pigeon

How come you weren’t playing with your classmates?

I don’t know, maybe because they’re dumb? and loud? and violent? and boring? and oblivious? and they tend to hang around in hectic, hard-edged groups, little phalanxes of exclusion?

The girl groups stroll around the playground strategically, link-armed, singing over and over a saccharine pop song, doe eyed, like something out of a magazine, and when the POP! of the refrain comes around again, they POP! it out real loud and start all over again. Obviously I can’t be in those groups; the entrances are hermetically sealed; it’s the 70s in southeast Missouri and I’m a kid so I can’t be gay or bi (what’s that?), we didn’t even know the word transgender, and queer only meant something you were supposed to smear.

The boy groups are more geographically diffuse, strung together by the invisible elastic of tag, gleeful anticipation of potential fights, correctly calibrated sneers, put it all together and you basically get sports that I don’t know the rules of and am not already good at. Obviously I can’t be in those groups. The whole frequency is wrong. I don’t have the right armor and weaponry. I don’t understand how they can trample right through the invisible enchanted forest without smacking face first into invisible trees, but they do; it doesn’t seem to be a thing they even have to think about.

Why did this pigeon come see me today? The pigeons have impeckable (not a typo) timing. My two youngest daughters are downstairs right now, neither one wanted to go to school today. Hmm.

Sometimes if there was a swing available I would swing. That happened more often later on, as I advanced towards the more worldly grades of elementary school; there was very little competition for swings from other 5th or 6th graders.

My daughters—are they sick? Avoiding something? Is there substance use involved? Is this the ramp (back) to self-harm? How worried should I be? My small worries are connected by a direct, low-resistance cable to my catastrophic worries. I think there’s understandable reasons for that; nevertheless it’s not always the most optimal wiring scheme.

So if I wasn’t playing with my classmates, what had I been doing when my dad drove past the school coincidentally at recess time and happened to see me out there all by myself?

Island hopping, probably. Way out by the northeastern-most reaches of the grounds, well beyond the end of the asphalt, jutting out from dirt and crabgrass was a small archipelago of boulders, worn shiny smooth by weather and generations of kids’ shoes. My brother (two years older so always either at a different recess or different school altogether) and I had hypothesized (unfalsifiably, for us at least) that they were the peaks of vast, subterranean mountains. Therefore you were a giant that could hop from mountaintop to mountaintop. Or shrink down and zoom in, and these islands in the dirt revealed intricate shorelines, tiny silt-filled tarns, a whole ant-sized ecosystem, with voyager ants departing and arriving minutely, busy with whatever they were busy with. It was a quiet place, from which the bells or whistles announcing recess’s end seemed surreally far away. (There’s another pigeon about those ants, by the way—a story for another time.)

None of my daughters has been fully in tune with the majority of their classmates either. That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing in itself, but it can definitely make life at school harder. Do I feel somehow responsible for that? It’s funny my dad was the one that asked me “How come you weren’t playing with your classmates?” At the time, something in me knew to be wary of the question. The question was looking to shine a light on something I knew should not be made visible. I shrugged it off. I bet my dad understood that shrug. He didn’t press me on it. He’d been a farm boy. I think he had his own version of those boulder islands—in the fields, with his horse, by the banks of the “River Jim” in rural South Dakota. In “Forgiving Our Fathers,” a poem in Ghost Radio, Dick Lourie asks if we shall forgive our fathers “for scaring us with unexpected rage / or making us nervous because there seemed / never to be any rage there at all”. What my dad habitually showed me was more of the latter; sometimes my daughters have seen in me more of the former. Neither one is right or wrong. The poem ends by asking “if we forgive our fathers, what is left” and I also wonder if we forgive ourselves, does that make us stronger, better able to equip our kids to navigate their own playgrounds?

And here’s another thing I wonder: is there some great power, residing somewhere in those mountains underground, some sleeping giant strength we’re going to need? Like for real? Real soon? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know yet.