Small Good Things

I have been considering how I might answer on judgement day to account for myself and my time on this earthly plane. What have I done here, what achieved? Well not a lot, is one way of looking at it. But I have had my moments and those will have to stand between me and eternal damnation:

I have learned how to make a wooden spoon. I made one at school (a Steiner one obviously) when I was 11, and if asked I could make one again now, from the first drawing on a piece of wood cut for the purpose to the last bit of fine sandpaper and rub of oil so as not to let it go naked into the world. In time it fashions its own skin. It was my father’s favourite cooking utensil. He took it with him into his second marriage. My stepmother loved it too, she used it even when the end was burned, having been left near the gas hob. She may have used it until her death. They talked about it, how when she cooked she always looked for it. To steal from the title of a Raymond Carver story, I count that as a small good thing.

I have found people to play with. In the tarmac playground at primary school, I bounced a ball against the brick wall that separated us from the railway track. I only played with the ones that knew without telling how to make things up as you go along, who could perhaps skip, count and chant dippidippidation my operation, how many people at the station but could also see that there was a door in the brick wall that might lead to the best and the worst of all possible worlds. I played with the ones who would go through the door without asking questions, brave soldiers. And sometimes my comrades-in-arms were stronger than I was. Shakela who, tired of my reading the Beano all the afternoon she came to play, seeing there was very little time left, said: let’s pretend that each minute is a whole day and we can fit in as much playing in quarter of an hour as we could in two weeks. Quintin who had to stand up and be told by Miss Williams that he was filthy and should be ashamed of himself, and who said, I had a bubbly bath last night Miss, and I’m clean and turned to me smiling, showing all his white teeth, who was the butt of Miss Williams’ anger (you’re disgusting Quintin, what are you?) and who at playtime shared with me a chocolate egg that looked like a real one with a white crispy shell.

Who can pull rabbits from a hat and let them go? Turn wine into water and pour it into the river home of a talking fish? I allowed for many possibilities. So my old friend who wanted stories was glad of a woman as beautiful as her hair was black who came from another planet in a spaceship to leave us notes in strange handwriting that said when the moon is blue your wish will come true and a gift of green Palmolive soap, a handful of nuts and raisins stuffed into a sock.

And I write poems. If the One with the black book doesn’t accept these things as currency then I will take my bag of tricks and go elsewhere.