Grandmother of the blue and white, you have been called forth to the top of Mt. Wannahockaloogie to join in the fraternal bonds of… spoonhood.”

By this point, my mom was almost crying with laughter, and still refusing to play, just so we could hear the lines Anthony came up with next:

à la Shrek: “C’mon, this’ll be fun, Grandma! We’ll stay up late, swapping spoonly stories, and in the morning… I’m makin’ WAFFLES.”

And then finally, he put an arm around her, gestured toward us, and said, “They may take our spoons, Grandma, but they will never take… our FREEEEEDOM.”

That kid will go far in improv. I would have never been so quick with the lines… they would have come to me in the middle of the night or a day later, long after the moment had passed.

My mom finally relented. She was too weak from laughing to resist any longer.

My two boys had their tonsils removed yesterday. We were at the Primghar hospital from 6:00a.m. to 7:30p.m. Things went well, for the most part, but we can never do anything without some complications or excitement.

Anthony’s bed pinched an electrical cord just a few minutes after he returned from the OR. The room went dark. Sparks, smoke, panic. He and his bed were wheeled out into the hall, just as he was coming out from under anesthesia, wild, disoriented, flailing around, tangling himself up in all the tubes and cords. His IV kinked up, and he had to be stuck again for a new one.

Two hours later, Evan came out of the OR snoring louder than I’ve ever heard him snore. Anthony, who has been aggravated to no end by this snoring, sat up and cried out in despair, “That’s HIM? He’s STILL snoring??” When Evan began to wake up, I stepped out of the room for 5 minutes, feeling like I’d been in the way all morning. When I returned, he was crying this hoarse, heart-wrenching cry, and 3 nurses were holding him down. He had pulled his IV out. As they stuck him 3 more times looking for a vein, he wailed, “I want my tonsils back in!”

The surgeon said their tonsils had been enormous, and Evan’s had been larger than Anthony’s. Later that afternoon, a nurse brought them into the room in a container. I don’t remember much after that.

The boys are doing pretty well now, although they’ll never want to see another popsicle again after this. I stayed home from work. They’re a little cranky, mostly because of the 3 different kinds of nasty medicine they have to take, but they’re already bright-eyed and smiling again.

When I was ten, I used to climb every tree in the neighborhood, but my favorite was a fir that stood at one corner of my parents’ old, 2-story house. Its boughs brushed the windows of my corner bedroom on the second floor.

When you pulled yourself up to the lowest limb, you entered an airy cathedral of arching wood and dappled light. Thick, sturdy branches encircled the trunk like a spiral staircase, and reaching the top of the tree was more of a leisurely hike than a knee-scraping climb. The very tip-top of the tree was far above the house, and a person could see for miles. I would sit cradled between two branches and lose myself in books for hours. Once or twice, I took out a penknife and inscribed my initials next to those of a boy I liked. Other times, I used the knife to draw out beads of sticky sap from the skin of the tree. My little sister made the climb a couple of times, but it was my tree, my sanctuary. It was such a perfect, beautiful tree.

My ten-year-old has inherited my (former) penchant for heights. He has built wooden platforms in two of the trees in our yard, and yesterday, he called out to me from the tip-top of one of the fir trees. I had to tilt my head way back to see him waving at me from among the branches. When he climbed down, he grabbed my hand and pointed out how thick and sturdy the branches were, how like a staircase they were, and I knew he had found a perfect, beautiful tree. But to me, the branches didn’t look sturdy enough, and the tree looked twice as tall as the one I had climbed without a care when I was ten.

I try not to temper his exhilaration with motherly fears, but as I watch him scramble up through the branches like a squirrel, so small and quick, I wonder how my parents coped with that sick, scared feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when your child climbs to such dizzying heights. I want to keep him grounded, in every sense of the word, but I also want to see him climb.

2001

It began innocently enough. I had been waiting in the school parking lot for the kids to return from their field trip, waiting and doing a slow burn while another parent let his musically-inclined toddler play the car horn for 30 interminable minutes.

Be-beep, beeeeeeeeep! I had an out-of-body moment where I envisioned my braver second self stomping up to his car, grabbing a fistful of shirt, and saying in a quiet, deadly, flinty, Clint-y voice: “Do. You. Mind.”

Just before I descended into madness [further], the school bus rumbled up, the kids tumbled out, and my oldest clambered into the passenger seat next to me, breathless. I had given him $10 to buy snacks and souvenirs, and he had spent most of it on a pair of blue spangley bangley earrings for me, crafted by a Native American artisan. While I tried to put them in and drive at the same time, he told me about his day. They had visited a national monument and an historic Native American site, but what engaged his thoughts now was a vintage tonsil cutter, seen at a dusty little museum along the way. “Man, that thing was sinister-looking, Mom!”

I smiled to see him flexing his vocabulary muscles, and he went on to explain how this torture device worked: “The dentist loops one metal ring around the tonsil and jabs into it with this little fork piece and pulls back on this lever and then this Gillette blade slices that thing outta there!” We both shuddered. Good luck bringing him in for a tonsillectomy sometime down the road, I thought.

“Your tonsils are that little wiggly thing that hangs down in the back of your mouth, right?” he asked, “Like that Cingular commercial with the cowboy who sings opera and all you see at the end are his tonsils wiggling?” (It’s a view that gives me the creeps, by the way.)

I shook my head. “No, your tonsils are back on either side, ‘ight ‘ack ‘ere,” I said, taking both hands off the wheel and sticking two fingers into my mouth in a poorly conceived visual aid. “That little wiggly bit is your uvula.”

“Oh.” He pondered that for a minute. Then, “So that’s what Drew Carey was talking about when he said some girl licked his uvula!”

I was afraid to know what he had imagined a uvula to be, and I made a mental note to speak to his father regarding age-appropriate television viewing for 9 year olds.

I drove in silence for a couple of miles, unaware that the worst was yet to come. He straightened up. “Mom, when do I start french kissing?”

Ouch. Think quick, Ma.

Hoping humor would deflect his attack, I teased him. “You mean you haven’t already?”

He made an awful face, and I was somewhat relieved to see that he was thoroughly grossed out by the idea. But then he asked, “When was your first kiss?”

“Boy, I ain’t telling you,” I grumbled, suddenly not in the mood for this conversation.

He let that slide in his eagerness to ask his next shocking question: “So,” he grinned. “When do I get my first hickey?”

I stammered and sputtered, caught off guard. “BO-uh,” I said (my artificial Southern accent tends to come out during times of stress), “Ah don’t need t’be seein’ any hickies on your neck ’til you’re at least 40!”

Then he asked me if I had ever had a hickey.

… (beat skipped here)

Recalling that this was the kid who was still puzzled by womankind’s collective aversion to a certain punctuation mark (courtesy of tv commercials complaining about periods), I resolved to be open and honest about all such fowl, bumbly matters from that point on: “YES,” I said, gritting my teeth.

Then he peppered me with questions: “How many? What do they look like? How do you get them?”

Reluctantly, I told him that I had had a few (“but a long time ago”), and that they look like purple bruises, and they’re made by sucking. He immediately proceeded to suck and slurp, first on his knee, and then his inner arm, with no success, thank goodness. Then he stopped mid-slurp and asked, “Did you ever give Dad any?”

A primitive tonsil extraction would have been preferable to answering these questions. And he hasn’t even begun to ask the tough ones.

Spring 2001