CHILDREN: HEAVEN, A PLACE WITH NO SKINNED KNEES

“What’s Heaven like?" three-year-old Matthew asks with eyes as wet as April and a trembling lower lip.

We have just buried the little boy’s pet hamster in a velvet-lined watch box, capping the tiny grave with a paving stone. Gone to Heaven, my husband has inscribed the marker with a piece of yellow chalk. 

 

“Heaven is happy,” I say, patting the pudgy hands that so often had cradled silky, little Munchie to his heart. 

“But, what is Heaven like?” my son asks again, because happy means too many things to really comfort him.

“Oh, Heaven is lovely and it’s warm,” I try again, remembering how poor Munchkin had shivered at the end.

By now the child is sitting in my lap.  I trace the even ridges where a plastic bandage protects one badly scraped knee.

“Heaven is happy and lovely and warm and safe--a place where little boys don’t ever get skinned knees,” I say at last.

My son relaxes then. I feel the tension ebbing as he settles back beneath my chin.

“Because the sidewalks there are soft?  He lifts his lighted face to ask.

“Because,” I say and hold him very close.

"Because the sidewalks there are soft?" he turns his lighted face to ask.

FIFTH GRADER SOLVES THE EDUCATION FINANCE CRISIS

Sara Bellum, my daughter's best friend, stayed for supper at our house the other night.

To say Sara is precocious would be the ultimate understatement.  She's so smart she makes Albert Einstein seem like a pea brain.  And well-read, too!  According to her fifth grade teacher, Sara's the only kid in the history of the school who ever gave a book report on the entire ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA.

"I think I've got things figured out." Sara announced to my husband between bites of meatloaf.

"Got what figured out?"  Dave shot back before I could send him a warning glare.

"How to resolve the education dollar crisis.  The legislature, as you know, is traditionally tightfisted when it comes to appropriating education dollars."

Dave's lower jaw dropped.  As a veteran school teacher, he was ready to take the bait.  Sara had him chummed.

"Pass the corn and tell me more," was what he said.

"Well," Sara smeared a slice of bread with grape preserves, "first of all, you resume selling canned pop in all the lunch rooms across the state and encourage the school district to sell the scrap aluminum cans to supplement teacher salaries.

"Then, you collect all the pencil sharpener shavings in each school and recycle them into paper school supplies.

"Finally, you take all the onions out of the school lunch salads--the kids never eat them anyway--and use the money you save to buy new text books.

 "Why those three measures alone should save the state's taxpayers millions of education dollars."

"I see," my husband said, so obviously intrigued that he had begun chewing on his Jello.

"You recycle the aluminum cans, and you recycle the pencil shavings.  But what about the onions?  What are all the farmers in Utah going to do with their surplus onions?"

"Give them to the legislature," Sara replied.  "That way, next time they talk about the problems in education they can cry some real tears."

HALLOWEEN'S A MONSTER

One Halloween, Mother turned the rag bag inside out, holding up for my inspection the lint-flecked navy wool from Daddy’s sailor days and the rhinestone-sprinkled circle skirt she’d worn ten years before on New Year’s Eve.

I finally settled for a gaudy, paisley shift, cinched tight around the middle with a flamboyant silk scarf. A knotted string of cut-glass beads and a pair of clinking Mason jar rings dangling from one ear made me a fairly authentic gypsy, Mama said.

I stood patiently as she rubbed my cheeks with lipstick over cold cream, taking care to feather out the edges, before adding an eyebrow-penciled beauty mark for good luck.

That was then.  Now, I rummage for my own kids’ costumes, but somehow their father’s cast-off baseball jersey and their mom’s satin bridesmaid dress will not do for youngsters set on extorting treats by virtue of their striking similarity to space-age spooks like Darth Vader and E.T.

It was bad enough when Michael hacked my flexible dryer venting hose in two for the arms of the robot he aspired to be.

And I could barely cope when Jennifer dismantled the kitchen stove so she could use the door for the head of her computer creature costume.

But when Stacee left the goldfish in the toilet with a “Do Not Flush” sign, so she could borrow his bowl for her astronaut suit helmet, I was the one who went into orbit.

Moments later, three space-age spooks timidly attempted to break the glassy-eyed silence I maintained.

“What are you going to be for Halloween?” I heard my children ask.

“A basket case,” they heard their mother say!

!

Matt and Mike back in the day when creating a Halloween costume didn't involve dismantling the house.

So this little spook had a bit too much candy!

KIDS' PLAYGROUND CAN’T LAST FOREVER

It was just a pile of rubble—crumbling slabs of old concrete, mounds of peewee gravel—heaped together in a nearby vacant lot and overgrown by weeds.

Unsightly, yes.  But to my children, it was Camelot, the Emerald City or Neverland, depending on which day they happened to be embellishing its niches and crannies with cast-off bedding and worm-eaten 2X4’s.  

For the nine months since we had moved into our new home, one of the first in the subdivision, my brood had been free to inhabit whatever imaginative kingdom they chose, often wearing elaborate costumes they designed themselves.

Occasionally they even journeyed to Mars.  Other times they were pioneers trudging west to eat peanut butter and buffalo sandwiches on the cement blocks west of our home. 

Sometimes they just ran away with lunch packed in a suitcase.  That was okay.  They always returned in time to snuggle down in their own little beds.

But inevitably, the backhoe came.  I saw it rumbling in the lot while the children were at school.  Within 45 minutes, Camelot, Emerald City, and, most recently, Neverland had been heaped into a truck and trundled to the dump. (For a moment I considered asking the driver to deposit his load in our backyard, but somehow I knew such rubble would not enrich my husband’s garden.)

All day long I held my breath against the moment when the kids would see the barren scar where their magic habitat had been. Soon, I knew, a house would rise from footings newly dug and poured on the exact spot where Jennifer’s Peter Pan had escaped from Michael’s Captain Hook.

When Stacee, always the first one home, stood shoulder hunched beside the spot, I quietly hugged her skinny shoulders. We paused there together, silently surveying the damages, neither of us speaking until my daughter (aka Wendy) raised her trembling chin.

“It’s OK,” she finally said.  “Maybe Neverland will fit beneath our basement stairs.”

Often elaborate costumes were devised.