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There was this children’s book I have remembered fondly from my childhood that I decided I must find again, a book passed down from one sister to another after it was given to the oldest in the mid-1960s. I’d searched for it online by title and author for months (Biquette, The White Goat by Francoise) and found nothing, until last week when I discovered it on ebay. I ordered it immediately.

By my memory this book was about a sick little girl who was ordered by her doctor to get a goat and drink goat’s milk daily until she was well, and the goat was a bad little goat that got into all sorts of trouble, including eating the little girl’s red sweater. I also remembered that the accompanying illustrations were clever, detailed, and meaningful to me. What I remembered best is the cover of the book. The book jacket was long gone, but the primary illustration was embossed on the cover, a little goat in profile, smiling, its leash trailing behind it, on a background of hunter green.

When it arrived, I found that my only memories of this book that were correct are few — it was translated from French, the little girl in the story was ordered to get a goat and drink it’s milk, and the cover of the book is indeed green. It is neither clever nor climactic, and the illustrations are dull.

But acquiring this book did one thing that makes the purchase worthwhile. I remember this viscerally: being a small girl alone in a quiet room, pulling a book off the shelf, and feeling the magic and awe at seeing a handwritten inscription to my biggest sister who was once a small girl, unable to imagine that she was ever a child, or that I would ever grow up.

After I finished the obituary, I found several other pieces, these two in particular, that cut to the heart of what Olsen represents to many of us who admire her, and like Lorraine this quote knocked the wind out of me.

But Olsen’s theme – and her fear – was silence, the dream only dreamed. Olsen knew this firsthand. After beginning a novel in the 1930s about a migrant family, her writing career was delayed 20 years for sheer lack of time. She never stopped regretting all the stories never told.

“Well, I’m going to be one of those unhappy people who dies with the sense of what never got written, or never got finished,” she said.

How many women feel — have felt — the same?

I do, sometimes, as I realize that all the time I spend doing so-called frivolous things like reading and writing cut into the mopping, laundering, and child-watching that I’m obliged to do, simply because if I don’t no one else will. I’m one of those saps who thinks she might someday make it as a real published writer, if not even as a career than as a passion (because if Dawn Eden can do it, I can fucking do it). I have a pile of blank journals that have been given to me annually by friends, each inscribed with requests for that novel I ought to be writing. I have a hard drive full of my own poems and short stories, and made a habit of writing a little something every day for probably close to ten years. Bits and pieces, heres and theres, whatsits and doodads of thought and story line and no time to put it all together or refine, refine, refine as I want. Sometimes I wonder how much time I could spend on “real” writing if I weren’t blogging, or if I would write at all anymore without the immediate gratification of instant publishing and instant audience. I quit playing piano shortly after Ethan was born and, as I explained to my mother tonight as Ethan played yet another round of Christmas carols from memory, I lost it. I can plunk out a song or two but something is missing. I wonder if writing is like that.

Several years ago I gave my mother a journal requesting that she write down some of her stories, an autobiography for my sisters and I to keep so we may know her better despite the weird confines of parent-child relationships, generation gaps, and personal grievances. It’s an easy platform, full of writing prompts and lined paper, and I eagerly searched it out to see what and if she had written. I discovered she hid it from me so I wouldn’t read it until she was ready. I hoard my “real” writing too, knowing that to reveal it before it’s ready is a painful exposure of all the blemishes I’m too busy to wipe clean, lurking about the reader explaining the rough parts raw because I haven’t found a way, or the time, to fix them.

Just tonight I received an email from an old family friend wondering where my novel is, and it’s here, it’s right here, but I don’t have the time to concentrate. Maybe when I convince somebody to buy me a laptop. Maybe when I’m fifty.

After much hugging and revelry we got down to the real business, opening Ethan’s new rock tumbler. To understand how perfect a gift this is, you have to know my boy. E checked out one science book every week all semester from his public school library, and most of them didn’t get more than a skim, minus this and the planet books. Ethan’s interest in the book on rocks, gems, and minerals was something to behold — every night he slowly turned the pages, stopping only to explain the merits of pressure on different kinds of matter to his geologically-challenged mother. He’d explain and re-explain how my amber ring came to be, and commit the birthstone of each member of our family to memory, doing his best to also remember how these gems were made. Thus, other than how goddamned noisy this thing is, it’s a great gift.

The rock tumbler comes with all sorts of common minerals, from rose quartz to tiger eye, and with some water, grinding powder and a little patience we should have a handful of kickass stones in a few weeks. Ethan is planning a few pieces of jewelry for me — another ring, he says, and a necklace.

I love this inclination in him to catalogue information about rocks and planets and store it away for a future date. A song lyric or conversation will remind him of something he learned in one of these books and a fact will break the surface. Mom, Mammoth Cave is located in Kentucky. Mom, Jupiter has more than 60 moons. Mom, you were born in the year of the cock.

I’m a fact collector, too, hoarding bizarre information on pop culture and literary ephemera, word definitions and strange names. Science was always out of bounds. I loved the bigger stories about the births of stars and the evolution of the planet, the political stories about Galileo’s persecution and Galen’s horrific miscalculated theories on sex and anatomy. But the details? Shit. I failed biology, physics, chemistry, and earth science in high school, nearly failed entomology and atmospheric science in college, and the sole reason I’m not a nurse today is that I couldn’t pass an anatomy class. For all my fact-hoarding I couldn’t perform the memorization necessary to complete the courses well.

Like the asshole dad who forces his kid into baseball to soothe his own painful memories of championships lost, I urge Ethan toward science.

Thus, after our foray into jewelry-making we participated in our Friday night routine: pizza and science movies. We watched a National Geographic video on Super Dangerous Deadly Planets and munched happily away at cheese pizza while we learned about the acidic atmosphere of Venus. Mom, Venus is covered with volcanoes, Ethan says between bites just before the narrator confirms this fact. Later the narrator reveals that some scientists believe that before the planet’s extreme global warming effects dried up the oceans, some of the simple organisms that may have lived in Venusian oceans could have figured out how to live in the cooler upper atmosphere.

“But they couldn’t breathe!” Ethan exclaims, throwing down his pizza in disgust.

“Maybe they evolved,” I suggest, realizing that this could be an opportune teaching moment if only I could get my three puny scientific brain cells in a row. “Evolution happens when living things have to adapt to the places in which they live. So they can live better.” And stuff like that.

“Nobody could breathe sulfuric acid. That’s ridiculous, Ma.” **

“What if they started out differently and migrated to the upper atmosphere because they had to? Since they don’t live on Earth they don’t have to breathe oxygen.” This is assuming that these simple organisms breathe like we do, which, if they exist, they probably don’t, but I’m so not going there. “How much do you know about evolution?”

“Yeah, evolution is like when we have two legs and monkeys have four legs.”

“Not quite. So, where do monkeys live?” I pause the movie, in which the narrator goes on about Venusian commonalities with Earth.

“Africa.”

“Not just Africa, they also live in India, Asia, and South America. Where in these places do monkeys live?”

“In the jungle!”

“Yes, but where in the jungle?”

“Wherever they can find food. Like bananas.”

“Right! So the monkeys learned how to live in trees so they could get the food they liked and escape mean predators, while humans figured out how to walk upright and gather food from other kinds of sources.” Opposable thumbs escape me. So does the fact that the monkeys and bananas thing is only part of the story.

“So what about dinosaurs?” E asks, his doe eyes narrowing at me while I wonder if he’s figured out my scientific deficiency.

“Some scientists think animals like birds are closer to dinosaurs than any other. Then we have reptiles like crocodiles and alligators.”

“Pterodactyls could be like birds.”

“Yes, they certainly could.”

“They both fly,” Ethan says.

He suddenly grabs my hand, noticing the ring Chef gave me during the proposal, a locally handmade piece with a twisted band in white gold and a rather large hunk of amethyst in a raised setting. He studies the ring for a moment, turning my hand to better look at the stone. It’s a clear gem, the kind of stone Ethan is drawn to, his last semester of autodidactic gem study clearly informing his thoughts. “Mom, your birthstone is amethyst. I like your ring.”

________________
* Children Of Atheist Parents Get Presents, Too Day
** Yes, I am aware I have the coolest kid ever.

Me: Oh yeah?

Chef: I helped an elderly woman at the grocery store.

Me: No shit, boy scout. What did you do?

Chef: This poor woman was standing out in the parking lot looking confused. She called me over because she couldn’t figure out how to start her car. She even showed me how to look under the hood if it was necessary.

Me: Weird.

Chef: I get in her car and the keys won’t turn, so I jiggle the steering wheel and get the wheels to unlock and it starts right up.

Me: Did she give you a quarter?

Chef: No, but after she thanked me I walked back to my car in the back of the lot and three people stopped me to ask if I got her car started.

Me: They just felt guilty that they didn’t help her. Faux concern.

Chef: Yeah, but the worst part is that she pulled out of the parking lot in front of me and drove twenty miles an hour all the way across town.

Me: Ooooh.

Chef: I cussed her out in my car for at least three miles.

Me:

Chef:

Me: I’m totally blogging this.