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Letter from Joyce Archives
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The Ice Storm...
December
20, 2008
Dear Friends,
No bulletins about upcoming
workshops or publications this week -- or, strangely, thoughts on the
holiday season now upon us.
Events of the last few days have occupied my mind with other things. I
want to share with you two stories. One, written this morning in the predawn
hours, and printed below, is titled, "Ice Storm." The
other, from my book Domestic
Affairs, is called "Perilous
Journey." Written twenty four years apart, they both deal
with a theme well known to parents everywhere, of children at whatever
age -- and to anyone who ever loved someone: the fear of loss, and our
own inability to protect our children and ourselves from great and crushing
sorrow.
I am writing today -- uncharacteristically -- in a mood of sadness. I know it won't last forever, and I know it's a part of being alive, to feel this way. To all of you who are my readers and friends, I send warm greetings, deep appreciation for reading and caring about what I write, and my abiding interest in hearing from you. I hope the days ahead find you with those you love.
With friendship,
The Ice Storm...
Our family came to know Adam when he and my son Charlie were thirteen and fourteen years old -- both of them in the same class at a small alternative school in New Hampshire, where we lived then. Like my children, Adam had grown up in the country -- son of a carpenter and a teacher. Even at thirteen, I think he was taller than me: a large, affectionate,goofy kid incapable of entering a room without a happy commotion. Always grinning, reaching for whatever kind of baked goods might have come out of my oven recently, with a big voice that had deepened early and filled a room.
This school the boys attended was a ways from both our houses, so there was a lot of driving involved -- long, winding roads that were sometimes icy. I loved the school but hated the drive, always fearful of that too-frequent moment a person experiences in New England, in winter, when she can feel the wheels of her vehicle losing traction, and the car no longer moving in the intended direction. The part I always liked about that half hour drive to Charlie's old school -- Charlie's and his younger brother Willy's, both -- was how, driving them there, or, later, driving home, I often became invisible at the wheel. Many times, when I listened to the things they talked about -- sometimes school, sometimes friends, or girls, and even the unreasonableness of parents, though I was one myself -- I'd discover things about my son and his world that I would not have known otherwise.
Because he lived out in the country, and our house, since the divorce, was located in what, in New Hampshire, passes for a small city -- a place with a little more action -- Adam often stayed over with us. He and Charlie were skateboarders, and we had sidewalks where we lived, and stretches of tar and concrete for practicing jumps. Charlie and Adam spent hours doing that. Sometimes, sitting on our porch with my coffee, I'd hear that instantly recognizable sound of ball bearings and wheels coming down the street, the slap of the board when one of the boys executed a jump, and there they'd be, in their big baggy pants that stayed up by magic, was all I could figure, and their backwards caps and the shoes they'd have done without food to purchase, they were so essential for the sport.
Not just Charlie, but all of us loved Adam. He hadn't heard that teenagers were supposed to be hostile or diffident. He always looked happy, and endlessly enthusiastic -- about the meal I'd served even if it was nothing more than pasta with a little canned tomato sauce, or the weather, or our dog Opie, or whatever project he and Charlie had cooked up that day. He was comfortable giving a person a hug. No doubt because his father was a carpenter, he was also a handy person, and ready to offer assistance to someone like me, a single mother living in a big old house where things often broke. Even at fourteen, he had a manly, almost protective way about him. If a door at our house needed oiling, he noticed that, and went for the WD-40. If I was carrying something heavy, he took it from my arms.
When winter came, the boys' sport shifted to snowboarding, an equal passion. The sport was expensive, and nobody had much money, but they'd gotten passes to the mountain through their school. The problem was Adam had no snowboarding pants. So one Saturday, we all headed out to the fabric store and bought a few yards of bright orange water repellent fabric. No pattern existed, in the book, for men's pants, so I improvised, creating a design drawn onto newspaper, with an insert in the crotch that I'd hoped might allow for more movement, during jumps. All afternoon, Adam sat at my old treadle machine, stitching the seams under my direction, until the great moment when he got to try on the pants.
To the rest of us, it seemed immediately apparent the project had not turned out well: the pants were tight in the butt, and baggy as a diaper in front -- about the least cool item of clothing a teenage boy could dream up. But as usual, Adam appeared happy and proud of our creation for him. He wore the pants, though I think they ripped on his first run, and not long after, his parents came up with a better substitute. But if they hadn't, he'd have made do.
The spring of the boys' eighth grade year, I made the decision to move to California. The idea of these best friends being parted was hard for them both, so I invited Adam to come out west with Charlie and me (Willy was travelling with his soccer team at the time, and Audrey was taking final exams) to check out the area together. We would combine a look at schools and houses with a trip to the Sierra mountains for a little West coast snowboarding, and to the Embarcadero of San Francisco, where the professional skateboarders whose names the boys knew well hung out.
I look back on that trip now with wonder, that I would have tried to pull off something like this: not only moving with my three children to a part of the country, three thousand miles from home, where I knew no one, but bringing two teenage boys out first, to function as my sidekicks and counselors in the project, navigating unfamiliar highways in a rental car, assessing possible housing options. To them of course, the most pressing question had to do with whether the skating was good, in the town we were checking out -- and it was. They were excited, too, about the prospect of late-season snowboarding on big west-coast mountains, though the cost of a ticket was so high, they pulled the hoods of their jackets over their faces and hunched down as low as they could -- not an easy task for a big-boned six footer like Adam -- to pass themselves off as twelve year olds.
Adam got a bad case of the runs on that trip, and ended up spending most of our time in the mountains lying on a cot in our motel room, clutching his stomach, but even so he put a positive attitude on things. "At least now I can say I've been to Tahoe," he told me, his voice uncharacteristically weak.
We got around, on that trip. The boys skated in San Francisco, and tried surfing at Stinson beach, though the water was frigid, and they whooped like cowboys as we sailed across the Golden Gate Bridge. Always one to give presents, Adam looked for a gift for his mother in the tourist shops along the piers. When I looked at houses, he assessed the quality of the construction, as his father must have taught him to do.
Madwoman that I was, I put money down on a house on that trip -- never mind that it cost twice what I could afford, and that I hadn't yet sold our house back home. Adam gave me a pat on the back. "You'll be fine, Joyce," he said. "It's going to be great for Charlie, living out here. This is the best skating ever."
Still, I knew how sad the boys were to be parted. "When you graduate from high school," I told Adam, "you can come and live with us."
Four years later, that's what happened. With two other friends, Adam made his way across the country in a fifteen year old Chevrolet that gave out on the last half mile leading to our house, and never ran again. The three of them moved in, and -- carless but cheerful -- found jobs at the local Jamba Juice. The get-up they had Adam wear, for his stint behind the counter making smoothees, reminded me a little of the snowboard pants, but as before, he didn't seem to mind looking goofy.
It is an aspect of parenthood that people don't talk about so much -- one of the great joys, in my opinion: the way, if you are lucky, and they make good choices in friends, your children bring these other children into your life -- first children, then young adults, and though they are other people's children, and you are not the parent, that in itself is one of the most interesting parts of the experience. You get to know a young person in a different way from how you can be with your own child, because you are not ultimately responsible in the same way. There is not the same baggage or history, of course, or the same heavy weight of anxiety and expectations that so often accompanies the passionate, very likely over-involved relationship a person like me may have with her own kids.
So, I could just love and appreciate Adam, without all the worry, and I did. I didn't have to stay up nights thinking about whether he should be applying to college, or whether Jamba Juice was moving him along a good career path. I didn't suffer the fact that he spent a few hundred precious dollars on parts for that dud of a car, and still it couldn't get it running. If he was watching TV or playing video games, I didn't think "he should be reading."
And perhaps, in the same way that all of this made things easier for me, it might have for him too. Although he always seemed like such an extraordinarily easy person to get along with, with his own mother there must have been tense times now and then. At our house, I don't think it ever got worse than the day I discovered that the boys were routinely peeing off the back deck, in full view of the neighbors. They were New Hampshire boys, after all. Raised in the country. Nobody told them, things were different in Marin County.
In my dream of how it would be, when Adam came to stay with us, I would have introduced him to so much of San Francisco: museums and plays, hikes to Point Reyes, interesting ethnic music festivals. Raised, myself, in small-town New Hampshire, I'd felt a compulsion all my life to open up a bigger world to children from places like the one I came from. "Expand your horizons," was the term I always used, and still do. There weren't enough hours in the day for introducing my children, and anybody else who happened to be with us, to all the wonderful things in the world they didn't know about yet.
But Adam's great gift, maybe -- or one of them -- was a capacity for contentment, and appreciation for just about whatever small good thing came his way, and even for the small unfortunate ones. The irretrievable breakdown of the car whose purchase had drained his life savings. The low pay at Jamba Juice, and the impossibly high rent he ultimately signed on for, when he and the other two boys finally got themselves their own apartment in the city, where they continued to live, without furniture or even beds -- now working at a different Jamba Juice -- for another few months, after leaving our house.
In the end, when Adam finally decided to pack it in and head back to New Hampshire to live, he did so with no air of defeat, but as a person who has completed a great adventure. Always a giver of gifts, he presented me with two: a dancing monkey for my desk, and a set of heavy marble bookends that must have taken a significant part of his paycheck that week.
Not right away, but eventually, he got himself to college, up north in New Hampshire. Though they didn't see each other all that much over the next few years -- with Charlie attending university in New York City, and traveling to Africa, and other places too -- Adam and Charlie continued their deep and loving friendship over the years, times when Charlie returned to New Hampshire, to spend time at his father's house there. Charlie's world came to include a set of passions different from the ones he shared with Adam -- African music, mixing old vinyl albums on turntables, a hip hop band -- but he didn't give up skateboarding or snowboarding. It remained one of the ten thousand things I worried about -- still do -- that he wore no helmet as he made his way through the streets of New York City, in traffic, on his skateboard, and, on those increasingly rare times when he made it to some mountain, executed three-hundred-and-sixty degree jumps. I would not have enjoyed watching those.
Charlie got his own old, beat up car, which he drove now to New Hampshire, sometimes, on winter weekends, where, often, it would snow. I could lie up nights worrying about that one too.
As for Adam, a different kind of danger found him. I learned from Charlie he'd gotten into drugs, and it was bad for a while. Hard to picture, but Charlie told me he was strung out and skinny now -- big, broad Adam, a young man built like a mountain. If this was my own son, I would have been frantic, but Adam was three thousand miles away, with his own good and devoted parents and loving brother. They were the ones staying up nights over that one, no doubt.
Then it was better. Last year Charlie reported Adam was doing great. He had a job, running a hot dog wagon -- doing carpentry on the side -- and he had a wonderful girlfriend, who had done so much to get him off the drugs. They were in love.
A week ago, Adam called my son -- living in Brooklyn, playing in his band -- to say he'd bought passes for the two of them to go snowboarding in the White Mountains of New Hampshire Christmas Day. He was starting a new job, doing green construction.
"I'm just so happy," he told Charlie, with his girlfriend sitting on the couch next to him as they spoke. "I love this girl so much. I'm going to marry this girl. Everything is so good."
Last week an ice storm hit New Hampshire, maybe the worst within memory -- though like all New England ice storms, this one combined not only fearsome danger but fearsome beauty as well, with every tree encased, jewel-like, in a thin coating of ice that sparkled so brightly when the sun came out you might need sunglasses to look.
But where sometimes the sun melted the ice swiftly, this time the temperature remained brutally cold, and for miles around, branches began to snap and limbs to fall. Trees toppled like pickup sticks onto the roofs of houses and over the electrical lines, sending sparks into the night sky. Whole towns were without power -- and a week later, still are. Pipes froze and burst. Schools closed until after the holidays, and families camped out in schools and cars. Stories proliferated about people asphyxiated by fumes from generators.
"They aren't even starting to get to all the fallen trees yet," one friend from back home told me, from her house, where she was huddled by the woodstove, with the temperature at forty five degrees. "People are out with their chain saws, trying to clear the roads themselves."
I called my daughter, living in a cabin out behind our old farmhouse, to see how she was holding up, and for a minute or two, we shared a little news. She was doing OK. Fiinishing up with graduate school. Working on a paper.
"I have some bad news, Mom," Audrey said then, and I felt my stomach clench, the stone that hangs by a thin filament over the head of every parent, every person who ever loved any other person, in fact. And we all know it could drop at any moment. All we can do is go on living our lives, praying it won't.
"It's Adam," she said. Like me, like her little brother, and her father, and everyone who knew him, Audrey loved Adam too.
There had been a snowfall, another one, and it had covered the black ice that already glazed the roads. Sometime after midnight, in the early hours of that day, Adam and two friends had headed to a convenience store to pick up something to eat -- he, the designated driver who had not been drinking. Still he lost control of the car, and it spun into a tree, and then another one. The two passengers were badly injured. Adam was killed instantly.
What to say? What lesson to be taken from this story? Stay home in bad weather? Never fail to fasten your seat belts? Wear a helmet, snowboarding? But how is a person to protect her most precious organ, her heart?
So for the last forty eight hours, we have all of us who loved Adam been walking around in a daze. We carry on -- all but his parents no doubt, and the woman he was going to marry, and his older brother, all of whose grief is more than I can imagine. As for me, I sit at my desk and do my work, in a fashion. I take myself to the pool at the rec center, and swim longer than usual. Charlie goes to his job, continues plans for the trip he and his brother Willy will make to Israel in a few weeks. Audrey delivers her paper for graduate school. My ex-husband -- with whom I had the first real conversation we'd managed in a very long time, a good one -- pays a visit to Adam's parents, goes home and hugs his young son (at age seven, still in a place where a parent can maintain the illusion, at least, of being able to protect). We all say a prayer. A few of them, in my case.
Sometimes, the story about raising children concerns all the things we need to do, to care for them well and launch them to be healthy people in the world. It's hard work while it lasts, this job.
But the hardest part comes after: the hardest part comes when it's over, and they're out in the world on their own, racing their bicycles, riding their skateboards, jumping off of mountains, offering up their love to people who may or may not love them back. Going all these places where we can no longer protect them. Heading out onto roads where at any corner, a patch of ice may catch the tire of their car. And we can do absolutely nothing to protect them if it does.
And still, I would not have missed this. The only way to be safe from this kind of sorrow and loss is to never love anybody, never have a person in your life whose departure from it could, as this one does, leave a hollow place in your heart that will mend eventually, but not for some time, and never without scars.
So here is all I know today: Treasure the people in our lives. Take no day or hour for granted. Trust that the sun will come out again, and the ice will one day melt.
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