Preposterous

I am weeding in the garden

trying to resist all the unearned metaphors

while the sweet men turn the compost.

My daughter asks for rolly pollies

with a square metal tin held out towards the writhing dirt

and is rewarded handsomely.

We each guess at their lifespan—

three months, six months, three weeks,

and learn

preposterously

that it is three years.

I flash on my carelessness with rolly pollies in my youth

leaving them in old yogurt containers in the sun

forgotten when lunch was ready or the friend went home.

How careless we can be.

I can be.

If I could roll up in a ball like that I would.

One needs a shell these days,

a way to curl inward.

13,000 children have been killed in Gaza since October.

I don’t know their names.

My dad doesn’t remember my own children’s names.

We, this country, seem to tend to life in so many wrong ways.

It’s too much

and not enough

all at once.

But my friend

a doctor who makes sure children suffer less

still has the most beautiful laugh

and over pizza dinner she told me she had kissed a whale.

The whale was

preposterously

gentle.

It could have flipped their boat with one uncareful move

and instead it offered itself up to her

and when her lips touched its rubbery cold back

it blew crystal water out of its blowhole.

This is not a fairytale.

This actually happened to my friend.

When I asked her

What do you make of it?

she said,

Be gentle

always.

I think that’s what the whale meant.

As we were driving home from our pizza dinner

we saw a young guy

backpack on

slumped on the side of my street.

His aura was overdose.

We pulled over and hovered nearby

trying to be gentle with our help

and then his big sister pulled up in a Mazda

or at least a woman with big sister energy

(one also needs big sister energy these days)

and put him in the passenger seat and drove off.

It was not the first time.

You could read it in her eyes.

The other day, my older daughter

who is mostly exasperated

preposterously

gave my younger daughter a back massage

in her royal blue, plastic car bed.

The little one unfurled her body on the twisted sheets

tummy down

bare back facing the stars.

My friend also said it felt like an ocean baptism

and that it was hard not to slip into the sea with the whale.

Her partner held her legs.

My daughters hold mine.

That big sister holds her brother.

We must hold hold hold on.

Be preposterously gentle with ourselves despite all the

forgetting.

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Thanks for welcoming a range of expression here Examined Family! Sometimes a poem is what I’ve got. If you’re interested in exploring more forms of modern gentleness, take a listen to this new Slate episode on showing up for a loved one with dementia. It means a lot to me.