the receipt

Yesterday was my younger son’s seventeenth birthday.  A busy work day, then an emergency secret mission, then quickety-snip home to clean the bathroom and slap some icing on the cake before our guests arrived.  And then, in that quiet moment when I stole into my bedroom to wrap the gifts, I found a little time bomb.

I’d pulled out a bag from the gift wrapping stash—one of those high quality brown paper shopping bags.  Fancy font: Sur la table.  I did not remember buying anything there, although I do love looking at their beautiful things whenever we take the train to Seattle.  There was a receipt at the bottom of the bag.  I had a queer sense of foreboding as I looked down at it, as if some part of my mind remembered.  Looking at the list of items purchased, pie molds, ice tray, cupcake papers (“I LOVE”), only half my mind knew.  Like the icing I'd just dumped out of the pan, flowing thick and slow, the words on that list slowly moved into meaning, began to construct that story.  I could hear the chatter in the kitchen as if it were very far away, and moved, arranged, my eyes upward, to the top of the receipt, and saw the address, Portland, OR.  The date.  The significant date.  And then the customer name below it.  Not my name.  The significant name.

So many little items, shards, evidence, in my house, hide, waiting to remind me of that time, that trip, that loss.  And I thought, if I were a poet, this moment, this receipt, would be a poem.

And I wanted to tell someone.  I wanted to make that moment into a poem before I left my quiet room and joined the cooking and warmth and laughter.

I’d spent the first part of the day in the sound booth while a couple hundred high school singers rehearsed onstage with a guest conductor, an all-day workshop.  I was monitoring the microphones, but only just barely, because this event runs itself.  But, still, I could not leave the room.  So when my coworkers stopped in to chat and tell their stories in this place, removed and dark, I listened.  

Tensions have been escalating.  There has been a long litany of stories, and yesterday I heard yet another tale of woe about one particular person, one manipulative, powerful, predatory person who stirs up trouble and then sits back and watches the chaos unfold, somehow managing to look innocent.  I said all my usual things, shared my own strategies, listened, and sympathized.  I wondered again whether highly unstable people cluster in academia, if rates of mental illness are higher here than in the general workforce, or if the batshit crazies are everywhere.

When I finally left the sound booth that afternoon I was wound up from the stories and too much coffee.  The sun was shining for the first time in weeks, and I felt like Mole (“Bother!”) giving up the spring cleaning. While I was scurrying to buy the birthday gift, I was enjoying the sun, but also thinking about dangerous people and wondering about tools for protecting ourselves.  As I pulled into the parking lot at Secret Mission Central, I spotted the corner where I’d stopped two years ago on a Christmas shopping trip.  I had pulled over the car to take a phone call from that particular friend who in that moment was a distressed father, grieving over his suicidal child, hospitalized.  There are so many reminders around town, places where I had conversations. 

I notice the places and remember, but that time is removed.  The receipt was different, real and concrete.  When my friend Linda arrived at the house, I was still holding it.  I held up the paper and smirked, and she looked at it.  Then her eyes got wide, and she said, “You should burn it!” We laughed and joined the kids making dinner.

We talked all evening about the state of education. 

“Were we that stupid in college, Nicole?  I don’t think we were that stupid.” 

“Oh, right, Mom.  What do you expect her to say, ‘Yes, we were definitely stupid!’” 

“Well, sure we had our moments, but we also had humility back then!  Less arrogance, for sure!”

I told amusing stories about the class I’m auditing.  Our children told amusing stories about the classes each are taking at their respective schools. 

So much laughter! 

We told stories about that day my son was born, right there at home. 

“It was like today, wasn’t it?”
“No, it was misty.”
“Not rainy, though.”
“No. No rain, just quiet mist.” 

Linda and I were with each other at the births of each of our younger babes, just a few months apart.  Linda’s daughter asked questions. “I should take notes for future reference,” she said.  I didn’t know whether she meant for when she had her own babies, or for her anatomy and physiology class.  While we answered questions about birth, trying not to get too gruesome, the birthday boy himself sort of checked out.  “Are we done yet?” he asked in a low, bemused voice. 

We laughed.  We laughed about his marathon sleeping habits as a baby. In her joyful, musical voice, my friend Linda said, “You were the most relaxed and rested mother of a newborn I’ve ever known, Nicole!  I’d come over, and you’d be singing and folding laundry and baking bread, and you’d say, ‘Oh, the baby’s still sleeping!’”  And she giggled a sparkling giggle. 

I remembered my midwife assuring me that 18 – 20 hours of sleep each day was within the normal range, but warning me that children who were big sleepers developed at a normal rate.  “He’ll roll over and crawl and walk on time, and you need to watch out, because you won’t expect it when he’s spent his whole life sleeping!”  Linda’s daughter had been on a “ship’s schedule – four hours awake, four hours asleep, around the clock.”

And then there was cake and singing and candles and more laughter.

And then we said goodbye.

Before I scooted to work early this morning for another long day of singing, I looked at that slip of paper again, and it was just a piece of paper.  It did not stir up that deep well of stillness.  I will put it in the box with the other mementos, the books and CDs and train ticket stubs and notes.  I don’t know why I keep these things, but it seems important, the way that poem moment was important and real. 

It’s Saturday, so there is only one colleague here, a curmudgeonly music history professor who is tired of music – here, ostensibly, to work on a book proposal.  He brought me a fritter and coffee and only one tale of woe, political, but authentic, not one born of manufactured drama.  Linda’s daughter will be finishing her SAT about now, and my boy is, I hope, mowing the lawn.  The singers are gathering again for their afternoon session, and my soup is getting cold on the desk next to me as I type.  Mundane moments pile up.  And the dangerous people are, for now, out of range.