jonathan montgomery are you listening?

Two really significant things happened to me in the last twenty four hours.

(I'm sure other really significant things happened to me in that time frame, but I just don't know why they're significant yet.)

One. Jaelyn's tooth came out.

Two. Julie Bemis gave me an amazing scarf.

We were sitting at dinner and, as always, at dinner, we're trying to enjoy our meal -- cultivate an atmosphere of conversation -- and teach our children ettiquette. Right now we're not at the stage where we order our forks or determine whether its most polite to introduce the friends grandmother first or the visiting diplomat. We're trying to just get our kids to stay in their seats at the table until a whole unit of time has passed (eg. family meal time).

BTW, it never sounds quite as honorable as "ettiquette training" sounds in theory when you're in the trenches. It roughly translates into:

"Addison I want you to SIT with your BOTTOM on that SEAT until we are FINISHED eating our SUPPER."

(to which my son, inevitably concerned with the theoretical endlessness of the unmarked future, asks: But, DADDY. How we be all done? -- which means -- When can *i* be done?)

So into this circus of trying to be calm and invite conversation and banter about days and police bottoms that are popping out of chairs, enters --

The curdling horror stricken cries of Jaelyn. (Who is, of course, sitting right between Lynn and I...apparently...except for the cries....fine.)

Has she bitten her tongue? Her cheek? Stubbed her toe? OR -- as a scream of this volume and vibrancy would merit -- has she accidentally sliced off her finger with an errant steak knife? We ask all of these questions to her, but she cannot stop sobbing.

Finally. "My tooth came out."

I know that there's an incipient sense of tragedy whenever part of your body falls off -- and that the gradual loss of hair and skin and fingernails gradually hardens us to it -- but not so with kids. Pulled off hair, skin and the threat of fingernail clippers are as tragic as pools of blood. But your TEETH. They're so...YOU!

Within minutes we are all celebrating the event. Jaelyn, too. She pries open her hand, extends the small, impossibly small, ridiculously tiny inscisor out to us.

This is an important night, I tell her. This is the first night you lost your tooth.

I didn't tell her how much MORE relieved Lynn and I were to see a new tooth coming in already behind the newly departed one...

We feared that this loss was premature and, no matter how out of our control the circumstances of its demise were, as parents we still felt an onus of responsibility. But AH! this tooth was MEANT to come out. Destined to come out. A NEW tooth has arrived.

She danced in circles. And I have to admit, I started to believe her just as much. She told everyone at the YMCA when we went to work out later -- This is an Important Night for me. This IS an Important Night for ALL OF US.

Once she was sleeping, i creep into her bedroom to assess the difficulty of the tooth fairying that Lynn or I will do later tonight. Usually she sprawls in every imaginable direction on her bed. Not tonight. Tonight her head is carefully and squarely planted on the middle of the pillow covered by symmetrical ballet dancers arranged on the felt of the pillow case that Grandma Glo sewed for Christmas.

I decide to check on her when I wake up. Surely by then she will have sprawled in another direction.

But I have to tell you, I went to bed with this queasy feeling in my stomach. So much was riding on this performance. What if my alarm didn't go off? What if she woke up at the ridiculous absurd hour of five o three -- beating me by the seven minutes of snooze that I always allow for in the morning?

So five o'clock came, and as i crept into the room, I have to admit, my body was filled with adrenaline. If I thought the alarm clock was precarious....the present mission that faced me proved that my fears last night were the immature underdeveloped fears of a novice. Here -- in the chrysalis of my glory or defeat -- i understood the true magnitude of the stakes.

I knew that step one was: gently lift the pillow. Think of what could happen here. In that moment!

My daughters beautiful brown eyes could fly open. Wide awake on a dime. And she would be looking at me. Right in my eyes in the middle of the dark of her bedroom. And her feelings of surprise and startle would last only for the moment that it took her to realize: It's a sham! There's NO tooth fairy! I'm participating in a pre-medievalist practice! It's pagan! It's absurd! She would swallow and in a croaky voice say, "Daddy, what you're doing?"

Wait, no wait, this wasn't an unrecoverable error. I could still keep my cover:

"Go to sleep honey," I could say. "Everything's Okay." and slip out of the room. The ruse still intact.

By the time I finish with this hypothetical, I'm almost over to the bed. Stepping carefully so as to not activate the beeping electronic voice of the blues clues telephone and not to shred my bare foot on the jagged edges of (my nemesis) Barbie's house...

Step Two: Pull out the plastic bag which Lynn had (so judiciously) suggested we place the tooth in. Did everybody put their teeth in plastic bags for the tooth fairy? I don't remember if I did? But how in the world could generations before me have gone through this particular agony if they had to swipe their hand everywhere across the rumpled sheets, looking for such a tiny bit of enamel? (Lynn! thank you! plastic bags save the universe again...and, of course, ironically, also manage to ruin the environment at the same time...)

(Part of me wonders how Sidney does it every week? I could never be the star of Alias.)

(the other part of me says, sure I could do it every week. Everything becomes natural if you do it enough...)

BUT don't be too confident here! I argue back. Every single motion must be intentional -- every reflex attuned. Because, I have decided, if those brown eyes flutter open while I'm holding the bag -- I'm made. There's nothing to do.

Finally I'm standing at the bed.

I'm practically hyperventilating.

E.B. White wrote an essay which I love called "once more to the lake" and he narrates the strange disembodiment of returning with his children to a cabin and lake where he spent his childhood. How strange it is to become one's father and to see one's progeny both as themselves and as ones' self.

Here I go, I think, as I reach for the pillow, I'm diving into pools and pools of tradition; generations of careful deception. I am (the pillow only barely touches the top of her head as I fold it back) the tooth fairy (the bag slides out with no problem). I am the tooth fairy (and i half tiptoe, half leap out of the room before she will stir.

(Not that it matters -- but J. thought the tooth fairy generous with four coins...I should guess so! When I was her age, i was lucky to get an entire penny for one tooth...)

Two. Julie Bemis knitted the MOST amazing scarf.

When I was in college, my roommate, Jonathan Montgomery had the LONGEST scarf I had ever seen. It was black and white stripes (horizontally) and wound around and around his neck and still hung (i'm convinced) past his waist. One week we kidnapped the scarf and left a series of ransom notes featuring photos and videos of the scarf in (ahem) compromising positions. It was three weeks of fun. Ahh the crazy college capers of fundamentalists separated from the world by a vast cornfield and an even vaster sense of guilt and atonement....scarf kidnapping was FREE happiness. No sin here.

But I hadn't thought about that scarf for years until I got this one.

I was thrilled to recognize my new scarf's antecedent. That original scarf, like almost everything else about Jonathan, makes me think about being creative and free. Jonathan wrote poetry like a madman. Occasionally, obsessively, absurdly, delightfully. He performed his poetry regularly. With or without an invitation.

One night he missed curfew and we didn't turn in his MIA status because we knew he was Jonathan, and sure enough the story he told us midday the next day was that he had followed a long pair of train tracks until they led him to the most comfortable tree he had ever sat in. So comfortable, in fact, that he fell asleep and slept there in the tree til late the next morning. For some an impossible feat, for double-jointed, unpredictable Jonathan? A perfectly legitimate explanation.

As he would listen to The Pogues on his headset, he worked to cover one of our dorm room walls with black and white photographs, clippings and images. One afternoon I awoke from a nap to find a decapitated Hitler staring at me from the wall. On another day I returned to find that he had sliced my LEVI 501 posters along random lines throughout the pictures. He had clearly made an improvement.

One semester he didn't show up. I feel proud that I started the rumour that he was traveling in Bolivia. What was a credit to Jonathan, was that most people shrugged and said, "Cool." And remember, this is the late eighties, a slightly less global era, in the middle of Ohio (where people, in general, do not venture to leave) and also in the heart of evangelical fundamentalism (where the only travelling we do is to "spread the gospel") -- and disappearing to Bolivia suddenly would be quite a big deal for most of us. But not for Jonathan.

Occasionally he would hear me begin a tirade against legalism or injustice. But what was amazing about Jonathan was that he would look at me like my anger was a curiousity -- but with a simple gesture or group of words he would DO justice or shalom or grace in the direction of my discontent. He could affirm the healing that was needed without belaboring (as I so often do) the significance and impacts of all the harms of all the systems of the world.

So anyway this amazing scarf I've been wearing all day -- it clearly has a spiritual, shamanic quality to it. I feel that I can enter any room with more gravity and levity -- all together simply by placing it around my neck. It's like a blanket and a prayer shawl and a mantel.

I think I'm naming it. I want a name that refers backward to all the goodness that Jonathan invested into my world -- and that refers to all the struggle and possibility that defines Bemis' world right now...

The mantle of freedom and possibility.

So I haven't talked to nor heard from Jonathan in at least eight or nine years. But I'd love to. So some late night when his wife is ego-surfing in google for him (because he's not really the type to ego surf) -- she'll call him over. Hey, honey, look at this blog! This is your name! Do you know this guy? Didn't you go to college in a cornfield?

And then finally I'll get to say thanks to my friend for the symbols and the richness and -- of course -- for making me be able to enjoy this gift so much.

And in the slightly more promising happenstance that one of my favorite non-emotional / super-emotive debators happens across this blog -- THANK YOU, Bemis! This took so much work. It's SO amazing. I promise you TWO episodes of Queer Eye at my house. And dinner sometime.

Peace~