Anarita and the Leaving

Anarita came home from school and saw that the big black box containing Dad's telescope was gone. But she didn't think much of it at first. Later, Alice came home and was making shells and cheese for dinner. She went upstairs to her bedroom and came down obviously upset.

She told Victor and Anarita that Dad's clothes were gone. Everyone cried, but Alice forced the kids to eat dinner. No one had seen this coming. Later that night, maybe around 11, Dad called. He was in Nevada, on the way to California, with a woman from his work and her daughter. He would sell his red Ford pickup and the telescope to start his new life with a new family.

Anarita was angry, bewildered, sad and jealous. She loved that red pickup truck and she loved the telescope; pieces of her dad. And why did that daughter get to be with dad but not Victor, Mom and she? What had they done wrong? The next day, Victor stayed home but Anarita decided to go to school. She sat on the swings and told her friend Julie that her dad had left. Her friend was sad, but Anarita thought, "This happens to almost everyone these days, what right do I have to hurt? It's normal." But she felt so sorry for her mom who would spend days and nights crying and worrying about how not to lose the house while trying to hide her worry from the kids.

Anarita and Victor were sent to a psychiatrist to talk about it, but neither of them wanted to talk. So sometimes they played games there, but Anarita thought that was a waste of time and money they didn't have. No one wanted to go anymore, so after a few visits, they didn't.

Some time later, Joe came back into town, but with the woman and her daughter. Mom took her and Victor to see him at their grandparents' house. Alice refused to go in, and so Anarita and Victor didn't want to go in either. However, they were told they had to go. Dad had 5 o'clock shadow and cried and hugged and kissed them and said things about missing them.

Anarita was dumbfounded. Why did he miss them, wasn't he the one that left? She met the other little girl who was about the same age as her, and tried to make the best of things by being friends with her. She was a nice girl. That turned out to be a mistake because Mom got angry when Anarita wanted to play with the other girl. She learned she wasn't supposed to be friendly with the woman or the daughter because they were the enemies, she should only just be polite. But as she saw it, they were in a worse situation than she. That woman had thrown the lots of she and her daughter in with Dad, and now Dad was back in town and second-guessing. They were being thrown around in the wind.

One day, Dad came back home. From that day on, everyone had to play a game that nothing had ever happened. No one was allowed to talk about the leaving, the betrayal. But it was always there, and it ate the hearts of all of them. It would drive Joe to depression,and being a mean drunk. It would make Victor hate his father for leaving and his mother for taking him back. It would make Alice have no self confidence or self love. And Anarita would spend the rest of her youth trying to be perfect so that she could earn her father's love that he had been so hasty to give away to strangers once upon a time. But being perfect isn't possible, and neither is pleasing a mean drunk.

Anarita and the Salat

She knew them as ordinary people, but when they bowed down before God, their foreheads prostrated in humbleness, they seemed to transform into something wonderful. Rather, the wonderfulness of their ordinariness became apparent when they worshiped the Creator.

It was a new kind of prayer to her. She knew the Prayer of Give Me, the Prayer of Want, the Prayer of More.

"Oh God, Please Give Me More Money,"
or "Oh God, I Want a Snow Day at School,"
or "Oh God, I Need More Time."

Sometimes, "Oh God, I Want My Mommy,",
or "Oh God, Save Me,",
or "Oh God, Not Again."

Maybe even, "Oh God, I'm Sorry,"
"Oh God I Hate That Guy,"
or "Oh God, Why???"

All the prayers of asking, complaining, pleading, conversing one-way. But now HERE was something she was missing and didn't even know she was missing until she saw it. A prayer of worship. A prayer of praise. A prayer of humility. And the motions mattered. The forehead in dust didn't just talk of worship and humility, it showed it, it felt it.

Anarita's heart leaped in her chest in joy and reverence as she bowed and praised, prostrated and humbled.

If there was a God, then this was right.

Anarita and the Feely Meely Box

Anarita loved kindergarten. One reason she loved it was because her mom had taught her well. Anarita already knew how to read. Her mom used to sit and read to her almost every afternoon, and then one day, her mom told her to read instead. It took forever and was very hard and exhausting (and she had plenty of help from mom), but that day she read her first book: Hop on Pop. "Up Pup Pup is Up....." She felt sorry for students who didn't know how to read yet and only had school to learn. If she ever became a parent, she wanted to teach her kids to read before they started school.

For her, school was fun. One of her favorite parts of kindergarten, and there were many, was The Feely Meely Box. At the end of morning, the kindergarten kids sat in The Pit. The Pit was an octagon with three steps down all around, where classes gathered to be read to, to sign up for morning attendance and lunch, and so on. The Teacher would grab a Kleenex box that had been covered in long, pink faux fur and googly eyes - The Feely Meely Box. If she thought you were good, you might be invited to stick your hand in the box, feel around, and pull out a prize. Maybe it would be a plastic ring. Anarita's doctor's office had her favorite plastic rings - they were Disney rings, white plastic with metallic red, green or blue paint on the faces of Pluto, Daffy, Goofy, Mickey or Minnie. But one day she got to stick her hand in the box and she pulled out the best thing of all - a pink butterfly magnet! She was too young to realize that what she really loved was praise and approval from adult authority figures, but at the moment she loved that magnet!

She went home and her mom placed it on the fridge. It was so beautiful. And it stayed beautiful until one day it somehow got knocked off the fridge and the dog chewed it up.

Anarita and the Little Jesus in Your Heart

Anarita had a little black and white TV that got fuzzy UHF channels with preachers on them. It even got channels between spaces on the dial that picked up half of cordless phone calls. She had never seen a cordless phone yet, but she eventually deduced that was what she was hearing. She spent hours playing spy, listening to one side of calls between people she didn't know, trying to determine what the other, inaudible caller was saying in the silences.

Many of the preachers kept talking about inviting Jesus "into your heart". If you did that sincerely, it was supposed to save you. People came on the shows and talked about how their lives changed forever when they were Born Again by this invitation. Then the preachers would put their hands up, palms out, as if reaching out to the people watching, and tell them to come put their hands on the screen and pray for Jesus to come in their hearts so they could be saved. The preachers would close their eyes tightly, and you were supposed to do the same, with your hand on the screen.

Anarita didn't want to go to hell, but this all seemed a bit silly. Still, she wanted to be saved and wanted to know and love God. She wanted that "relationship" those preachers always talked about it. So, she put her hand on the screen and prayed along, keeping her eyes closed except for those peeks to see if the preacher was keeping his eyes closed, too.

She had this mental image of a tiny Jesus, wearing a white or blue robe and having a long brown beard just like in all those Jesus wall pictures. The tiny Jesus came and knocked on her sternum, and it had a tiny door knob. He twisted the door knob and opened her chest cavity up, revealing an empty, red fleshy altar where the heart was expected to be. She had no heart, just a hole. A hole perfectly sized for the tiny Jesus, halo and sandals and all, to climb in and sit.

So now that Jesus was in her, she expected to be changed like those people on the TV. But she felt exactly the same as before. She must've done it wrong. So, she tried again and again with different preachers on different shows and different channels. The preachers were weird, a little creepy, maybe. And what was that tiny Jesus doing sitting in her heart hole all day anyway? He must've got out to go do stuff, and that's why she was the same old Anarita. Or maybe he was never really there at all.

Anarita and the BLM Land

Anarita walked down the side of a sandy gully and up the other side. In the span of less than 50 steps, 50 breaths, she had passed from "her" land to no man's land, or rather, BLM land. No fence, no post with pink flag, nothing that she could see marked the boundary. The boundary was a figment of imagination, just as was the idea that one side of the gully belonged to her family. It was only a delusion that people with sheets of paper and exchanges of money all agreed to together. Enough people or powerful enough people agreed there was a boundary where clearly none existed. What would the world be like if no one agreed to such things? Who was the first guy who came up with the ridiculous notion of owning something that had been there before him and would be there after him?

Her parents would own the land by the BLM land for a few years, via payments. For a few years, the family would camp there, gaze at stars, and watch the dogs run around. It was magical; it had petrified wood, free-range cattle would wander onto it, and a few times the Christmas Tree would come from it. But for Joe, the magic ended when he left a small trailer there with a few board games, camping gear, etc., and it was broken into and robbed. He sold the land that people agreed to imagine somehow belonged to him, and so they stopped imagining it.

The BLM land felt hotter and wilder than the other side of the gully. It had a faster, noisier wind. It had lots of holes in its loose dirt next to more Yucca than on "her" side. She heard a buzzing sound in the wind. She looked for the insects, but saw none. She examined the holes, and decided some animals had made them, but maybe not - they could've been dug, as if someone were looking for something, prospecting.

But the buzzing sounded more like whispering or chanting. Who had walked here before? Where they speaking to her now, threatening her for being on the wrong side of the gully? Or inviting her to stay and listen to some important message? A dust-devil jumped up a short ways ahead of her and then evaporated. She could see the dancer in the dust, encircling her. The haunting mesa was spooky but she didn't want to leave - she wanted to stay and listen, to solve the mystery, or become part of it.

Anarita and the Gray Fleece Jacket

Anarita had a gray fleece zip-up jacket that she loved. She picked it out on the annual August back-to-school clothes shopping day. Once a year, she got somewhere between $50-$100 in new clothes, and hand-me-downs from Victor, Alice, and Joe. She especially liked wearing her dad's old clothes. Over the years, she would accept his old jean jacket, Carhart jacket, flannel shirts, and hiking boots. Many Halloweens she wore his Hunter Orange, because half the time it snowed on Halloween anyway.

The gray fleece was carried from class to class in the junior high halls and worn on the walks to and from school and at lunch. Perhaps because she carried it around to so many places, one day she lost it and never found it again. When her dad found out, he was furious. At the dinner table, he yelled at her for a long time for losing the jacket, after already yelling at her for leaving her book bag by the door. He fumed for the rest of the evening, because once something set him off, there was no shutting it down. He yelled about irresponsibility and money and "How many times have I...." Maybe even something about earning money to buy a new jacket from her allowance, and probably 10 other things that she had done wrong in the past few years.

So she rechecked every place she could imagine that it might be, but to no avail. However, a few days later, her dad apologized to her at dinner. He said something about how she was usually responsible. Mom must have said something to him at a time when he was able to listen. But it was awkward and uncomfortable. It wouldn't undo the past days of her feeling guilty about losing it. No, she would rather he didn't apologize, because she still preferred the hard-fought and well-prepared fantasy that parents are always right and always know what to do. An apology did not fit that perception. Plus, he wasn't good at it and never would be.

Anarita and the Jungle Gym

Anarita Eleanor has no memory of when her parents bought the jungle gym. Presumably when she was a toddler, they bought the set with bars, swing, rope, etc., and her dad "did the job right" by pouring concrete around the posts so it would be sturdy. It wasn't a lousy plastic one that falls apart in one season. It was metal, with jangling chains almost like the ones on the swings at the elementary school. The chains sounded like summer even in winter.

One of her earliest memories, (sometime around '78/'79) is this: she is in the back yard sitting on the swing trying to make it go, but not remembering how to do it without having someone push her. Her brother Victor Cedric and his friend Jason are playing football. Those two, and many other neighborhood boys, spend hours playing football in the backyard. They seem to spend as much time developing a complicated but glorious playbook (all in their heads, not on paper) as they do playing "real games". Anarita asks her brother to help her swing, and he says something like, "In a minute," or "Later on, we're busy."

But, she hears him say, "Pump your legs back and forth." So that's what she does, and soon she is swinging all by herself! How did she hear just the right thing? Is it a Jungle Gym Miracle? Or was she just remembering a lesson temporarily forgotten?

That jungle gym was a purposeful and wise investment for her parents Alice and Joe. It was a tool to keep the kids in their own yard instead of unknown, unwatched locales around the neighborhood as much as possible. For probably a decade, Anarita and Victor, but especially Anarita, would play with neighborhood kids on the jungle gym. They swung, jumped, swayed, climbed, attacked, conspired, imagined, hung, tickled, kicked, and pulled there.

Slowly it decayed, losing its appendages one by one until all that was left were the bars. Then, the bar in the middle developed its first hole from rusting away, and she and her friends got to work picking and prying at the bar's weakness. Alice didn't want the kids to do that, but they persisted until the first bar was broken and gone. It was only the first; others followed, and then one day the jungle gym was dug up and grass seed was planted in the bare spots where children had played the grass to death year after year. Some of the bare patches would persist for a few years in memory of the jungle gym. The yard was so big and empty without it. But, it had done its job and served well.

Anarita remembered the gym and mused, "More kids should be so lucky as to play on jungle gyms."

The tiny fish who saw a stone fall

I went and stood on the dock
And tossed a rock
A smooth, flat stone

I let it go with sprite
And it skipped joyfully on the water
And then it sank

A tiny fish saw it fall
And wondered at a thing that should be down
Coming from up

The flat stone swayed slightly
Side to side in the current
Until it came to rest in the sandy bottom

The shiny sand popped playfully
Up and around the stone and resettled
Covering part of the stone

The tiny fish saw that the stone
Was like any other to its right or left.
Had they all come from up?

Then the tiny fish had a big thought
That it had never had before
It wondered as to its own origin.

Did I come from up, too
And what is up, after all?
And the little fish felt unsettled.

It swam to the stone to investigate
Not knowing what it looked for
And it wondered why is there a stone at all?

And why is there a little fish
Worrying about the stone that came from up?
Neither the joyful stone nor playful sand would answer.

So then the little fish swam up
To see where the stone had begun to fall.
Its eyes breached the water just barely.

Over and over again it exerted itself
To go up and see into the heaven
But it could not understand what it saw.

Nothing in the up made sense
To the tiny little fish
No matter how long or hard it looked.

The up was blurry and bright
And full of objects that had no words
And its very matter was foreign.

The little fish was dismayed
At its failure to understand the up
And regretted wondering about the stone.

So the tiny fish went back to the down
And tried to forget its wonder
And its big thought it had never had before.

It thought perhaps it was not for little fish
To understand the up
Or to know why little fish and stones were.

Then night came and the tiny fish
Found its place to be still until the light returned.
And it wondered if there was a why at all.

In the dark it couldn’t really see the stone
Or the sand, or even the water.
But it knew that all these things were there.

Maybe the up was like the dark
Thought the little fish
It just obscured what was always there

Little fish’s heart lightened with the idea
That it didn’t need to see in the dark
Or understand the up to know something.

Gradually the water became light
Along with the tiny fish’s heart
And it felt joyful like the stone

And it felt playful like the sand, too
Because an even bigger thought had
Come to the tiny little fish.

There are some things I know
Because I was meant to know them
And I can look inside or outside and know them.

There are some things I have no words for
And that I can never describe
But they are still real.

On the dock I came again at dawn
And saw a little fish swimming
Happily against the stream

And unknowingly in that instant
I shared a thought with the tiny fish,
A big or tiny thought about God.

And we both were happy.