07 dec 2004
YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU
By Juliet Johnson
“Can I take this to school today?”
Nathan
has a purple beach bucket loaded with a
flashlight, a Sponge Bob wallet, stuffed
with fake money and old credit cards, three
rocks and some crackers. This is how it
started.
First it was crying at school.
Now he wants to take everything with him. The first day he took a bale of hay that
he conned his gramma into buying for him
at the art supply store. Kid size, it was
only two dollars. He will not unwrap it
from its original plastic covering. He
put it in a Ralph's plastic grocery bag
for double protection.
As we get ready for
school, he's toting the miniature hay.
Daddy keeps pointing at it over his coffee,
going, "HEY!
HAY! HEY!" while we all stare at him
until we get it. As we leave to go out
the door, he's still holding the hay.
“Honey—what're you doing?”
“I just want to take this. Can I
take this hay?” His big orphan eyes. “What do you need it for at school? You
want to show your friends?”
“I just want to take it. Just this.
Nothing else.”
We’d recently
started a new rule: No New Things in the
Car. Started because we could no longer
see the floor of my car, the kids climbing
in and out over a sea of dolls, toys, shoes,
candy wrappers, books, lunchboxes, kleenex,
old cups and broken sunglasses. And that
was just the top layer. We hadn't seen
Nathan's best friend Karina for awhile.
But I was hoping for the best.
Every time I washed the car we'd fill
three garbage bags with junk, and the
bags would sit in the living room for weeks.
In the car there'd be a breath of blue,
a hint of a void. There was so much free
space that for several hours we could think
of having another baby, or even getting
a bunny.
Then a doll appears. A pair of socks.
The legs of a toy. Badminton rackets.
A deflated basketball. Old lollipops. Golf
tees. It's autumn in my car, and the kids
are shedding new stuff each day.
“Only ONE thing in the car,” I
amend my new rule, and my husband shakes
his head. Nathan had such anxiety at school.
Taking a bale of hay wasn't going to
hurt anything.
At school he put it in his cubby. I looked
at all the other kids’ cubbies.
Dora backpacks. Princess lunchboxes.
Spiderman
sweatshirts.
My son: hay bale.
There's
something great about requiring the unnecessary.
It twists a new coil in the brain, turns
a light on in a dark place, somewhere up
in your head, to have a son who values
hay bales over backpacks. It isn't the
thing he values as much as the valuing
of something, relishing the specialness
of some novel new object.
It's too soon that life is filled with
the necessary, the wallet, the proper
clothes, the right change, straight thinking,
the
steps to the top, success, achievement,
purpose. This is his time to float. Nathan
shows me the value of focusing on the one
thing at the moment that brings you joy.
And then taking that thing (preferably
in a plastic bag) everywhere you go.
The next day I'm holding Emma the two-year
old under one arm in her pajama top with
milk smeared all over her face, rushing
to get us out the door to Nathan's
school on time. I block Nathan with one
foot at the door.
“Wait, what's that.”
“What.”
He’s holding
a beaded leather notebook and an old soapdish
in a Ziplock bag.
“What's that?”
“I'm taking it to school.”
“You don't have to take something every
day,” I say.
“You're taking something,” he
says, looking at Emma.
The next morning
the pool man comes early because something
has been
sucked into our pool filter and
he's about eighty years old and it’s
not looking good for the pool or the man
on wet, slippery cement. Nathan stands
somberly at the diving board, taking
in the fixit activities very seriously.
I'm yelling to the pool guy that
I'll be right back, chasing Nathan to
get him out the door. He clutches
two rolls of paper towels, one under each
arm like a wrestler. Looks up at
me with big eyes. "Can
I take these," he says, urgently.
The next day it's his red play
tool kit, inside are some magnets,
a hammer, and a piece of cheese.
The next day, a roll of tape inside a
trash can. I have to draw the
line, some line, any line.
“You can't take that with you,”
I say.
“I can,” he says, assuringly.
“You can't take everything with
you.”
As the floor of my car fills
up once again, and I am living the end
of
Titanic, all the stuff floating
up up up until we drown or jump, Nathan
brings “just
one more thing” to
school. A pumpkin. The little plastic
table from the middle of a pizza
box.
A piece of black plastic pipe.
Two dolls in a tupperware bed with
cloth diaper blanket. A roll of adding
machine tape fastened with a yellow
paper clip. A tiny rake and two
shovels in an eyeglass case.
For awhile
he couldn't go to sleep unless the tupperware
bed was next to him. Now it's the
tiny gardening tools next to his pillow
in their eyeglass case. "Babies can pway with them," he tells me very seriously at naptime,
and I look at his tiny teeth. "Not the rake. But the shobels. They're
not showp."
He found his treasures at Half-Price Wednesday at the thrift store.
He put them in an eyeglass case.
He looked at all the other eyeglass cases,
sitting on the floor, opening them,
looking up at me with an earnestness. One
had dark blue velvet on the inside. "Mommy,
you want this one? It's soft inside." His
big blue plush heart shining out
at me. That he can find treasures on the floor
of a run down thrift store, that
he feels rich with the choices, his life a bright
stream where the oddest throwaways
have possibility and light.
As I make endless
meal after endless meal, watch "Mary
Poppins" for the thousandth time or take another
trek to the cultural mecca that
is my grocery store, I think about
Nathan and his bags of treasures.
As I
haul them in and out of carseats
and brush their teeth and pull on tiny
pants
and tie shoes and answer questions
like "Who
invented food?" and watch
them fall asleep and see their
live faces and silent fingers I
think
I know
what Nathan is talking about.
He stands at the
door, four years old, wearing my striped
tights
and holding a fishbowl filled
with marbles.
I'm taking
it all with me
Juliet Johnson is a produced
playwright and short fiction writer. Her work has been published in Los
Angeles Family Magazine, Collages and Bricollages,
and Scribble. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband,
two kids and Gramma Moose. Juliet can
be reached at julietmyf@msn.com |
