Pencil Altars

One day last week I announced that I was heading outside to mow the lawn.  My son, who is  two and had just woken up from his nap, was sitting on the couch munching on his pacifier.  It’s his one enduring fix.  When going to bed or when going on long car rides, when trapped by a crib or by a Britax triple harness system, he gets to suck on something.  I don’t know what it does for him but I would guess his pacifier is like my good morning jog followed by a chapter in a favorite book.  It eases me back into the day.  It puts me at ease with another day.  Simply put, it eases me.  And yet, say the word tractor and he spits serenity out of his mouth like an addict kicking his bad habit to the curb cold-turkey style.  What follows is some derivative of a circus that is almost worth buying tickets to go see.  With hoopla bordering on sheer madness he runs into his room, grabs his sneakers, and starts to jump up and down, though his pint-size body can’t quite lift itself beyond itself, so his jump amounts more to a unique blend of skipping and shimmy-shaking.  For all that this moment means to him (a wee exaggerated my description may be), you must understand his intensely simple love for tractor time, because without it you can’t possibly sympathize with the pain he suffered (or the pain that I was about to suffer) when he learned that his sister had already been promised the first ride that day.  His shimmy-shake turned to stomping and his squealing to screaming.  I tried to reason with him.  “You always get to go first.”  It’s not like there was a long line waiting in the garage to board our 8 year old Craftsman Special Edition.  That he wasn’t going to ride first only meant he was going to ride second.  “You get to go next.  How about a swing ride while you wait?”  “Words, words, words,” he must have been thinking, as all the earth filled with shrills and shrieks.

It was then that I decided a time-out was necessary, if not for him than at least for me.  We were both losing our ease.  I carried him into his room, his 30 pound frame writhing in my arms.  Against all passive-agressive instinct I placed him gently on the floor.  Walking out I shut his door, though not all the way.  (Never all the way.)  “When you’re ready to stop yelling, you can come out.”  He didn’t have to actually stop yelling.  Reemergence, reengagement, resurrection, whatever you want to call it can’t be accomplished on your own.  Not when you’re 33 and fairly level-headed and certainly not when you’re 2 and feeling emotionally rocked.  Someone has to call us forth, to give us something to move toward–a voice, a hand, a glimmer of persuasion that the world wants us back again.  He just had to let me know that he was ready to stop yelling.  We could take it together from there.

Outside in the hallway his sister was sitting on the front steps.  She didn’t say anything.  No mention of how he was holding her up.  No talk of, “I’ll be outside guarding the tractor just in case.”  No look of superiority.  I saw his pacifier sitting on the coffee table and glancing back down the steps decided he should have it.  I pushed open his door, barely, and laid it out like a welcome mat.  His vocal cords were still at it.  Turning back into the hallway I went to close his door again when his sister ducked under my arm and into his room.  Before I could tell her not to do whatever it was that she was about to do she reached out to her brother with her own welcome mat.  “You can have the first ride.  It’s ok,” she assured him.  In her palm was the tractor key.

I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I wanted to swat it out of her hand, to rebuke her for misplaced grace, to tell her to back me up, he needs to suffer this one.  He can’t be allowed to think this is an acceptable way to get his way.  In fact, what about not always getting your way? But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that she put him at ease.  She put me at ease.  No, he didn’t say sorry.  He didn’t even try, which at his age would have been as good as saying it.  He also didn’t try to hustle his way out to the tractor.  What he did do was to stop yelling and walk out into the living room to find his crayons and coloring books.  Call it his reemergence, his reengagement, his resurrection unto toddler life again.  I bent down and in to his sister, my daughter.  “You are very kind.  There’s never anything wrong with being kind.”

But little did I know how quickly she’d find ground for debate, for no sooner was I ready to say, “Do you think you’d like to go ride the tractor now?” and she was ranting about how her brother was using her pencil.  “It’s my Buzz Lightyear one.  I really, truly, want it.  He won’t give it back.”  “Did he actually take if from you?” I asked.  “Were you using it?”  Not every one who is named a thief has stolen.  Sometimes a thief is what we call the person who has what we would have, except we’d have to steal it to get it.  In this case the jury never had time to deliberate, for the verdict was cast when her brother opened his palm not only to to hold out the pencil, but also a tractor key.

A prophet whom I believe has the power to save us,  once said from a field, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”  Another prophet once said, “Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.  When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.  Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.”

I dare wonder, do you think there’s a tractor in that field?