tuckova

The Legend of the Magic Bed

Squire Tuck returns from his week away at camp today, and I told him I'd clean his room while he was gone, because it is beyond the skills of a ten-year-old to handle the mess in there, and sometimes you need a fresh start.

As payment for my cleaning, I am stealing this story that I found in one of his notebooks, which I believe he wrote last year, and which is totally him in a nutshell. Two pages and he's nowhere near the point, and he seems to have abandoned or forgotten that he was even writing a story, and yet it has a certain undeniable charm for me anyway.

When I was in third grade our schooll took a field trip to a place very close to a very old castle to witch we one day went and I there learned about "The Legend of the Magic Bed."

The castle was very old, probably used in the 16th century, in witch Legends, Myths, and Folk Tales were once the true warmer of slaves, beggers, and other people.

Here Beggins the Legend:

In the 16th century when the castle was full of people, a servant ran to the King with a letter in his hand, and gasped: "Your Majesty, Your Majesty! A moment please." So the King folowed the servant into the "Imperial Letter Office" and read:

Dear Oulac the Imperial,

I was just going to ask my trusty servant Ivan to make me some strong coffee when he reminded me that I was to visit you for three days expect me in four hours.

Love,
Mistress Lentantribe

The servant looked at the king.

weekend

We went to the cotthut this weekend. Squire Tuck and I chainsawed the rest of the wood from the massive apple tree pruning. We read a bunch ("My Side of the Mountain" is an excellent cotthut book). Friar Tuck got the interior support beams done so now we don't have to worry about the new roof falling on our heads. It was altogether a good weekend.

smarter than a bag of hair

On Tuesday we took Squire Tuck to the doctor, where they determined that he is not brain dead. Sometimes I have trouble deciding whether I am more frustrated by American doctors ("Well, either your hearing loss is permanent or your hearing will come back sooner or later") or Czech doctors. As she fixed the funny hat to his head the nurse told him that he looked like "Little Red Riding Hood".

I told him how in high school and college when I had my hair super short people would call me "sir" and it's nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. And he heard that, I really think he did, but he also is seeing a summer of sweaty long hair stretch in front of him and he said, "When I come home from school today, I want you to cut my hair."

I was a bit sad about it, because his hair is beautiful and healthy and when he jumps up in the air it's the flowing California hair I will never have and part of the reason I used to shave my head: HA. Can't have it, never wanted it anyway. And I hate to think of him doing something because he's giving in to someone else's standards, or even just because he's tired of feeling like he has to justify his own. So it sort of hurt me to get the clippers out.

But on the other hand I absolutely understand the feeling that there are so many things you can't control, so many assumptions people will make no matter your best efforts, and so many times that you're so twisted up in your head that you don't even know whether your need for change is internal or external, but you know you need it and you need it now.

So he got in the tub and I got out the clippers and bzzzzt and it was all gone. We swept it up into a bag to take to the cottage, because human hair repels many critters and it may be nice for the birds, although I think we're late for this year. It's weird to see his skull shape again after a year of growing his hair. If he grows up into a bald man he'll have nothing to fear, as he really has a lovely cranium. His face looks so big, and a bit older, and he seems to have grown into my stubborn jawline in the last 12 months, too. He seems happy about it. I asked him if he worried he might regret it, and he was like: Mom. It is hair, it grows back.

I would maybe eventually like to be smart; not take every event as if it were laden with echoing meaning. I would maybe like to see each moment at its actual value. I would also like to get over this itchy feeling that if I shaved my hair off, I would somehow become as clear-headed as my son seems to me today.

 

**

after years of carrying this
"it's not heavy, it's bulky"
the climb inevitable
and the fall apparently certain

hitchcock filmed my nightmares
and greek myths dictated my burdens
and surely opera played a part

the hardest part of parenting
is not what you expected;
it is not what you didn't expect;
it is that you get both together

the fear of edges and falling over
the overwhelming guilt for doing what i
always knew i would do

you can have help but you must
ask the right person
the precisely worded question
a verbal key in a maze of locks

after years of carrying this
surprise and expectation and
the constant fear of falling

every time you remember
"they look like big, good, strong hands"
you burst into tears. but they did
look like strong hands. they were.

silver, copper, gold

i have accumulated more gray hair in the last two months than i had over the whole year. there are maybe 20 now, i think. it's not like a million but it's more than i can count anymore. i almost can't pull them out to get a closer look at them, so tricky are they with the light. i think they are very pretty and sparkly and when i am a few years older i imagine that crows will drop from nowhere to have a look at my pretty shiny silvery business. if they made a nest there, i think it would be a bit much, but maybe they will like, take some hair home and make sparkle nests.

i want to take a hairbrush to the cottage and leave little gifts of silver and copper for Friar Tuck's birds. he wants to build a birdbath for them which is very cute but it's like: babysteps, my friend. first we build the cottage. "we" meaning "Friar Tuck" since i would have run down to the foreign employment office and hijacked myself some hardworking ukranians about six months ago, if it were up to me. i am good at planning and measuring and carrying and i will go where you point me until your fingers fall off, but i am not a constructor. a boa constructor, maybe. but not of buildings.

i have learned to pitch a tent faster than a hissy fit, though.

i've been thinking a lot this past month about how i define love and how really, really hard i am on people, how high i set the bar. it is one thing to set the bar high for oneself but it is a bit messed up to expect other people to feel like jumping over your standards. i tend to need to learn the same lesson a few hundred times, as my czech teacher will sadly confide to you, which is partly the fault of czechs for saying cottage differently depending on whether it is a cottage or whether you are going to a cottage or whether you went to a cottage. but it is largely the fault of my brain. it's probably because i used to see the same movies 10 or 20 times and i've got the idea that like, wow, i felt so good when i learned that lesson: let's learn that lesson again! which when it's czech is bad enough, but when it's like, life lessons, again and again is brain-gnashingly hard sometimes.

my father once told me that i like to punch myself in the face because it feels so good when i stop.

so anyway about love, and it was friday night, and i was crying in a pub, which is always so awkward. but i feel like i'm finally making the things i learned five years ago actually stick, which things boil down to: i am going to keep the bar right exactly where it is and i am going to keep trying really hard to clear the bar of my own standards and i am going to keep trying really, really hard to quit watching to see who jumps over the bar as well or better than i want to, and eventually i hope to bits that i will stop wanting anybody to notice what a good bar-jumper i am, because it's that moment when you turn to check your audience that you inevitably crash into something.

there was this book published here, it was written by a lawyer, and the bio section had translated "he stopped going to bars in 1987" but they really meant he had passed the bar. i don't mean either of those kinds of bars, though. nor gold bars, which are also called bullion, with which we make gold soup.

i'm older. i feel okay about it. i have a better family than i deserve, a better job than i ever hoped to get, a better life than i planned back when i thought you could make everything happen by planning it. and i am not myself perfect but i still feel young enough that striving for perfection seems like a worthwhile pursuit, like not in sight of the finish line but well enough clear of the starting line that it seems worthwhile to keep running.

crush as in grapes

so you're nine, and you're visiting your friend, and you're both kissing the picture of david cassidy on her sister's record, which you have borrowed for the purpose of kissing this picture. to be honest you don't get it, but it seems expected, and since she's nice enough to play with you, despite being popular (which you are not), kissing a picture seems a small price.

or age thirteen with another friend after you both have finished singing all your favorite songs into your tickle deodorant, you talk about how much you both love whichever star, which in this memory is paul stanley, the guy from KISS with the star on his right eye. you do not actually know much about paul stanley but having a crush on him seems, again, important. his favorite color, you sigh, is purple, which is also your favorite color, and you love him so much, you were made for loving him, baby.

and this goes on, through junior high and high school, these obsessive crushes that you do not get and yet become increasingly adept at faking, since you are an outstanding liar. the whole thing seems really pointless: what possible purpose does liking someone who does not like you back, who possibly does not know you exist, serve? and then there are practicalities, like they're already married or they're about a thousand years old or whatever.

except now you are thinking about it, that what these crushes did was train girls for the experience of unrequited love. it seems a stretch but you just learned that tickling trains you for combat so that crush on judson scott might have been helpful, if you hadn't been faking it.

if, for example, you had been trained for unrequited love in high school, it might not have messed you up so badly when that one man came to visit later, asked you to marry him, and then called you a week later (when he'd gotten back home) to discuss what to do on his upcoming date with a girl who he said was not as smart as you are but was there, which you were not. again you are fortunately good at faking your feelings, so you gave him some advice. a movie and a sunset, it was, a movie that required some hand-holding and a hill from which you had watched the sunset yourself: it was a great view. you generally try not to think about that phone call. it was, you imagine, what the ninth gate must be for people who had crushes on johnny depp.

and so anyway now you are older and your training in unrequited love has been basically like bloody mel gibson style slaughter when what you have ever wanted is some tickling. and you're noticing that you do better when you don't care what happens. when you like someone without thinking for a minute whether it is practical or feasible or reasonable or even right. and so what you are practicing now, you realize, is crushes. you still can't handle stars, because it's too much like artwork, which you love to admire but do not love to love. but it's the same feeling you observed in your friends those years ago: the desire to know everything. the feeling that every small thing is a window on further fascination. the near-complete detachment from caring whether the object reciprocates. the total disregard for practicality.

this is working pretty well for you. you had some questions this weekend over whether maybe it wasn't a little...skeevy... to objectify people like this. whether perhaps it wouldn't be healthier for you to want a return on your investments. whether it serves any purpose, since it's not like you can retroactively protect your damaged heart. but then you shoved some more wood in the chipper and thought about long fingers and puns and in jokes and how it's not really about you at all, these crushes, but about being a mirror for people who might otherwise be afraid to look at themselves and are therefore missing out on what you can see. it perhaps serves no purpose and it is certainly not practical, but it is, you have to admit, terribly fun.