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anne: if you died tomorrow, your dog would care.
me: thanks.
anne: i'm thinking about starting a greeting card company.
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-I'm in Boulder. I came into Boulder to find a glass knob, one for the scratchy green side table we found at the estate sale yesterday. I found a bright ceramic one with flowers painted on it, in a bin gaily labeled Recycled! at a store, which made me feel vaguely heroic. No, no bag please, I said loftily, waving away the saleswoman. What, she replied, you're just going to carry that out?
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I'm walking back to where I hope my car is when I notice a Victoria's Secret across the street, with huge posters of women in lingerie with pained expressions on their faces. They look like the kinds of women who have really clean cars and cute vintage teapots and give you that look when you ask to borrow a pen at the bank.
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I'm looking at these women and wondering why they never have tan lines- do they tan naked? How can you take yourself seriously in a career that requires you to tan naked?- when I notice the kid's playset right in front of the store, in the middle of the shopping center. It has a huge plastic turtle with a somber expression and a couple of hollow plastic logs laid end on end, all on that scratchy green cushioned carpet that I assume makes all the difference between your kid bouncing harmlessly and breaking their neck.
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A couple of boys are playing halfheartedly on the logs while their moms- who look like they tan naked too- chat on phones and blow on coffee. They smile white smiles across phone lines and their sons cling to the back of the turtle as if he's holding up the world, and I wonder what on earth it is like to have children, what it feels like to eject a human being from your body with one guttural roar, whether you can see your hands in theirs from the very beginning.
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I wonder whether it's terrifying, whether your first thought after this mystery is, What were we thinking? followed by, What now? I wonder how you love them before you know them, what do you talk to them about after they start listening and before they start to speak, why the first thing they know to do is cry, how you begin the work of teaching them everything else there is.
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I watch the women's brown hands gesticulate wildly in the air, the brown woman-stomachs stretched out behind them with labels like Very Sexy!, and I think about how it all boils down to the kids stumbling through these shiny plastic logs in front of them, their blonde cowlicks disappearing, reappearing.
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One woman tosses her coffee cup in a recyclables container. She loved a man and this little-man appeared just months later. I wonder about the state of her heart after doing this kind of double-time, whether she stays awake at night sometimes, wondering who her kid is becoming, whether he can make it on his own, whether he's going to be okay when they're gone. I wonder if I could stand those kinds of questions.
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The other woman stays a few minutes longer and then leaves with her toddler in tow, probably because I've been staring at them for almost ten minutes. She's still talking on the phone but her hand closes reflexively over his before they cross the street, and they go, her with all her son-love and him with his blank spaces to be filled, and I turn and cross the other way with just my recycled knob, my gently-used heart.
