On Children

I’m re-posting the following piece from the period of the Trump presidency to remind us of what we endured and what cannot happen again.

I’m thinking, as you might imagine, about babies and children. How they sweat when they’re sleeping, giving off the hot, sweet breath of life, all of what they are destined to become concentrated in their small forms. How they squeal when something remarkable happens like a cupcake or a grandpa. How they go around trailing their blankets and bears behind them and how they come around and climb up onto your lap to visit. How earnest they are, my two year old grandson, Asher, refusing to go out to the motel swimming pool because he was studying the Gideon bible upside down. They are power plants of love, generating heat and light if they are properly maintained. But if not, if they are left to sleep among strangers in wire cages under aluminum foil and fluorescent bulbs in places where hugging is strictly forbidden, well, their thermostats run amok. They become either very hot, violent, inconsolable, or very cold, the sort of children who no longer want to be hugged.

When my Isaac was five or six, we went to a large party at a friend’s house in Great Barrington in late August. It was the kind of party in the 70s where the children were wandering, pioneering off the grid, while the grownups passed joints around in circles. We did not helicopter in those days. We floated over our families like hot air balloons. Isaac came running up to me with his hands cupped in the international sign for amphibian. He had caught a frog. This was a year or two before he gave his heart to the Red Sox and started baking cakes for Carl Yastrzemski’s birthday in August, so the frog had his undivided attention that evening. We put him in a shoe box lined with grass and twigs and punched holes in the top of the box. Later, tired and all done for the day, we brought the box home to our house on Pixley Hill in Glendale. 

The three of us, me and Isaac and the frog in his box, went out into the backyard. It was a green heaven of a big, grassy yard with the house on one side, the garage on the second, the road on the third and woods in the back. I said to my boy, “we need to let him go back into the woods where he wants to live, so he can be what a frog’s supposed to be.” Isaac’s lower lip trembled. He resisted for some minutes while I urged him to be a liberator. Finally, he lifted the lid off the box. The frog jumped out and crouched on the grass, remaining very still. The frog didn’t move. “He loves me,” Isaac said, just as his green friend ran off, heading for the woods. It felt so bad and so good.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

To be free of incarceration is the right of every child and every frog. Those tiny Guatemalans and Salvadorans have done nothing to deserve their imprisonment. They are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are in Trump’s America, the wrong place to be a brown person, a poor person, an immigrant. They should go back where they came from so that they can be cut down by one of their own, caught in the crossfire of a shoot-out between rival gangs, their homes turned to desert hovels by drought. They have no right to lie around here waiting to die from malnutrition or lack of medical care in our sweet land of liberty.  God, who as we all know, is white, male and full of himself, didn’t invite them to the Fourth of July picnic. No strawberry shortcake for you, chica, unless maybe you’re picking the berries or washing the cake plates. Otherwise, we will give you nothing, less than nothing, not even your own mother. We will make of your young life a cautionary tale so that other desperate people will know their place. We will make of you a test case to see just how far into the filth Americans will allow themselves to be dragged by this pussy-grabbing predator before we stand up and say No!  Anyone who has had a child, anyone who has been a child must know that this time is now, the time to stop being a voyeur, to become instead a witness to all the children who go around with tear-streaked faces and come around asking for us to really see them.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In September, poet and visual artist Rosemary Starace will join me for Part 3 of our inquiry into How Art Heals: Remembering Wholeness. All subscribers are now welcome to read and comment on Many Voices posts.

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