My visit with Sarah

Twenty four hours ago I might have been pleased with myself for groping my way to pen and pad through the work strewn room at 4 am.

But that was before Sarah.

It was a visit I dreaded and desired since hearing that my friend's granddaughter had lost both optic nerves by a gun badly handled. I'd last seen Sarah in passing, as she kissed her granny through the car window, her bleached bangs screaming wild. The way news of family filters through friends, I knew her as the wayward child. What would I, mother of sons, think to say, or do, in the presence of this newly blind young woman?

She was resting, down the hall, as we came and sat and wrapped our hands around wet glasses. Her mother's even keel belied her taut vigilance, bound to the sudden, changeable winds. What choice did she have in a home with a child who wasn't always keen on living?

Someplace within the lull of our murmurings, Sarah had joined us. She was curled in a bundle of gray hoodie, jeans, and black converse sneakers. We talked around and past her for awhile, swirling our best intentions her way like dervishes on tiptoe. When we lighted on braille and her new teacher, the tools came out and Sarah showed us the fingerwork she'd practiced.

It was really Sarah who broke the ice. "Show Susan the notebook, Mom -- maybe we can do the thing with random pages." I inched toward the lovely girl with auburn hair and dark glasses, starstruck by her grit and grace.

So we did the drill. She took each page I handed her and went to work, tenderly teasing the alphabet from tiny bumps, accepting me like the great aunt who passes through town on business. But this was not my business, it was hers, and she had her plans.

"After I learn the braille, I want to get good at cane walking and how to cook and do laundry so I can help my mom around here. I'll probably go to school in Pittsburgh -- I think it will be good to meet some other blind people. I don't know anyone who's blind."

And neither did I, but now, it seems, I do.

Something in Sarah reminds me of Dave, best friend of one of my boys. Dave ROTC'd his way through college, served and blogged his way through an Iraq tour and ended up, miraculously, alive. Both of them exude a sort of ironic alertness to the present, tense as it may feel from the fallout of choices they did and did not make. Their words carry the intelligent lilt of skepticism; their humor takes you in stride.

Her mom brought her a crisp new dollar, which Sarah began to fold and crease and fold again as talk turned to watches that speak and pills that dull the relentless pain of bullet wounds. Maisie, the golden mutt, bellied up for scratches on the braided rug. Voilà! Sarah's origami creature, a wee elephant that couldn't be spent in a million years, landed in my palm. "Every waiter says the same thing when I leave a row of these on the table," she says, pleased and weary. "I'll never be able to spend that tip."

It was time to go, my pachyderm a gift to cherish, a parting sack of chocolate eggs in shiny foil tucked in Sarah's pocket. We stood and hugged and said the normal things. "So good to see you, Sarah."

And Sarah said, "good to see you too, as the saying goes."

New Yorker 7.21.08

I reserve the right to be as offensive as I want in my cartoons, and to exaggerate however I please -- but I want my cartoons to work, to be good cartoons. A cartoon that fails to communicate its message in a way that readers understand is nothing more than a bad cartoon.
Daryl Cagle political cartoonist

If The New Yorker wants to get into the political cartoon business, it ought to hire some political cartoonists.
Ted Rall Association of American Editorial Cartoonists

If you're spending time on this, it must be summer!
Signe Wilkinson editorial cartoonist

Now that we've had our group fainting spell over the latest New Yorker cover, our bloggers exhausted, our pundits redundant, our analysts spent: this might be a time to wonder... what was that exactly?

Did all the huffiness and bilge amount to much besides the artist (what's his name?) getting a boot of notoriety and the rest of us (who are we again?) lavishly spinning our spokes?

Will a single voter change course because of this picture? Will the bungled satire cause two exhaustively scrutinized citizens to thicken up their skin against the muddy season? And if they do, so long as they keep their bright minds on the prize, this apparently being our collective inalienable freedoms to frazzle ourselves silly over words and pictures if we want to, what's the harm in that?

Sunseeds

I'm at a hospital or rehab center, visiting family. Simultaneously, I'm in Greece or Isreal with O & N, my niece and nephew. One wing of the building is noticeably run down; it's where the welfare patients live. I want to fix this, eying the foyer to the wards, wallpaper stained and peeling. I could pull down that paper, fix and paint the walls. I have skills in this work. Surly the authorities would approve. I consider getting permissions as I shrug off the fact that tackling this job will keep me inside for days.

O & N clamor for the great outdoors. I feel them pull my hands and laugh and clown around me. I reach like a woman obsessed for a peeling corner of pink flowered paper and rip away a good sized chunk, blinking with equal satisfaction and dread. As I wonder if the institution might finish the job, a couple of nun type characters show up, nod their approval, leave the completion to me.

The foyer has modest walls and painted ceiling. It opens into a giant hall with infinite ceilings that, lo and behold, are plastered with more flowered paper. Walls and ceiling have cracks and grooves begging a professional's hand. Away I peel into the vast hall, vaguely cognisant that papered walls need endless scrubbing before the paint goes on.

The place takes on a dingy feel, a musty smell, a hopeless sound of muffled laughter as two Israeli bikers rev up along the sparkly sea with its blinding sand reflections. I hope and hope, against all evidence, for rescue, working wildly, perplexed by my choices.

In the end, I wake up, panting, aware. My bondage to pink fading flowers never was nor evermore shall be.

Womb II

Once upon a cell, you did divide. You piled up cells unthinking, happy to comply with nature's plan. But even in her womb, your mama's booze, your dad's cigar, your older brother's angst took shots at you. Or maybe you were met by gentle souls who jellied up your appetite for calm.

Infinite possibility flooded by finite mitigations nobody planned so precisely as to ready you for this, life on the outside.

I call it second womb.

Once here, you would build your perfect womb -- your well stocked home, diversions and routine -- to serve more cell divides. But with second womb construction and maintenance, scant time leaks out to lube your passage into the wilderness you're bound for the minute ovum joins sperm.

We're conceived as cells. We grow more cells in utero, and once outside we pad our cells with matter no one asked for. We form thick walls around the impetus, the spark of life, the only part of us that's born to thrive.