one from lisboa

i am teaching a workshop
in portugal.

before teaching, i spent
a couple days on the beach,
crisping myself and eating fresh snapper
with lemon juice and bowl after bowl of olives.

i used to hate olives.

but then i told myself that everyone whose mouth
i admired loved them and that it was not olives
that were wrong, but me.

and i forced myself to love them,
the way my brother, when we were in high school,
forced me to love david bowie.

i didn’t know we could force ourselves to love
and it would work.

but it does, at least with david bowie and olives.

sometimes i wonder about adopted children.

—–

two weeks ago we had lunch.
we had lunch with a woman.
we had lunch with a woman who is 34 weeks pregnant.
she came with the father, who wore a baseball cap
and almost cried when he talked about giving the baby to us.

they ordered sprite but kept sending it back because
it wasn’t sweet enough.

the syrup had run out.

they were matched with another couple
for the past couple months until
one doctor’s appointment when the baby was measuring
small, she broke down and admitted to having been doing
coke during the pregnancy.

the adoptive parents backed out.

the agency called us.

and so we had lunch.

she asked about us being jewish and our jobs and did we have enough love
to love two children.  and we said we hoped so.

we asked if she wanted to be friends and what it was like to have two
daughters already who weren’t living with her and if she’d like something else
to drink instead.

maybe some iced tea or some coke
and then kicked leanne under the table.

i’m such an idiot.

in the end, she wanted a dessert so badly.
and so we got one – a giant apple cobbler with ice cream
and each of us grabbed a spoon and ate out of the same bowl -
me, the man with the baseball hat and tanned skin, the woman
with the belly that wouldn’t fit in the booth who was going to give
us something, and my wife who had had cancer and lived.

we drove them to their apartment.
the birthmother was nervous in the back seat.
we were nervous in the front.

—–

when we got home we called the agency
and told them
ok.

—–

when we told lydia,
she raised her eyebrows and shouted
as if she had gotten a present.

she had, we hope.

later, she slept all night in her bed.
we woke up in ours with just us, alone.
from our bed we could see the empty crib in the dormer.

when i asked lydia why she had not come upstairs
in the middle of the night, as she always had done,
she said that she was too big for that.

i’m not sure i’ve ever felt that much pain and pride
at the same time.

—–

that reminds me of a story that i heard yesterday in my workshop in lisboa.

there is a dad here, antonio, who is telling a story about his daughter.

he remembers when she was 5 (she’s 11 now), playing a board game with her….
but they couldn’t find the dice.

we’ll just play with imaginary dice, she said.

and so they did.

she rolled the dice and got a….6!
he rolled and got a 3.
she rolled again.  another 6!
he got a 2.
she rolled again.  again, another 6 – unbelievable!!!!!!
he rolled a 4.

and then she looked at him – he was so far back –
and she rolled a 1.

i love this story.

i know you can see why.

who put what where

because i was teaching a workshop in ireland a few weeks ago,
so i took the girls to italy.

if that makes sense to you, bless your heart.

the first day, lee and i drank a bottle of wine with lunch
and we all fell asleep at 6pm in orvieto.
then we all woke up at midnight.

we looked at each other – wide awake now.
“who wants to go get gelato?” i said.
“reallly???” lydia said.

yes.

if lydia doesn’t remember, when she’s 80,
getting up in the middle of the night to go get gelato in our pj’s,
i’ll be shocked.

leanne, on the other hand, will never forget
sitting next to the illustrious rick steves
at a crappy cafe in lucca.

(why didn’t he tell us the pasta was lousy?)

in the car, and on particularly long rides, we offered liddy my ipod
to watch a movie on a couple times.

she declined.

she just wanted to look out the window.

it’s a better movie out there.

she says her favorite memory is of me stopping
in the middle of small tuscan country roads
to pick flowers for her.

red poppies
and purple and white and yellow and pink bursts.

i’d pick them and they’d wilt and die in the heat
of the car.

and then, yes, we’d talk about death.

some people believe they go nowhere, i said.
just into the ground,
which is somewhere actually…

and some people believe they go to heaven or hell
and that there’s this guy named jesus, and another guy
named god and there’s this ghost too – and they’re all kind
of the same, but different, and they kind of make all these decisions.
like that your entire life is planned out already.

liddy looked out the window at the poppies.

like that god makes people die for a reason, i say.
or like those poppies, i say.
some people think that god put those poppies
there for you to see.

where do you think people go when they die, i ask.

in the ground, she says.

—–

later, in lucca, we stay at a former villa from the silk trade.
they make their own olive oil and wine and honey there.
we stay in a room that’s over 300 years old
and drink the wine
and eat potatoes with fried rosemary
and liddy and i give leanne a pair of earrings
and watch the cows and wonder if one of them
is like ferdinand, who doesn’t like to fight.

then we start driving back down to rome,
so that leanne and liddy can leave and i can
fly onto dublin.

we stop in a little seaside town with black iron sand
and liddy and i jump in the sea.

leanne doesn’t because she doesn’t like the water.
once i asked her mom, a psychic, why.

she paused….

then:  grease, she said.

the movie? i asked.

no, the country, she said.

something about the aegean, she said.
she drowned.

—–

on our last night, we wash the black sand off our bodies
and go get gelato.  liddy gets cherry vanilla and i get ricotta with nutella.

we walk with our cones until all that’s left is a sticky napkin.

throw it away, i say to lydia, as she looks at her napkin.

where, she says.  i don’t see any garbage cans.

right there, i point behind her.

she turns around and drops the napkin into the bin.

hey, she says.  god put that garbage can there….just for me!

he sure did, i say.

the 11th good thing about lydia

look, i hate to do this.
i really do.

i don’t think i choose
death…

it’s just been around so much as of late.

a couple weeks ago we went to another funeral.
this one was for Crystal – one of Leanne’s oncology nurses
when she was sick.

Crystal was 34, had brown hair and shoes and a face and hands
that used to take a big needle and stick it straight into Leanne’s chest.

She also had a husband and three kids, including an infant.

And, since November or so, also had cancer.

Pain during intercourse.

That was her only symptom.
(as if we needed more reasons to not be having sex with each other)

Cervical cancer, undetectable by pap smear.  And then….poof…..
a couple months later and she’s gone.

Before she died Leanne wrote her a letter.
A few weeks later Crystal called.
She asked Leanne what it was like losing her hair.

Leanne had trouble answering.
Later I asked her why and she said it was because
she always knew
that hers would grow back.

On the phone that day,
she knew that Crystal’s never would.

—–

And so I had to explain, again, to Lydia about death.
And again I took this from her bookshelf

I think it was first read to me when we had to put my cat Otto to sleep
after he attacked our sexist mailman, Mr. Christmas, and tore
a chunk of flesh out of his arm.

I read it to Lydia all the time.
It’s my favorite kids book.
It’s probably my favorite book, period.

And so we sat on the bed and read the book
and talked about Crystal and how she looked in the casket
and her lonely kids and husband and coworkers
and how her hair would never come back.
not really.

—–

every time we drive by the hospital
where leanne used to be, i point it out.

it’s the same hospital lydia was born in.

do you remember, i ask?

—–

when i was in junior high my parents got divorced
and moved.  the new neighbors across the street from my
mom’s house invited us for “dinner”.

it was plain raw potatoes and salami on a plate.

later, against my will, i babysat for their little boy.

he was probably 5, the same age that lydia is now.

he rode a big wheel up and down bryant st.

i stopped him once and said:

“remember this.  remember everything.”

he looked at me like i was crazy.

—–

i wonder what lydia really remembers.
the gloves and gown that she dragged all over the ward,
leanne’s face – her jaw clenching from the neupogen,
the endless stream of visitors coming to help us,
the pills, the hair shaved off in the sink.

and then i wonder how leanne knew her own hair
would come back.

—–

in bed i close the book and turn out the lights.
i get close to lydia on the pillow.

“how do you want to die?” i asked.

“softly,” she said.

yes.

the pink balloon

I came to this family late, to know Leanne’s grandma Rena and have her as my grandmother late in both our lives.

But I’ve spent the past 12 years spending more time with her than I ever spent with my parents’ parents.  I’ve spent the past 12 years not only being with her every time we came out, but being with Leanne all the time.  And being with Leanne oftentimes means being with Rena…because she talked with her or about her all the time.

I don’t think I knew anyone as close to their grandma as Leanne was to Rena.  It was like I’d read about in books.  And somehow her memories of Rena have in a way become my own.  I can almost be there in the room when Rena would make grilled cheese with the crusts cut off or made little parties every new years eve or pick her up from school when she was sick or it was a snow day.  I’ve heard these stories so many times that I can create visuals for things that never happened to me, like stories our parents tell about us before we had memories.

What a gift.

I’m not going to say that I didn’t have grandparents, I did.
But not really.

Not like Milt Kolman.
Not like Rena Kolman.

I mention them in a pair now because, for me, with Rena’s death then the couple dies.  In a way Milton was still around while Rena was here the past two years.  They were still here.  The same American flags outside their front door, the same message on the answering machine, the same chair in the living room, the same “no kvetching” sign hanging from the wall above their two-seater kitchenette.

She brought him with her like a purse….on trips to the dollar store, to gymboree where she’d buy clothes for Lydia that lee nor I would ever buy, to wal-mart where she pushed her own cart and searched for some new kind of sugar-free candy, trips down to the cafeteria where liddy would ride on her walker, or to the pizza place in the mall, or dunkin donuts for her bagel sandwich, to boscov’s to search for an outfit that she’d probably end up returning, or how I’d drive her back to her apartment sometimes in ira’s big American car with a bench seat, fold her walker and put it in the trunk, lift her legs up and put them in the car, stretch the seatbelt across her and make it click, give her a kiss on her forehead just because.

I started out just now talking about her and ended up talking about me.

See that?

Rena did that all the time.
She made me, made us, all of us, feel important.

Both of my grandmas carried the weight and aftermath of the depression on their chests.  They wore it like a heavy cloak.  They used to put that cloak on me.

Rena never did.

She was simple and sweet and she liked to laugh.
She’d cackle, actually.

I used to ask her questions she didn’t want to answer and Lee would chastise me.  But I got them anyway sometimes.  The answers.

That’s right, she’d say.
And then I’d say it mocking her.
And she’d laugh and I’d laugh.
We did a lot of that.
Her saying something, then me saying something, then both of us laughing.

I’d crank call her pretending to be a taxi driver from India saying that I was told I could stay at her house.

And she’d fudge for a bit, exasperated, and honestly worried that she might disappoint this strange man….and then I’d start laughing.

And she’d laugh.

Like that.

My Dannyboy, she’d say.
And I was.

Tell me something in Yiddish, I’d say.
Gay gazunta hay, she’d say.
What does that mean?
Go in good health.

Oh, I’d say.  Thanks.

You want to learn something in Spanish?
Sure.
Lame mi codo.  Say it:  la-may mee co-dough.
Law-mee co-dee.  What is that?
That means “lick my elbow”.
Ha!
Ha!

You’re mishugganah!
What?
Mishugganah.
What’s that?
Crazy.

Ha!
Ha!

It wasn’t all funny stuff, but a lot of it was.  We talked about being lonely too and missing Milt and she’d cry and I’d commiserate with her and hug her and offer, if I was there, to take her to suburban house and get her a bagel 3-ways and then have her wonder what she ordered when the waiter put it down in front of her.

And sometimes we didn’t talk.  We’d miss each other’s calls and leave messages for each other.  I remember her message to us after Leanne had beaten cancer.  “Have a drink on me.  Make it a chocolate soda.”

A month or two ago I gave Lydia her first camera.  She ran up and down the block taking pictures.  On Tuesday morning we decided to send a card to GG in the rehab hospital.  I asked Liddy to pick out which picture to send…and she picked out the picture she snapped of a single pink balloon floating in the air in our front yard.

It reminded me of the book so many of us read when we were kids.  The Red Balloon.  That one splash of color that transcended the dullness of life.  GG was that color….for me, for so many of us.

I put the picture in an envelope and Liddy and I biked to the mailbox and I watched as she dropped it in.  We decided that we wanted to balloon to have enough helium in it to lift GG up.  It was the first letter that she sent all by herself.

I dropped Liddy off at school and biked back home.  And when I got home, GG was dead.

But the balloon was already on its way.
And so was she.

To somewhere, a place where Milton is waiting for her with a blow dryer in one hand and a bouquet of Lucite flowers.

And to both of them I say
Gay gazunta hay
And
“Have a drink on me.  Make it a chocolate soda”.

up the spout

that’s what she said.

first she said:  i was 20 when i got knocked up.

then she laughed a bit and looked around the room at all of us in group,
the group of families wanting to adopt a child and dressed too nicely
for a monday off of work and taking notes and hands clasped.

then she said:  “is that wrong?  knocked up?  i don’t know what they’re saying these days.
up the spout?  is that right?  i got it up the spout when i was 20.  yeah.”

later, after giving her baby to the most conservative family she could find
(they even put pennies in their penny loafers)
she pumped every day for 9 months and would drop the milk
off in a cooler on their porch.

we spent two whole days meeting adoptive mothers,
birth mothers, adopted children who are now adults,
people for whom things went right and those for whom
it couldn’t have been messier.

we ate lunch by ourselves in the sun.
these were the stories we needed to hear.
all of them.

we’re still waiting for a baby,
or a birthmother who doesn’t hate jews.

and if you haven’t figured it out yet, we fired
our old agency, Adoption Choices.
fucking crooks.

if you hate anyone and want them to suffer,
send them to adopt through that agency.
they’ll probably kill themselves.

—–

on the way out of the new adoption agency,
lydia says:

i want a white baby.

where does she get this?

—–

a few weeks ago, leanne felt lumps in her neck.
just didn’t feel right…and she was nervous going in for her scan.
really nervous this time.

i went out and bought her a breakfast burrito while she
was in the tube.  i called nick – who i always call
when leanne is getting scanned, and left a message.

in the drive-thru i waited and tried to think about
how it’d be different this time if she came out of the tube
and the techs were not looking her in the eyes….

i’m not sure i would even cry.

just start doing.

the truth is that i’m not sure
that i like the person that this cancer has left me.

and i’m not talking about leanne.

like the lead apron that the x-ray tech puts on you.
i wear it every day.

at the oncologist’s office, he made us wait.
we looked at magazine covers to not think.
the ghost of heath ledger and angelina and all her lips
and kids.

the scan was clean.
we chided him for making us wait.

dr. menter felt leanne’s abdomen
while lydia played with leanne’s boobies.

“that’s not appropriate”, leanne said.

dr. menter agreed.

i did not.

when i talk

at the recruitment meetings for team in training
they usually ask me to talk about leanne.

in the past week i’ve done this twice.

leanne isn’t there.
she’s with lydia or she’s out to dinner with a friend
or she’s looking for yet another pair of black pants
to go with the 20 or so pairs of black pants in our cold closet.

and i put on my cycling jersey even though it’s 8 degrees out
and my hat and maybe one of my own black pants
and i drive and i park and i stand up
and i tell the story.

a story.

there is no one story
to tell.

sometimes i talk about cutting all her hair off and how she cried in the shower.
sometimes i talk about how the baby was kicking like crazy when she was in the mri tube,
the tube that she came out of to find her doctor crying.
sometimes i talk about her being in the parking lot outside the store and getting the call
or about how she went back to that same parking lot much later to finally buy herself
something – yes, probably another pair of black pants.

but i realized yesterday that when i tell these stories
everyone in the audience thinks she’s dead.

—–

i’ve been wanting to write about the adoption,
but i haven’t.

i’m sick of bad news.
i’m sure you are too.

that said, here’s some more:

she was due in two weeks.
we were picked.
we took the car in to make sure
it was ready to go.
we packed baby seats and pacis
and blankets and a portable crib
and cheetos for lydia.

the night before we were going to drive to oklahoma
she wanted to talk to us one more time.
she asked us to call at 8pm.
we called.
no answer.
we called.
no answer.
we called and called and called.

we never heard from her again.

so we spent the weekend, this past weekend.
unpacking the car
and our hearts.

leanne cried on the couch.
she cried when we went out to breakfast and
lydia shared her bacon with me.
she cried and cried.

every time she cries, she cries for so much.
i know this.

i want to say – but you’re alive!
i want to say – when i’m telling one of our stories
to the people at my meetings, i get to end it with
you living.

but it’s no good.

—–

this weekend i went to a play.
rabbit hole – about a family that has lost their son
when he gets hit by a car in the street outside their house.

in the play everyone fights.
the husband and wife fight.
the wife and her pregnant sister fight.
the pregnant sister and the husband fight.

at one point, the teenager who ran over their son
comes over to the house.

he has written a short story and wants to dedicate it to their son.
the story is about a boy who
has lost his father and who goes looking for him
in “parallel universes”

they sit on the couch and she looks at the story.

“you mean there are other worlds with other versions of us in them?” she asks.
“that’s what the scientists say,” he says. “if you believe them”

“oh,” she says. “these are just the sad versions of us?”

—–

and that was it.
that was exactly it.

compound fracture

in the picture, which my friend sean took,
he doesn’t use a flash.

it was when we were dancing at the wedding,
when you and others each held a candle for us.

and so he used the flashes
from other cameras to light the photo.

what resulted is leanne’s back.
and my hands on clasped on the small
of her back.

but the rest of me is gone.

you can see through where my head should be
to see the faces of the people there, standing in a circle,
holding candles.

i guess i always used to think
that i was going to be the one fading away.
and though leanne’s opacity
dimmed a bit last year,
she never did.

—–

at a party on friday night a swiss woman
read my palm and confirmed my cross dissolve
into nothing.

pass the bacon-wrapped scallops.

—–

when leanne was really sick
we went to a baby shower.
at the shower was a friend of a friend.
she was wearing a wig.
leanne wasn’t.
they both had cancer.
they both had 2 year olds running around.
they both were in their 30s.

leanne, even though she was sick, looked good.
leanne always looked good throughout.
this other woman didn’t.

i got a call this morning that she’s on her deathbed.
on her deathbed.

too many stories like this recently.

like one of leanne’s oncology nurses – 34 with an infant -
who now has “incurable” stage 4 cervical cancer
and how everyone in the office – all the people we spent
the past two years with, now have to take
care of one of their own.

or how some of our best friends here were super close with that family
who went up into the mountains two weeks ago, rented a house in aspen,
went to bed and never woke up.
mom, dad, daughter, son…….all dead.
carbon monoxide.

home depot has been out of carbon monoxide detectors
every day since.

or my my step brother, dan,
whose sister has cancer, and when he was leaving
the house to fly out to take care of her, he slipped
on the stairs.  compound fracture of his ankle.

what i’m wondering about is the compound fracture
of the world.

of the world.

is it just that we’re older?
or is it that we’re too social – that we just flat out
know too many people?

or is it the world right now -
that can’t seem to balance any kind of budget,
the budgeting of our debt

to ourselves and each other.

—–

i had to take travis out –
our friend who was best friends with that family who died in the mountains.
he was their contractor and carpetenter and friend.  that family was the first family he had met
when he moved to denver.

a couple days after they died,
he drove with me to the animal shelter.
we were taking my cat.
the cat i had waited 12 years for,
but who regretfully couldn’t stop biting,
couldn’t stop peeing and crapping all over our house.

and stupidly, the shelter, on 3pm on a friday, said it was closed
early for a staff party or something.

so i stood there in the snowy parking lot.

leave your animal in a cubby for next-morning intake, the sign said.

and i looked down at artie, who was a good cat, but sometimes not to us.
and i couldn’t do it.
i couldn’t just leave him in a locked cubby in a wall,
a cubby that had a square of carpet in it and a bowl of water
and a window.

why’d it have to have a window?

i couldn’t do it.
but i couldn’t bring him home either.

and travis, my friend just stood there too.

he had his own mess to deal with.
this friends, poof, gone, and the furniture
that he still had to make for them
and deliver, even though they were dead.

and the invoice that he had to type out and deliver
to the executor of their estate.

i couldn’t do it.

and then i did.

and we drove to a bar
in the middle of the day.
it was happy hour….they said.

and we drank.
and ate nachos. and talked about some kind of god.
and drank some more.

and went home.

—–

we got a call two weeks ago.
a sure match they said.
and so we read the profile.
until we got to the part that said
“no jewish – must celebrate xmas”.

then we stopped reading.

—–

a few days ago
i found that picture on a dusty shelf,
(the one from our wedding)
and i had it framed with a pumpkin matte
and gave it to leanne last night.

a map
of something.

another letter

(my apologies for the capital letters – microsoft word insisted….and i obey)

Fever.
Malaise.
Smelly feet.
Glazed eyes.
Sweaty hands.
Difficulty swallowing.
Inability to sleep.
Lockjaw.
Hypertension.
Lip chaffing

You could’ve had any symptom at all when you woke up in the middle of the night screaming.  We would’ve dealt with it.
I climbed into bed with you and cuddled you close on the good pillow – not the other pillow that’s good for reading but whose case is just a bit stiffer.

You slept for another hour and then screamed out again, waking us both up, and mommy too – who came downstairs with her hair in her eyes and took you on the couch.  While I got Tylenol, mommy looked at you.

Danny, come here, she said.
And I brought the medicine over.

Look.

And there it was – the one thing we couldn’t handle at all –
the lymph nodes on one side of your neck bulging out.

It hurts, you said.
Where?
My neck, you said. My neck and my cheek.

And that’s when Leanne started crying and hiding her crying on the other side of the couch.

Mommy is nice and smart and kind and funny and serious and resilient and stubborn….but she’s not a processor.

Friends and co-workers were amazed, when last year, a mere two weeks after her last chemo treatment, with her head still bare and her port still buried in her chest, she returned to work.

Some people would take some more time off, would go and meditate, would put themselves into a group or therapy or something.  Not mommy.  She went back to work, back to her life almost as if nothing had happened, as if nothing would happen….and maybe, just maybe, nothing would….had you not woken up in the middle of the night with lumps in one side of your neck – lumps that looked just like the lumps that mommy had on the side of her neck last year.

And so she cried and I think I even saw her edge away from you on the couch.

And even though we went to the emergency room – your first time going to the doctor when it wasn’t your yearly check up – and watched cartoons in the waiting room in the middle of the night while I filled out the paperwork and mommy tried to get you to pee in a cup (the only time she laughed that night), and the doctor said it was just cat scratch fever and not cancer at all, and we ended up getting flu shots and you didn’t even get any shots at all, mommy couldn’t stop crying.

And she couldn’t stop for days.

We called off the adoption the next day, the baby in Cincinnati that you had been arranging stuffed animals for in the crib, gone.

Every time I looked at mommy she broke apart and down.  On the phone, walking towards the house from 22nd st. after her daily walk, in the kitchen making tea.

I don’t think you saw.
I did though.

One of your friends came over and saw the crib.
“Who’s that for?”
“The baby,” you said.
“What baby?”
“Oh, we’re buying one…it’s just not here yet.”

You drew picture after picture of things in jail, locked up behind bars.  Peppers in jail and people trapped in a burning house.  Over and over.

When I took you out to Grand Mesa a few weeks ago for a camping trip with Cliff and Tennyson and Rudy, we decided to make a book.  You would draw the pages and then tell me what to write on each one.  You sat on a rock – the same rock every day – and drew six pages.  I think four of them had people shackled on them.

You made me write “trapped” so many times.

And inI did,
in crayon.

It was your first book.

appliances

the elevator dings between each floor.
i can hear it still, the echoes of a doctor
telling us about a skiing trip that she took.

and then the drip of the IV, sometimes blood,
sometimes saline, the metronome of the hospital,
keeping time.

—–

sometimes when i’m teaching i ask people to tell me stories.
i’m going to tell a story about my parents getting divorced, they say.
or a story about falling in love.
and they start writing it, and it fails.

the subject’s too big.
instead, i ask them to tell me about small things.
their hands, umbrellas, eggbeaters.

tell me about cake, i say.
and they inevitably tell me about a pineapple upsidedown
cake, how their mother (who always treated them like crap)
would make it for them on their birthday and put a cherry
in the middle of each pineapple slice -
one for every year they had lived.

it was the only nice thing she ever did.

and how their mother is gone now.
and how now, cleaning up her empty house,
they found the old recipe and made the cake
for themselves in her old pans.

or instead of telling a story about someone’s parent’s
both dying when they were young,
they talk about ironing.

—–

when leanne first got sick,
all her co-workers wanted to do
something.

we’ll buy you a freezer, they said,
a giant freezer to hold all the food
that we will cook for you.

we said no, and so they didn’t.

a year and a half later i wish we had said yes.
not for then, but for now.

we have no room left in ours.

the weinshenker dairy is now officially

open:

last night we had to walk it down to our neighbor’s house,
and rent some shelf space in the extra freezer in their basement.

crib?  check.
diapers?  check.
semi-decent family?  check.
breastmilk?  check.

just waiting on a baby.
just waiting for the maytag man
to deliver a new appliance -
one that whirs and spits and cries and grows,
one that makes noises in the night.

nothing’s more pathetic

than an empty minivan.

i traded in my car for one today,
before i found out that the woman we thought
would give us her baby, decided not to.

so now there’s an empty minivan outside our house.
an empty crib upstairs.
and i’d be lying if i didn’t say that my heart
feels a bit emptier.

this is good, though.
it means my heart works still -
something i thought was maybe damaged.
i hadn’t thought much about the adoption.

that’s not true.

the truth is that i’d thought a lot about the adoption,
i just hadn’t felt all that much…at least i thought i hadn’t…
and that made me scared.

this will probably happen a lot, they say.
but part of me wants to know why.

just like my neighbors
probably want to know why
we have an empty minivan
parked in front of our house.