friends holding hands

Scout is working on a speech about friendship for her fifth grade graduation. It’s a competition she’s trying to win, and the kids aren’t allowed to speak personally about the topic, so they’re walking a spinning barrel over the wood chips with nothing but generalisms to hold onto. Her best line is “you might think you don’t know how to make friends, but friendship is waiting there in the back of your head ready to be used.” Friendship like a tool that lives in the batcave.

Months before, she came home from school furious about an exercise that day. The kids had been paired up and tasked with tracing each other’s heads on paper. The girl tracing Scout’s head had done a careless balloon, after Scout had so carefully produced a Regency portrait of the girl. I could see the piece of paper, Scout staring at the scribble that was supposed to represent her multitudes. I could see them lying their heads sideways on the chopping block, waiting for the tickle of a peer’s marker down to the thin ring of neck. Sheesh, the shit kids have to do in school. We spent a chunk of time in primary school lying on butcher’s paper on the floor while our classmates drew around us—why? Perhaps some kind of backdoor to developing empathy? What I know is we were only interested in what our own outlines looked like.

*

If you were to ask me to draw unrequited love, I’d show you Japhy thowing a baseball to himself on the front lawn any time the baseball players who live next door were hanging on their porch—a mating dance of sorts. He called them the Party Boys because the only times we saw them were when they cracked out the beer pong table or dragged a keg up to the front steps. Their (shitty) lawn melded with ours (nice), and sometimes when they dove after a ping pong ball, they’d stumble backward into their own future: shrubs, stepping stones to the mailbox, children.

Since they were college athletes, Japhy had made it his life’s mission to play a game of whiffle ball with them. If they weren’t training or studying aeronautics, he’d have his glove on him just in case, ready to play. I asked him to clean up his toys one day, yelling through the house without finding him, only to discover he was out chilling with his 6-foot-tall friends at their grill.

They had a rager going on when he was headed out to an 8 p.m. game during the rec rumble, and bless if didn’t they follow him out to the car, asking, “Buddy, you have a game now?!” I could see how tough he felt, his kit on his back headed off to battle, the lopsided bat sticking up like an antenna. Another time he got home from a game late and they were on the porch. He yelled out, “Hey guys!” three times while walking slowly, in view, toward the door, but they never heard him. He dragged out the last few steps then gave up, heading in and up to his rainbow LED twin bed.

Japhs got his big game in on graduation weekend—hauled his Jingl set and torpedo bat out front and ran laps as the Party Boys smashed whiffle balls over the roof. Our favorite Party Boy, D, gave Japhs his regulation bat before he left, and we received the contents of their pantry before they spooled up their purple string lights and disappeared forever in their matching Jeeps. I sat the sawn-off cardboard box on the kitchen table and went through it later: A box of cocoa, Werther’s Original pumpkin spice flavor, a Crunchie bar, cooking oil, and chewing gum.

*

Me trying to make friends with a dad at baseball: So how did Keegs get the nickname sticks?

The dad: Oh it’s … he’s number 11. If he was number 1 it would just be “stick.”

Me: Ah. [flies away]

*

On the other side of us to the Party Boys, we have an elderly couple. My neighbor Rose and I have nice routine with a few solid beats. If the weather is bad, it’s, “what did we do to deserve this!” and if nice, we’ll do a “this isn’t so bad, eh?” Rose is 80 but takes pride in keeping up her garden, even if half of it is plastic—year-round light-up Christmas tree, pinwheels in the garden beds, bright-green turf on her porch. She likes to go out with a broom and sweep. Sometimes I’ll hear the swish of it on our driveway—a hat tip for my shoveling their sidewalk in winter.

“How’s Bob,” I might ask, and she’ll say, “Still alive, goddamnit!” her chin hairs glinting in the sun. He doesn’t get up off the couch, she says, and so I go along with that. “Hahaa men, always sitting.” I’ll say. She makes a point of kicking on without him, often being whisked away to lunch in a car. We connect through the international language of heteropessimism—sometimes she’ll joke about smothering him with a pillow—and what of it.

“Rose’s son said she has dementia,” said Noodles as we tidied the kitchen one night. The family were debating what to do, but she was in a day program for now. “Apparently after the sun goes down she can’t remember anyone’s name,” he said.

It certainly explained the toys we had put on the curb being rerouted to a pile in her backyard. “Ohhh,” I said. I saw her smiling out the window at no one as the car took her away.

My latest for Mother Tongue is about Sisters of New York, a nonprofit collective of cannabis activists (“weed nuns”) who have made it their mission to give pot away to "anyone who wants it."

Marijuana is a spiritual tool, they say, but it's also a consumer product in the $30 billion cannabis industry, and one that comes with a fairly ~pungent~ brand bible. Thus, the sisters are trying to keep the spirit of compassionate use alive while using social media and weed-nun iconography(^) to shine a light on a justice system that still uses low-level possession as a pretext for arrests. A story on consumer goods, branding, and activism—each needing the other. Get a copy here.

If we’re talking friendship, can’t go past Mac and Jon on Frog and Toad over at Looking at Picture Books—you have to read the whole thing before you can fully appreciate the appreciation:

JON: When you and I first met, we talked about these stories, and the thing we both valued in them, one of the things anyway, was that Lobel never resolved the problems in this relationship. Toad will never tell Frog about this dream. Frog will never say, “Toad that’s crazy! I’ll always be here for you.” We both remembered that, even as kids, this was familiar to us. We had had friendships like this already, where it felt imbalanced one way or another. And Lobel’s conception of these kinds of friendships, at least here, is that that’s just the way it is.

Sometimes I think of the parent-child relationship as a time-traveling friendship, and that is a reading I am willing to impose on Tracy Clark-Flory‘s lovely memoir MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER, which follows Tracy as she discovers her half-sister (put up for adoption in their mother’s teens) and wonders whether you’re doomed to fall into the same traps as your mother/grandmother/forever on.

Also just read The Palm House (thumbs up) after My Phantoms (big thumbs up).

I will always tell everyone to subscribe to my friend Jenny True ‘s newsletter, here’s the most recent reason why.

I’m burying this down here, but I felt actually quite bereft seeing the Party Boys’ house empty. My birds have flown. Empty [Solo cups] at empty [beer pong] tables.

Laura B McGrath on lit agents: “Is there a significant amount of truly excellent literature being published? And do literary prizes actually find and reward that work—the most excellent? Prizes are one of culture’s great games. The rules can be learned, and the game can be won.” (Rosa Lyster doing the asking here)

Edwidge Danticat talking with Kaitlyn Greenidge about ghosts: “We can also be haunted by the living, based on how much we miss or are longing for them.” Kaitlyn’s books newsletter is really great.

Congrats to The Mother Of It All on 100 eps!!!

Sometimes Laurie Stone runs a reader’s note and it feels like it could fix things:

NOTE TO READERS: If in the comments you write the equivalent of a CARE emoji or an ANGER emoji, I will never forgive you. Those responses insult this chunk as a piece of thought. That’s what it wants to be. It does not want to be a bid for commiseration. In this moment, my feelings are not hurt. I’m writing about the phenomenon of hurt feelings and what they stir. If my feelings were hurt, this would be complete dreck.

“Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong.” Annie Dillard

See also Agnes Pelton

Alright, back to it