The Lost Boy

      I am walking on Broadway in Astoria one Saturday morning. I am passing the time, looking for some place to have lunch. The street is busy — the Palestinian food vendor’s cart scents the air with frying falafel, a few older Greek men converse on the corner, and shoppers head up the street from Trade Fair or Parisi’s bakery toward other stores or home. The usual sounds of traffic, the overhead train, and the ice cream truck’s silly jingle sound loudly through the air, but then I hear a voice calling through that din. It’s a woman’s voice and it has that frantic sound, the sound of a mother calling to a child. Her voice pierces the air, filled with the fear of not knowing where her child is.
      I glance around and see her, half a block up the street…
      Danny, Danny she is shouting. She is a small woman wearing a Mets sweatshirt, calling out at one moment and talking into her cell phone the next. No, I can’t find him. He was just here…. No, I didn’t. NO. And then, raising her head, shouting loudly Hey, Danny, where are you?
      People are beginning to look around. Slowing their pace because this woman’s voice has the shrill sound of primal fear which everyone notices. She doesn’t care how she sounds. She is losing herself to that fear and people are feeling it.
      An elderly woman with her two carry bags filled with groceries asks, What’s happening here? 
      An old man in a white T-shirt responds, Sounds like a lost kid. 
     The elderly lady nods, What’s he look like? 
     He answers, Don’t know. She just started shouting his name, Danny.  

     Now the mother is swearing into the cell phone, I don’t fucking know where he is! 
     A bald grizzled head pops out of Mahoney’s Bar, and the guy asks, What’s going on out here? 
     Lost kid, someone says. So out he comes and he starts walking down the street towards the subway station, calling out, Hey kid, your mother’s looking for you.

     Another passerby, a woman with two little girls, asks the mom urgently, What’s he wearing? What’s he wearing? 
     The mom looks up for a moment, eyes big, says, A blue hoodie. He’s little, eight. And then she turns away, shouting, Danny where are you?, her hysteria mounting. 
     And everyone knows how she feels and how the kid must feel because we’ve all been either that kid or that mother — the feeling that overwhelms you when you realize someone you thought was right there — is suddenly gone.

      At this point quite a few people on the mother’s side of Broadway are involved in the act of finding Danny. Someone shouts, Hey, look in the dollar store. Another says, I’m going up to the subway platform.

      The mother is crying. Shouting into the cell phone, No I don’t know where he is. And then Danny! — the continual refrain of this fearful moment.

     Ain’t in there, says the man with the black ponytail who was smoking his cigarette outside the Greek bakery, but had gone inside to look. He has his hands on his hips, his brow furrowed.

     Another woman says, I’ll go around the corner, look on 31st. 
     The mother is now shouting at whoever is on the other end of the cell phone, I don’t fucking know where he went, I don’t know — and she is also paralyzed by her fear, standing there. It is other people now who have to help her and they are helping, searching the block.

     The Chinese vendor watches the scene, smoking his cigarette, and then leaves his stall surrounded by bouquets of lilies and dyed daisies to look up and down the street. 
     The mother is so flustered that all she can do is yell into her cell phone that she doesn’t know how it happened. 

     Then we hear it: Got him, I got him! shouts the man who had gone up to the subway platform. He’s here. 

     The mother’s head snaps toward the sound of that voice and then, as the man and the little boy step off the stairs from the elevated platform, you can see that the mother is going to get angry with Danny. Running toward them, she is shouting, What the hell happened? Where did you go? And her voice is urgent and fearful and angry, all wrapped into that one question, which the little boy will not be able to answer.

     As she stops in front of Danny, two Hispanic women with a little girl and an older woman pushing a baby carriage are right there watching and they step up close beside the shouting mother. The older woman pulls the little girl out of the way; she’s watching the scene, her eyes going back and forth between the women. One of the Hispanic women puts her hands on Danny’s mother’s arm and strokes it, saying soothingly, Hey, it’s OK. It’s O.K. 
     The other woman squats down and says to Danny, OK, sweetie, you must be so scared.
     Danny is looking at his mother who is shouting Jesus, Don’t ever do that again. She’s talking into the cell phone, too. Oh my God, it’s OK now. Someone found him….. on the train platform. Gotta go.
     The Hispanic woman is still stroking Danny’s mother’s arm as she grabs Danny in a hug and then pushes him out at arm’s length, Danny, what were you thinking? You scared the shit out of me.
     The woman squatting stays right next to Danny so that her face is looking right into his. He’s still in shock and the woman is talking right to him even though he’s looking at his mom. You’re OK, Sweetie. It’s OK
     Don’t ever do that again his mother says, Danny, don’t ever do that again. And the other Hispanic woman is still stroking her arm. It’s OK. He’s here. 
     The mother is crying now and she squats down too and hugs Danny again. This time she holds on and her embrace is long and Danny’s body untenses, and they stay that way for a little while. The two Hispanic women begin to move away.  

     The grizzled man who came out of Mahoney’s and has been watching, says loudly to no one in particular, Alright, little boy found! And then he heads back inside the darkened bar. 

     The elderly woman picks up her carry bags and resumes her slow gait, shaking her head, saying to the guy in front of the bakery, Oh, you never forget that fear. 

     The man with the black ponytail lights another cigarette, Yeah, worst feeling in the world losing a kid like that. Worst feeling. 

     Danny’s mother is quieter now. She’s got Danny by the hand, and the flow of people on the sidewalk along Broadway has begun to move along again and Danny and his mother are joining that flow walking toward the corner of 31st under the elevated train platform. The mother is holding his hand tight, and she’s talking to him, and Danny is looking up at her nodding his head. 

     The people on Broadway resume their lunchtime activities, each in their own world, and Danny and his mother soon disappear into the river of people whose attention and help and feeling, for that moment, they held.

Sometimes my father would sing

When my father sang, which was not often, I was always surprised by how good his voice was. He had a lovely tenor. One of his favorite songs was Waltzing Matilda. He knew all the verses, and there are quite a few. When he sang his face would light up, a look of joy filling the usually tense, dark corners. I liked seeing him that way. 

He once told me that when he served during World War II the American soldiers didn’t sing the way the Brits and the Aussies did, with verve and heart. Having grown up as an American expatriate, and having been educated in Britain as a young boy, he must have felt a kinship with those soldiers. The camaraderie in those moments, when their voices were joined in song, must have given them all a reprieve from the horrors of war. I imagine as he was singing my father felt that he belonged somewhere, if only to the singing.

But as I was growing up, my father did not seem to want to belong—he was a bit of a loner. He continued the expatriate life, moving our family for the jobs he held in different countries. He often spent Sunday afternoons alone on projects, such as researching local history. He’d go out on excursions by himself and report back to us about the things he’d discovered. 

Occasionally, he’d want company. My mother for some reason never wanted to go. I think these excursions involved more “roughing it” than she would have enjoyed. My older sister was often involved in some kind of activity. She liked church groups and camp, which I wasn’t interested in. So that left just me to go along for the ride.

When we were on home leave to the US during summers, I went with my father into the woods and mountains. When we lived in Brazil we went down the Amazon, in Hong Kong to a snake-eating restaurant where you had to pick out your snake from a pit. Sure, these were adventures, but more importantly, my father seemed different to me on these outings, a change from his usually tense self. He relaxed, and he was more fun, and that’s when he’d sing. 

One such road trip—I must have been about 10 years old—was to Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. En route we took a slight detour to visit his old friend Oliver, a country man, older than my father. Oliver had been a kind of mentor to my father when he had worked as a 17-year old boy as a rifle instructor at a summer camp near Brevard, North Carolina. My father later said that Oliver, though uneducated, had made sure that all of his children received an education, and one son later became the mayor of Brevard. 

What I remember about Oliver is that he wore overalls, he was missing a tooth, and his wife chewed tobacco, and I swear she could hit a spittoon halfway across the room, which was very impressive to a ten-year-old girl. More importantly, I remember this as one of the first times I caught a glimpse of a man I rarely saw: my father was relaxed, laughing easily, as he talked with Oliver. 

This side of my father was at odds with the side he usually presented: blustery and full of pontifications. His friendship with someone like Oliver later came to puzzle me because he wasn’t the type of person my father often instructed me was of value. Yes he’d given his children an education and my father knew that, and that part was clear. But what confused me was this: when we went out as a family to restaurants, my father would make disparaging comments, rather loudly, about other patrons who appeared to be without class or education, and he would complain about the failures of an egalitarian society. I feel certain that had my father not known Oliver, and he walked into one of the restaurants we were sitting in, my father would have made rude comments about him, too. 

On that day, however, after we left Oliver’s, I could feel my father's happiness. He was humming, lost in thought. Maybe because we were going to a place he loved—but more likely because we had just visited someone with whom he felt a real connection—my father started to sing a song I love to this day. These are the lyrics as I remember them:

I heard the crash on the highway
I knew what it was from the start,
when whiskey and blood run together,
the picture was stamped on my heart.

I heard the screams of the dying.
I saw the dead where they lay,
when whiskey and blood run together,
I didn't hear nobody pray.

The song is “Wreck On The Highway,” a tune from 1937 written and performed by Dorsey Dixon, a South Carolinian mill worker. My father sang the verses in his soft tenor and he did justice to that plaintive tune. As we drove down the highway, he taught me the lyrics, and we sang all the verses several times. My father was temporarily released from the dark tension that usually overwhelmed him, his happiness spread to me and made me feel happy, too. 

How odd that my father would choose this ballad to share with me, but I guess he had “old-time" music on his mind because we had just visited with Oliver, and because we were in the mountains. But on a deeper level, the irony of this sad tune bringing joy somehow makes sense.

My father was an enigma that I doubt I will ever unravel. Often during my childhood and adolescence, he berated me for my lack of understanding about class, and he almost never let me off the hook for the “mistakes” he claimed I made. He insisted I needed to better discern who was of note and of value and who was not. If I went out on a date with a boy, he would ask me exactly what the boy’s father did for work, as if I would know or care. My father was a harsh taskmaster and hard to please, and I rarely pleased him. And yet, his rules were full of contradictions and exceptions, contradictions I’m not sure he was aware of. 

And so on that summer day, instead of being under the scrutiny of his perfection, attempting to live up to some impossible standard to which he held himself and others, I am sitting in the passenger seat next to my father who is driving us through the mountains of North Carolina. The afternoon sun is shining golden. All the windows in the Chevy wagon are open and the mountain air flows sweet and cool. My father doesn’t seem weighed down, least of all by who is of value and who is not. We're headed to Sliding Rock where he’s taking me to swim. I’m holding a bottle of cold soda pop in my hand, and my dad and I are singing “Wreck on the Highway,” his sweet tenor rising and my small voice joining in, and for the moment, we belong to that singing.

Breath

Nothing is ever so dire that breath can’t ease
the unnamable ache.

Breath is the ripe pear on the sill
absorbing light into a sweetness you can taste.

Breath is a distracted mother slowing her pace
to help her child button the new red sweater.

Breath is the old man at the park fountain
writing poems for passersby.

The cab driver who tells you his life story,
the woman you help across the street,
the flowers you pass by at the florist
gathered together in a bouquet
soon to fade
breathing
we are glad to be
only beauty.

The bodhisattva’s first dream

What is visible fades into uncertainty.
Lightlessness—black as anthracite,

as the abyss, as the grave—is a beginning.
Deep in the forest of contemplation,

huddled under fallen wood, under moss,
under the earth’s dusk-grey wings

is the bloom born of darkness
fed by a vagabond moon.