Alphabet Puzzle

A is for ABC

This is the alphabet puzzle your grandmother gave me when I was a boy. I do not remember when I got it; it was always mine. This alphabet puzzle has never belonged to anyone else, until this moment, which you will not remember.

You have woken up looking into a bright light, seeing nothing but the light. Soon, forms will begin to define themselves against the light.

The letter “A” is a crossed, open, upside-down triangle, the head of a horned bull. The A is red, the perfect red of an apple on television. It is what I see in my mind when I think of the color red.

B is for Blood

One of my strongest childhood memories is when I stapled my thumb on purpose. A wonderful, awful little shock-one purple drop there after I pulled out the staple, before my father saw and seized me, and held my hand under the hot water, then squeezed it dry in a hand towel.

Thereafter, I am told, my parents often came upon me with something dangerous in my hand that they had hidden away: scissors, a nail.

B is blue.

C is for Cecelia

Cecelia is your mother’s name, but you won’t use it much, because, for you, she is your mother, not herself.

A few hours before you were born, in the hospital, as we were waiting for the doctor to come down the hall with the pain medicine, your mother squeezed my hand harder than I knew she could, and she clenched her eyes closed and could not keep herself from moaning, from crying, from screaming. My reaction was not only terror and sympathy, but also a kind of helpless joy as I bent to kiss her wet forehead. This is like what I feel when you are screaming and I bend to collect you up.

C is white and a little gnawed on.

D is for Donkey

You prefer not the turtle I bought for your first birthday, not the giant plush white teddy bear from your mother’s work friends, not the tiger you screamed for at the zoo gift shop, but the half-faced donkey with the stiff limbs discovered by my brother on his recent search of our parents’ attic for his baseball cards.

D has been missing as long as I can remember. I do not know what color it is, but it must still exist somewhere. Buried deep inside the cream-colored couch I once puked on? Jammed beneath a radiator in my parents’ house? Accidentally thrown away and so now in the Nashoba Valley Landfill, thirty feet down?
 
E is for Eat

Sometimes nothing will work. Not pretzels, barbeque potato chips, yogurt covered raisins, chocolate milk, mommy’s special walnuts, applesauce, peas and butter, a candy cane I found in the junk drawer, sleeve cheese, string cheese, peanut butter, saltines, wheat thins, bread, corn. Only animal crackers. What you want is out of my hands. What you want is out of your hands.

E is yellow striped with blue.

F is for F

I had trouble with the letter “F.” I would skip over it in the song; I would point at it and say “E.”

F is purple with yellow lines.

“F” you say, as sure of yourself as you are when you point at the moon and say “there’s the moon.”

As I carry you sometimes I feel that the sidewalk is one thin inch of ice over a black lake.

G is for Galoshes

I have an ongoing argument with your mother about the word “galoshes.” I called them galoshes once, getting you dressed, and she said “Since when do you call boots ‘galoshes’?” It’s true-I have never in my life called boots ‘galoshes’ but now I do always, without thinking.

“Galoshes” is a wonderful word to say. These days I find much more pleasure in dressing to go out into the rain than I once did, even if I am alone. Leaving work for lunch-out into the black but wet and shining parking lot.

G is green.

H is for Han Solo

Of my old action figures dug out from the attic by my brother and presented to me-to you-Han Solo was my favorite. He was the hero in my imagined adventures-he climbed the rumpled-blanket mountain, sought magic weapons in the darkness beneath the bed.

I think I still have an active imagination, but I imagine now in terms of still images, not quests. For example, here, a redwood forest in mist, quiet and dim and green-you have just let go of my hand.

A golden elevator.

Your mother in a doorway in her long black concert dress, her oboe with the silver keys.

A white church in snow.

I sink my hand into a cold river and silver minnows shiver in and out of my spread fingers.

The letter “H,” thick and orange, the size of a man, hovering there, just above traffic.

H is orange.

I is for Itsy Bitsy Spider

I is unpainted, the only one. It is the color of thin yellow wood, the tree that all the letters have been cut from.

Every so often I wake up in the middle of the night and hear you singing to yourself in the dark. There is no way to know how long you have been singing.

J is for Juice

We were in line at the bank-I had to deposit a check before the mortgage payment came out the next day. It was almost five, the end of a long day, getting dark, wet out, the two of us in line at the end of a long day, in our wet raincoats, in the hot bank. You wanted juice. “We have to wait,” I said.

There you are on your back, out of your mind, making demon angels in the muddy footprints. Everyone pretending not to notice. I have to pick you up and sing.

Banks are so strange. Bulletproof glass, chained pens, slips of paper, numbers.

J is red with thin orange lines.

K is for Kookaburra, Koala, Kangaroo

A box of flashcards. On one side of each card a simple drawing of an animal and, on the other, the name of the animal in thick black letters and, in smaller letters, a few interesting facts. It is good to know the names of animals. I feel this strongly, weirdly strongly, because what use is such knowledge to most of us? I know what whales eat. I know the size of an ostrich’s egg.

K is yellow.

L is for Lucky

L is half of what it was-when I was an older kid with a new Swiss Army knife, looking for things to saw with the tiny saw, I sawed it in half. Why I only put half back in the L-slot I do not know. The half-L is black.

It is lucky I chose the L to saw, because when you saw off half of a letter “L,” it is still a letter “L.”

M is for Mine

That’s my swing, my bucket, my sand. That’s my cup of milk, my truck, my pretzel stick, my cat, my fossil-rock, my paper-towel-tube. That’s my shoe, my lizard, my key, my crayon, my book. That’s my way to sing that song. That’s my window, my moon. That’s my hat. That’s my dad.

M is green with white dots.

N is for No

All your “yeses” are tentative and non-binding, barely words.

If you know you want something, you do not say so–you act. If you want the sqooshed-dried out mouse carcass we discovered under the carpet, you pick it up. If you want the bright-red ketchup-smeared torn-up 7-11 hot dog box on the sidewalk, you let go of my hand and reach.

Only the negative requires earnest verbal expression, a full-throated attempt at communication. Then, I can almost see the word “No” flying out of your mouth, fully formed, a blue stone.

N is blue.

O is for O Little Town of Bethlehem

O Little Town of Bethlehem was always my favorite Christmas carol and it is strangely upsetting to me that it is not one of the songs that sticks in your mind, that you ask for. You don’t even have enough of the words enough to garble them back to me.

I remember Christmas Eve, the packed church, standing with my brother in the side aisle to let others sit, standing beneath the stained glass that was dark in the dark. My jacket stuffed into a ball and jammed between the wall and my hip. It was hot, and there were candles. I did not believe in any of it, even then, but I did like the songs.

You know Silent Night so well because your mother sings it to you as a lullaby and always has, even that first week in July, your first week here, firecrackers and police sirens outside your window as you slept.

O is orange, but it has been traced over and over again in blue ballpoint pen by someone who is not me–I don’t remember doing it–and not you–you have not quite mastered the circle.

P is for Paris

Your mother has been to Paris; I have seen the photographs and you will, too-there she is in a black tank top imitating the pose of a white statue, there she is leaning on a railing that holds her back from falling down into the sky.

There she is, arm around the waist of another beautiful young girl, this one with a pierced eyebrow, who is now a teacher in Washington D.C. (I think) who I have never met.

Your mother was once more or less fluent in French, but she has lost most of it.

The P is purple.

Q is for Quiet

The Q is strange-the bar that breaks the circle is a simple white, but the rest of the circle is a complicated yellow and green pattern of lines and triangles-like fronts on a weather map. Someone somewhere decided that this is what a Q looks like.

Before you were born, quiet was silence. Now quiet is the radio static of the monitor, which your mother and I found we could not sleep without and so now leave on, even though it receives no information from the receiver, which is turned off, unplugged, in a drawer.

When the power goes out in a storm we are awakened not by thunder or wind or rain-or your cries, since storms do not make you cry-but by a hollow of a silence in the storm, the thick silence of the world.

The flash of lightening, the thunder, the wind; the rain is not a wave but a number of individual mosquitoes of water just too heavy to fly.

R is for Red

R is red. You always attempt to fit the R back into the puzzle backwards.

Red is the color of your raincoat, the only red item of clothing that you own-your mother claims she does not dislike red, but she dislikes red. I bought the rain coat for you on impulse on a home-from-work stop at Wal-Mart for diapers for you and peanuts, which your mother cannot live without.

I would have said that I did not much care about color. But these days I find I believe red to be an excellent color for raincoats. I also like yellow cars and handwriting in green ballpoint pen. I like to look at pumpkins, and algae blooms on ponds. I like black dresses with flower prints. I like this pale-orange-striped tie I discovered at the bottom of a drawer and now wear with some frequency.

S is for Summer

In the summertime, we try to spend as much time outside as we can. We are limited in some ways: by our jobs, by your nervous reluctance to sleep anywhere but your own bed, by our home in the core of an American half-city, by our lack of true pioneer hearts. Your mother and I are payers of a mortgage, holders of jobs, carers for your grandmother (who does not always forget your name, which means something).

We are what the pioneers were walking into the woods to get away from.

How much you love the tall grass in the meadows of the part of the state park that is not far from the highway. There the grass is tall enough that you can walk through it and into it at once.

You cling to my knees in the grocery store, you demand to be picked up when crossing the street. In the tall grass, you just go.

S was in its slot when I gave you the puzzle, but now it is gone. It is purple.

T is for Tree

I was a climber of trees. A camping trip in college was the last time. Not that I made a conscious decision, or even thought about it before now. Somehow the scale was wrong. There is something correct about being a small person with sap on your fingers so high in the air, yet with green branches everywhere beneath you.

Once, I refused a lunch command and sat up there for an hour, alone, so high I rocked in the breeze. I only came down when my mother threatened to not drive me to baseball practice.

T is pale blue.

U is for Umbrella

U is black, the same color as our umbrella that terrifies you. I could never have guessed you would fear an ordinary umbrella-for you, sirens are interesting, barking dogs are puzzling, your scolding father is ridiculous. But the umbrella opens and is a the black open mouth of a monstrous spider, its spokes long grasping silver tentacles.

The choice is to carry the open umbrella in one hand and, in the other arm, you screaming and thrashing, your head buried in my chest, or to leave the umbrella in the corner folded in on itself, a seed, and lead you by the hand bareheaded into the rain.

V is for Viv

Viv is the name of the nurse who helped your mother through the early part of your birth. As we were waiting for you in the hospital, after the doctor gave your mother the medicine for the pain, she closed her eyes and asked for quiet, which she does not do. I could not even pay attention to a newspaper, as I can always do. I looked around the room. I studied at scuff marks on the wall. I read the serial numbers on the heartbeat-reading machine. I counted the blades of the window shade. I felt empty. I tried to imagine you but could not. Viv came in now and then. She adjusted your mother’s pillows, fiddled with the machines. She was wearing white white sneakers and silver glasses that she had to tip her head down to read over. Just before she left the room, every time, she always took a second to touch your mother’s shoulder and say “You’re doing fine.”

I found the word “Viv” in my mind. The letters hung there. The sound of her name over and over in my mind, a sort of silent buzzing. I wondered if “Viv” was your name; it is not.

At a certain point, Viv was gone, and we had a new nurse whose name I do not remember. Then you were born.

V is the same red as the A.

W is for Willie

Willie DeMasso was the name of a friend of mine in elementary school. We lived three backyards apart, so we could dash behind the houses into each others’ yards whenever we wanted (if Molly the German Shepard was inside).

We were friends, and then he went away to a different middle school, got leukemia and died.

I don’t think my mind understands that he is dead. Somehow childhood lasts forever. Like the way I sometimes dream I am a child. I am with Willie in the pale orange and brown light of the autumn woods behind his house, hammering sticks into scraps of two-by-four that we found in his basement. We are building something that will never be built. I can taste the nail held between my lips; the head of the hammer is warm.

You might remember today.

W is white and one of its arms is half sawed-through.

X is for Xylophone

I used to feel sorry for X because it never got to be the first letter of any word other than Xylophone (X-ray and X-marks-the-spot did not count). Though I did not admit it, this feeling was the reason I asked for a xylophone for Christmas in the 3^rd grade.

X is green with red lines. It is shaped in such a way that it has no up or down, left or right. It is the easiest piece of the puzzle to fit home.

Y is for Yellow

Y is brown. Y should be yellow. B is blue. G is green. O is orange. R is red. W is white. But Y is brown.

Z is for Zero

Z is the striped yellow and black of the pencil-long garter snake we saw on the way to the playground today. It was resting on the edge of the grass and the paved path leading in from the sidewalk in a patch of sunlight. I spotted it first and considered avoiding it, unsure if you would be afraid. But then I held your hand and held you back from the swings and slide and crouched and held you and said “Look.” And you saw, and did not turn away, and I could not see your face. And you took a step toward the creature and held out your hand and the snake felt you and came to life, to its motion, its awful at once tight and unfurling slither, like it was drawing itself. It slipped away into the darkness of the grass.

I remember the Emily Dickinson poem about a snake from high school because I understood it. She looks at a snake and feels “zero at the bone,” an animal terror. The “Z” in “zero” hisses.

You turned up to me with your hand still open and out and said “I saw a snake.” Not afraid.

“I did, too,” I said.

“The yellow snake!” you said.

Then to the playground. You have not learned to swing on your own, though you are almost there. You kick your legs in and out as I push you, not quite in rhythm.

Dear child. There is no heaven.