Shifting Sands

By September of 1958, our landscape shifts again. Pogo joins the seminary. The day Kako is allowed to join us for a visit is the first day the whole family has ever been together. We celebrate Ro’s first birthday.

•••

Pogo went to Nazareth Hall which I’m shocked does not have palm trees and sand like Book of Knowledge Nazareth. It is sad he has to go because Pogo has a very funny humor to rhyme things and make faces and jokes and I was Reen-Bean and he was Pogo-Bogo now just a hole at the dining room table. Also hard to sing Deck The Halls with Boston Charlie and Be Kind To Your Web-footed Friends because he has special harmony so a hole in the songs now too. And Family Journal.

But Tom is still here and not mean like Skip. He loves our family and made our family coat of arms and drew our family tree down through the ages.

He’s also smart for fixing things and business. Last summer he made up a business to paint everybody in our neighborhood’s address on their steps and got money. Now, Junior Achievement with first aid kits he sells. He makes a mint for presents for everyone and to take girls out. The best of Tom is this one time.

•••

“Wake up.”

Tom shakes me in the dark.

“The watertower, remember?”

I jump into my jeans and shirt. In short moments we reach a cherished place: the Washburn Watertower.

A massive masterpiece of art-deco, circled by Oscar-looking men with swords who guard its water, it stands high on a hill over the green treetops, domed like an observatory, like a crown in the skyline, like the head of the Pope, surveying the surrounding homes under the wide flat sky.

(Under the swordsmen we would stand, under the very points of their swords, pretend that they would drop them on us, pretend there was a mad scientist inside who wanted to rule the world; something more valuable than water had to be behind the wide huge mysterious metal bank-vault door.)

At the foot of this frightening fascinating overwhelming presence indicated by my big brother’s pointing finger—his arm, straight and strong as a fine white baseball bat, quivering ever so slightly under the weight of the dirty canvas bag smudged with ink and mudballs full of morning papers fresh and curling slightly in the dawn damp—is what he’d spotted yesterday, told me about last night, brought me here this morning to behold. Huddled by the watertower steps, like a small forgotten child’s fur slipper, teeny ears thin and pink as little fingernails, twitchy nose quick as her heart, cotton-tail no bigger than a Q-tip top: a baby bunny, her button eye filmed with the shock of abandonment.

She is small and soft as a baby’s shoe, trembling, mute with patience, as I under the massive weight of Church ways and family ways; and Tom noticed it, wandered off his route to look away at the vista, and yet looked down too, to find this small thing at his feet, trembling like his little sister who longed to soothe her own thittering heart.

Together we bring a shoebox and flannel pajama bottom, pluck some grass and dandelion for a little home. He lets me put her in among his ribby socks, among his polo shirts she would be safe.

How did my mother find her—was I soaking a rag in milk, and did she ask why? Was I so joyful that she read it in my face: I have a little charge to nurse, and I will show you just how loving’s done, since you forgot.

Return it to the wild, she said, you cannot raise it here. Touch it and the mother will abandon it.

The following dawn, laying the little brown breathing fur by the concrete steps, I wonder, “Who touched me?”