“Candy Land, Life, Monopoly,” my son replied
when I asked “Do you remember us playing marathon tournaments
of board games when you were a kid?”
This, on the way to the airport
where he will fly to California,
back to his home and his work.
He is vexed by my asking such a trivial question
while his thoughts swirl around his travel plans, the work that awaits him,
the transition from his visit with me to his life on the West Coast....
Yet, on his face, I see the boy who loved to play,
who kept his Monopoly money in neat piles, color-coded
and at the ready to buy another house or hotel; who outwitted
me at Checkers, making kings that jumped up and over
and trapped me in the back row; and I, the Queen of Ping Pong,
falling in defeat to the child who outwitted me with speed and stamina.
Later that night, after he called to tell me he’d arrived safely,
I thought about all the years I read to him, lying on the bed
with Babar the Elephant and Conan the Barbarian.
After he learned to read, I remember thinking, “I’ve lost my job,”
but no, he brought home “The Hound of the Baskervilles,
and we took turns reading to each other.
We know our children for so long as children
that when they grow up, we relate to what we know best
about them. It seems unfair to them, yet inevitable to us.
We look for some overlap, something familiar to connect
the past to the present. What in the man is still like the boy?
And I remember: whenever he visits, we talk about books
and he reads to me. And, though he doesn’t call to me from the next room,
he calls.
© Evie Safran, 2016
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| Mother and her child reading scripture Photo by Dr. Avishai Teiher Pikiwiki Israel from Wikimedia Commons |
1 comment:
Sweet. Warm. But hard to see this as a poem.
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