“I was at home writing when I heard the news. The phone kept ringing. It was such an insistent ring that I answered. It was my companion. He said, `Have you heard?’ I was thinking that somebody had died. He said, ‘It’s not personal but it’s very bad.’ I told him to get out of downtown. Since then I have been dipping in and out of grief. This essay is the only thing I’ve written since that day. I have not been able to return to my fiction writing. I think, ‘What does it matter? Who cares about a novel?’ Were someone to tell me that, I would say, ‘It matters more than ever.’ But I don’t feel ready. I am holding a lot of things at bay, trying to gain the stamina to endure the next day’s headlines. But writing this essay was wonderful. It felt great, like I wasn’t deserting my post as a writer. It provided such a clear moment about my feelings, about the beauty of an ordinary day.”
Yesterday, just before sunset, I took my dog, Toby, down to the schoolyard that’s a block from my house. It was a fall day of the best sort: warm and beautiful; red and yellow and lime-green leaves falling from trees and riding air currents in lazy circles before they landed. At the playground, soccer players ran on the field, and children shouted and laughed on the slides and the swings and the jungle gym. I threw the Frisbee for Toby and heard admiring comments from the children nearby: That dog’s smart! Watch, he’ll catch that Frisbee! Trust me when I tell you that Toby is not smart, though the largeness of his heart makes up for the smallness of his brain. But he does excel in catching a Frisbee, sometimes getting all four paws off the ground to do so. Soon, a small group of children, aged from maybe 5 to maybe 11, formed around Toby. Some children, though clearly afraid of dogs, reached out their hands to pet him, and Toby obligingly sat on their feet, eager to get all the affection he could, though Lord knows he never suffers from any lack of that.
When I came home, the sun was setting, and in the dimness I saw one of my neighbors’ boys, 7-year-old Jack, out on his front lawn, raking leaves. He had amassed a rather large, neat pile, and he worked steadily, with a rake about twice the size of him. “Aren’t you nice!” I said, and he shrugged shyly, smiling.
Beside the driveway, Jack’s 8-year-old brother, Frankie, was watering his mother’s flowers that grow in a window box along that side of the house. Well, he was supposed to be watering his mother’s flowers. What he was doing was watering the basement windows and the driveway. We exchanged pleasantries and I gathered from Frankie’s comments that he was “seeing something” about water. He is often caught up in experiments of his own making, the kind of kid who will go to a baseball game and sit with his back to the players while he “sees something” about the patterns in dirt. At one point, he directed the hose in the air and peered through the falling drops of water. “Can you see rainbows at night?” he asked. “No,” I said. “You need the sun.” “Oh,” he said, but continued watching for a while, because even though he is just a little kid, he has learned that adults don’t know everything.
The oldest son, Sam, who is 10, was attempting to jump a skateboard with his scooter. I witnessed one mishap; then couldn’t bear to watch any more. Sam didn’t complain about any injuries, as usual–he is quiet and resolute, someone who treats playing as a job where he would never dream of calling in sick.
I was in the kitchen getting ready to start dinner when I heard Jack calling my name. He speaks slowly and with determination, and he says my name like this: a-LIZ-a-beth! So I heard, “A-LIZ-a-beth!” and I came outside onto the back porch and Jack asked if my partner, Bill, was home yet. Not yet, I said. So Jack showed me the baseball cards he had really wanted to show Bill, lousy compensation, because while Bill knows everything about baseball, I know nothing. I made admiring comments to the best of my ability, though, and then Jack and I sat down and began chatting about things in general.
I asked him about his teacher and he told me her name was Miss Farmer and that she was in her 50s and she had just gotten married. Well, I said. That’s not so unusual. Jack didn’t look particularly convinced. He threw a tennis ball down to the end of the porch for Toby, then said, “A-LIZ-a-beth. You know what? I have made 100 home runs in kickball.” “Really!” I said, and he said, “Yeah. Maybe 150.” Then, looking up at the now-dark sky, he said, “Look! The first star!”
“Better make a wish,” I said, and both of us did.
“Is that the North Star?” he asked, and I said I didn’t think so, that so far as I knew the North Star was part of the Big Dipper, and that wasn’t the Big Dipper we were looking at. Then I wondered if that was right, and I invited Jack into my study so we could look up the North Star in the dictionary. “Is everything in the dictionary?” Jack asked, and I said no, everything wasn’t in anything, but I thought the dictionary would tell us if the North Star was in the Big Dipper.
As I flipped through the pages, Jack marveled at the size of the dictionary. “How long is this?” he asked, and then looked for himself. “Two thousand and seventy-four pages,” he announced. “No kidding,” I said. “Could you read this whole book?” he asked, and I said I could, but I didn’t think I ever would. “My parents think Frankie should read the dictionary,” he said. Sensing something, I said, “Well, you know what we could do? We could learn a new word every day. Why don’t you just open to a page and point to a word?” Jack smiled and did exactly that. He landed on the word “twin-jet.” We talked about what that meant, and Jack decided that he had really known all along what twin-jet meant. We decided to pick another word. We decided to pick the very, very last word in the dictionary. It was “zyzzyva,” and it meant a kind of beetle. I wrote it on a piece of paper and gave it to Jack. “You go show that to your brothers,” I said, and he nodded and put the piece of paper deep into his pocket.
We found the North Star, listed under Polaris, and learned that it was part of the Little Dipper. I got out a toy my daughters once gave me, something that shines the constellations on your ceiling. It didn’t work very well. Jack said the points of light looked like floating potato chips.
Jack went back to stare at the dictionary, then asked, “Who was the very first person who ever lived?” I was thinking Cro Magnon, but I wasn’t sure he was really the very first. So I said, “That’s a very good question. I don’t really know.” Jack looked at me with a kind of pity. “I don’t think anyone does,” he said, in a whisper.
Outside again, we leaned our heads back to study the stars. Then Jack said, “They’re not going to bomb the stadium.”
I looked at him, swallowed. Then I said, “No. They’re not going to bomb the stadium.”
“So why do they have all those soldiers around it?” he said, and he laughed the kind of laugh that is fear in disguise.
“Well,” I said, “they do that because when something like this happens, then everyone starts being very careful. That’s why you see those soldiers. They’re there for protection. They want to keep everyone safe.”
“Oh,” he said. And then he looked up at the sky again, as did I. I saw two planes headed for each other, or so it seemed from my perspective. I watched as they drew closer and closer, and felt my throat tightening. But then the planes passed each other; they weren’t really close at all. I breathed out, smiled over at Jack and thought of all the things he will learn, how eager he is to know everything. Then we heard his mother call him; it was time to go home. You could see the lights on in his family room. You could see that a baseball game was on television, and his brothers were watching it, in their pajamas, I assumed.
I watched Jack go home, and I thought about how next I would go inside and make same avocado and mango salsa to have with the swordfish I was making. I thought of how all over my town, people were settling in for the night. Bath water was running. Bed linens were being turned back. Outside, the moon was rising higher, and more stars were appearing. They looked down on us, their hands over their hearts. And planes passed beneath them, all of them safe.
