Co-parenting

I am often frustrated when I discover that some long held, cherished idea of mine has been successfully published as a book or article by someone else.  But this time, my mom-brain is just grateful that someone else had the time and energy to follow my thoughts to their logical conclusion.  It taks a village to raise a child.  Very few of us live in villages anymore.  Extended families are far away.  Some of us suffer through parenthood alone, while others give up on it entirely.  Grist, one of my favorite web pages, posted an article on a wonderful "Hey you got peanut butter on my chocolate," solution.

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-12-14-gink-how-childfree-can-be-parents-too

Unprepared for Poetry

I didn’t mean to go out to lunch today. Last night we worked on the budget, and eating out was clearly not in it. But it was one o’clock, and I hadn’t eaten and I ran for the bus this morning without grabbing anything to eat later. And, to use an old fashioned word, the "vibes" in the office were less than harmonious. I needed food and air, so into the near freezing wind I marched. And was promptly stopped by Vladimir from Port au Prince, Haiti. Or at least that’s how he introduced himself. But since I couldn’t tell where his eyes were looking (they didn’t wander, on the contrary, they seemed fixed in position, but he wasn’t blind) so I couldn’t quite make eye contact to test his honesty. His accent, while not exactly local, didn’t have any of the cadence of the Caribbean, but I decided that today, openness was more important than cageyness, and chose to accept the situation at face value.


I shook hands with Vladimir, who promised that if I would wait for 45 seconds, he would make a poem from my name that would mean something new each day. Then he handed me a polished amethyst worry stone and a packet of envelopes and wrote my poem with hardly a pause, moving closer to me to block the wind when I shivered. I tried to block the thought that whatever the poem meant today, tomorrow it would be a reminder of having my pocket picked, and watched him write my poem in a barely legible scrawl across a Japanese flash card. He pulled the flash card off its ring and placed it in one of the Japanese envelopes. When I asked if his poems were for the sake of art or for sale, he said he left it to me.

“Some people give 50 cents, some $5. I can’t say what it is worth to you, and maybe weren’t prepared and can’t give anything. It’s just how much you want to help me out.” I dug in my bag and found $3. Vladimir gave me a hug and as I walked away I tried not to wonder if I was going to get lice.  Hey, all that human connection stuff doesn't come to me easily.

Here is his poem:

Gain of a cosmic and intelligent worth, To
Embrace the ambilateral knowledge
Mighty sword and a seat of solitude when in an hour you
Must accept the beauty that unfolds them both into one, from
A surrendering force of a delightful promise to keep, like a mountain of dreams.

This and an amethyst worry stone cost me $3.  After that, I got a tofu Rueben on artisan bread and a fancy hot chocolate. It cost $11 and I put another buck in the tip jar.  Which part of that $15 was best spent?

Post Script: Ambilateral IS a word. I had to look it up. It is an adjective meaning, “relating to both sides.”