Usually my friend David comes up from New York for Labor Day Weekend— we cook lobster and scallops and corn and tomatoes and talk nonstop. But this year, because of the Pandemic, he was staying put in Germany. During a bad patch in my life I spent a lot of holidays alone — the secret is to plan something special, something you really want to do, and not compare yourself to other people or imagine the great times they are having. This year, knowing that a lot of other people weren't going to parties either helped. And so did an article in the NY Times about things to do. I chose to pick flowers and pay for them by the pound at The Farmer's Daughter in Rhode Island.
It was a longish drive, but so worth it: fields of dahlias and zinnias and flowers like red clover but bigger. I chose yellows — sun-yellow, primrose yellow, pale yellow, oranges from bright to pale peach,
creamy white for contrast, some pinks and red — but mainly the sunny happy colors I love.
For once in my life, I was going to have enough flowers. I filled three buckets full. The girl weighing my flowers seemed as enthusiastic about them as I was. We debated how to get them home safely — it was a hot day and a long drive, and I bought the buckets so I could keep them in water the whole way. Just looking at them made me happy:
“It's like buying joy!” I said and she smilingly agreed and helped me carry them to the car.
At home I had the fun of arranging them, though really, they looked their best — their most exuberant — all heaped together in the buckets:
I filled the house with them — it was such a luxurious, happy feeling — to have flowers everywhere I looked. For once, enough flowers, I thought.
And then, I remembered when I was living in Boston, working three days a week because they thought I had fibromyalgia. WARNING: Stop reading here if you'd rather end on an upbeat note!
Years later I found out I had celiac, but that's another story. It wasn't a happy time; I hated my job at Fidelity, I was really sick — so sick that I went to bed as soon as I got home from work, I was obsessed with a bad man (this was so painful even to witness that none of my friends would talk to me); but I did do two good things in those years. One was write Blow Out the Moon and get it published. The other was to volunteer in a school for kids who had been kicked out of regular public school.
Every Friday, I met one on one with each boy in the class (there were no girls). They seemed more like me than anyone I knew in Boston, and I realized for the first time that I, too, had ADD. When I was young I don't think they knew about it; if you didn't do well in school, you were considered lazy or stupid or, my teachers' word for me, “careless.”
But the boys had been diagnosed. A nurse wheeled a meds cart around twice a day and when one ran out of his meds, I saw someone literally bouncing off the walls: he'd jump up, hit the wall with the soles of both sneakers, land, and do it again. As the teachers said,
“He's a poster child for Ritalin.”
The teachers were saints. When one of the boys, they knew, wasn't getting any Christmas presents, the teacher filled a sack for him (and asked me to get things too which of course I did).
But this story is about a bright boy whose twin sister was at Boston Latin. He, Jonathan, had trouble reading and concentrating. When one Friday he wasn't in class, the teachers told me that he'd been put into a home by his mother — The Home for Wee Wanderers, it was called then. I promised to visit him there each week, and the teachers gave me schoolwork to bring him.
The place was at the end of the subway line, and a long ride. Some of the children had been born with aids, and weren't expected to live. I remember a small pale boy who talked about this calmly. Some were mentally ill: I remember a girl with crazy grey eyes who got too close to everyone. Jonathan, normally a cocky, swaggering boy — so cool that I was a little intimidated — seemed seemed subdued and more serious than usual.
At the end of the first visit, I asked him if I could hug him good-bye: I asked because at McKinley they told us always to ask (you never knew if a child had been abused) and he said yes and clung to me like a frightened child; well, of course he was a frightened child, but one of the things that poverty does to kids is make them seem adult.
It was a hard place to visit — it's panful to witness the kinds of situations the children were in: not that they complained. Their bravery was one of the moving things. Jonathan was brave, too, but he did tell me that he worried (not his word) that they thought he was “slow.” I said he wasn't, and reminded him of a brilliant poem he'd written.
He smiled a little at that.
On perhaps my fourth visit, I didn't want to go, but I had promised Jonathan, so I did. That day, one of the adult workers, a young man who'd been a final candidate for a place as a composer at the Berkley School of Music, gave me a ride to the subway station, which I appreciated — it was a long walk. By this time I knew him a little and asked how he managed to stay.
“I've learned that the children are more than their tragedies,” he said.
By the time I got off the subway in Back Bay, it was late — and someone was selling peonies. They're my favorite flower and I chose some; and then the guy offered me all he had left for $5. That was enough flowers, too — enough to fill every vase in the house. I thought at the time, and still think, that it was a reward from the universe.
Jonathan came back to school. Some said his mother had only put him in there because she was afraid he was going to do drugs — or was doing them. Others said she had broken up with the boyfriend who didn't like him. But he came back.
I don't know what happened to him, or any of the boys I knew there; I've googled them but haven't found any. My life had a few years of the chaos created by bad choices (and a bad diagnosis) left before things got better, but for me, they did. My guess is that the boys haven't been so lucky; as my friend Wendy, who in those days worked with poor children in Vermont said,
“Ten years old, and already a lot of doors are closed to them.”
That was probably true. I made my own bad choices, but my life turned out happily enough anyway; I'm grateful for enough flowers and all the other things I've been given. Those boys were dealt a different hand.
