We are in week #2, and this week the older kids are working on plots. We were graced by write Janae Marks who offered incredible, irreplaceable advice yesterday (of which I took plenty of notes). This morning, I'm having kids pull 10 details from their story and asking them to play with language, a workshop I've done with poetry, but not fiction. I was going to go forward with poetry, but it led itself to short fiction, of which I plan to workshop and play with more tomorrow. Writing from what we know. Imagining new worlds and possibilities. This is a goal for Wednesday. He came home a little late, and didn’t know if the boys would have already left. Adolescent boys: girlfriends, jobs, soccer practice - all three always on the go.
That morning, before work, the tensions were running high and all he could think about was how horrible he was at parenting…the deterioration over the years. Nakupenda, not in action, Manaika, once a conceptualization. He once gave good hugs, but now his moves went forward with trepidation…more caution.
When they were little, he used to tell them they had a superpower, Ubuntu, but that togetherness faded after middle school. This morning he lost his cool, and as he pulled into the driveway, he expected another rant from one of them: how unfair he was, what a jerk, how he was way too strict.
Instead, he found a note with abbreviation.
W.L.U., elephant shoe.
All three arrived at different times and the adaptations were many. Being a dad was always like sliding the glass door, always just enough to let them in and have the powers to knock down walls. He sought empathy whenever there was an altercation. Assimilation was never easy, but in his heart he had one hope: to draw lines for possibility and another start.
Yes, he was White. Born that way. An ethnic mutt of European and Russian blood. He chose to be a loner, too, and was never one that desired relationships, but instead liked being in his house with books, pens, and ideas. Funny how humanity races with historical spices, and how fresh flowers grow out of notebooks where stories were once composed. He understood the years of stories drafted in tars and feathers, the politically exploited pastures of stolen rice and bulldozed lawns. Now, 25 pairs of shoes sat in the front lobby awaiting hands to grip them and to head outside for another adventure
Memories of djembe drums, Mandingo and Congolese dreams, not one of them his. He learned to call avocados butter pears and to make every morning a ritual of dance and song.
Homes provide sturdy bricks for pathways. Stability arrives from sitting together on patios and sharing the moments of a day. Forgiveness isn’t always red, white, and blue.
So, he held the note a little closer to read once more,
W.L.U. - Elephant shoe
One of them had started to make a stew of pulled chicken and beans. The sauce wafted in family tradition. He figured he was going to make cheeseburgers and call it a night, but it seemed dinner was already prepared. It just needed to be heated up.
The fight was likely to continue, because that is the way it’s always been. America. The United States. The complexity of Lady Liberty finding justice in the land of the Jerry Springer circus.
Forgiveness, though. He wasn’t expecting that so soon.
