KNOWING CHICK

Photo above from the Ascension Press blog Oct. 4, 2023

His given name was not Chick, of course. It was Charles. But I never met anyone who called him that. Maybe the IRS, if they ever had reason to contact him, which I seriously doubt. Maybe God, although it’s hard to imagine that would be the case. His friends and anybody who had ever volunteered alongside him knew him as Chick.

            He worked extensively with the poor and homeless. He helped open a center where they could be welcomed and warmed. Perhaps all this came from a troubled past of his own; I’m not sure. And he smiled, eyes crinkling. That was, I think, the main thing he did in life. It was a kind smile, and a little jesting, and above all, loving. It instantly said, “Hello! I see you. Welcome into my life!” Each time I met him, I went away feeling—better, yes, but more than that. It was as if I’d just brushed against someone who exuded all I wanted to nurture within myself. For a while afterwards, I’d make an effort to see the people around me, and to connect with them in some positive way.

            I first spent time around Chick (what little time I had with him) at a class on St. Francis of Assisi. There was a group of us, discussing who Francis really was, or might have been. Stay with me now. This is not a church-y story. We sat around a table, talking about this symbol of kindness and love, with no clue as to what might actually be true about him. Someone offered a quote from Dorothy Day: “St. Francis was ‘the little poor man’, and none was more joyful than he; yet Francis began with tears, with fear and trembling, hiding in a cave from his irate father.” Turns out Francis had stolen some valuables from his father to repair a church and refectory where he meant to live. It wasn’t really stealing, Francis figured. He would have gotten it anyway as his inheritance. We talked about what it meant to detach from objects, and most of all about what it takes to effectively serve people in need or trouble. All the while a consummate servant-of-others sat among us, but I didn’t yet know it.

            Every time I saw Chick, he smiled and greeted me warmly. And that was about the extent of it. Honestly, I can’t think of a single, long, one-on-one exchange I had with the man. It never mattered. We shared a few other group experiences, and I was always taken with his kindness and wisdom. But I can’t claim that we were friends. We were fellow travelers with the same view of the world and the same hopes for it. He was a lot better than me at expressing it.

            In mid-May word suddenly came that Chick had stopped eating and drinking, by choice. There were some health issues. Things were not going to get better. Many of us were a little flattened by this news. What would our world be like without him? There’d been so many things I’d wanted to ask him! How do you maintain your optimism, your patience? How do you deal kindly with someone who annoys the stuffing out of you? But there never seemed to be an opportunity.

And now he was leaving, in his own way. He would be accepting visitors for several hours each day. Should I go? He’d meant more to me than I’d meant to him—of this I was certain.

            One afternoon a mutual friend stopped by our house. “I just came from Chick’s,” he said. I couldn’t read his expression.

            “How was he?” I finally asked.

            Our friend gave a bemused shrug. “He was Chick. Sitting on the sofa, talking.” They’d had a nice visit. Chick had kept close a small bottle of water, from which he’d taken a sip to moisten his mouth. He spit it into a cup kept close at hand.

            A small, buzzy feeling washed over me, the conviction that I needed to go see Chick, right then. I didn’t stir. Was I imagining this? Jeff and I continued chatting with our friend, and the buzzy feeling faded. But I knew I needed to go.

            A few days later I walked by Chick’s house with a friend. There were a lot of cars; I didn’t go in. On Sunday afternoon the driveway was empty. I knocked timidly. No answer.

            I tried to decide how I would feel if Chick slipped away and I hadn’t gone to see him—to tell him one important thing. I didn’t necessarily need to tell him, I assured myself. It wasn’t vital. But one morning I knew the time had come.

            I went back to his house, which sits high above the Androscoggin River, just below a dam with roaring falls. A warm home with large windows, on the very edge of nature. I knocked on the door and turned the knob.

            Chick lay in the living room beneath blankets on a sofa, his eyes closed. Two men I didn’t know stood beside him. “Hi,” I said.

            “Hi,” said the closest. “Come on in.” He gestured toward a second sofa next to where Chick lay, positioned close to his feet.

            I sat. Was he still conscious? I wondered if I should touch him. “Say hello,” one of the men suggested.

            I stood and leaned close to Chick’s face. “Hi Chick.” A pause. “It’s Jan DeBlieu,” I said.

            He opened his eyes and smiled. “I know who you are,” he grinned. “Where’s Jeff?”

            My surprise must have shown in my face. “He’s going to come another day,” I said.

            Chick nodded slightly and lay back. I sat near his feet, which were clad in thin socks. “Hey,” I said, “can I rub your feet?”

            He smiled and nodded, eyes closed.

            Others were coming and going now. A granddaughter took her leave; a grandson replaced her. I gently rubbed the sole of Chick’s feet and cupped his toes in my palm. “Is this okay?”

            He nodded, eyes closed. I took the other foot in my hands, waiting for the right words. The room was rich with tenderness and love. I lightly massaged the arch, the sides, the heel. Finally I put it down and moved forward to kneel by Chick’s face. I asked him to give a hug to our son in heaven. I told him he was the kindest man I’d ever known, and I thanked him.

I stood, smiled weakly at those gathered around us, and went back out to face this crazy, troubled world.

The Maine Woods

            One beautiful late season afternoon in 2020, in the heart of the pandemic, Jeff and I hiked up to an open ridge overlooking the vast forests on the north side of Baxter State Park. We’d been in Maine a bit less than two years, and this was our first trip into the famed North Woods. We’d come off season; no one else was around. Seated on a rock with an abundance of time to relax and gaze, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing:
            Nothing but forests stretching into Canada. There were a couple of distant antennas, one to the north, one west, but otherwise we could see only nature. Spiky firs and spruces, round-topped oaks and maples, ashes and birches and scattered others, all spread across the undulating hills and mountains.
            What was it like deep within them, these forests so eloquently described by Thoreau? I wanted to explore them, to come to know them well, to learn about their histories and the plants and animals they sheltered, and maybe the people they helped support.
            As I would soon discover, it is not a pretty story.
            Fifty years ago the view from that ridge would have been quite different: nothing but hillsides of dead and dying trees, all attacked by a voracious insect, and of stripped land that had been hastily clearcut as the scourge moved south from Canada. Known as the spruce budworm, this pest feeds more eagerly on balsam fir than on red spruce. Its outbreaks are cyclical, coming every few decades—and another is on the way this summer.
            Maine’s North Woods have long lived in my imagination as a landscape of—not quite wilderness; I wasn’t that naïve—but as a haven where moose and bear and lynx roam and streams run fresh and clear. By long tradition they are completely open for hunting, fishing and hiking. In that sense they serve as a vast public reserve. They are mostly owned by timbering companies, some of which treat them kindly and some of which do not, and by several nonprofit conservation groups. Very few acres within them are developed. Indeed, the whole northern section of the state is known as the Unorganized Territories because of the absence within it of proper towns.
            And yet forty years ago the North Woods were in such poor condition that Lloyd Irland, a historian who specializes in studying Maine forests, described them as “an immense junk woods.” The respected journalist Phyllis Austin added that most stands held only trees that were “diseased, dying, or of poor quality—though still generating profits.”
            I know this because recently I wrote three articles about Maine’s forests for the digital newspaper The Maine Monitor. It was fascinating to delve into that history—and it certainly disabused me of any notion of Maine as a pristine paradise. (Links to the articles are attached below, in case you’d like to delve into the subject more deeply.) Suffice it to say that there was an epidemic of not just budworms but of clearcutting, followed by--nothing. No coherent management. Unfortunately, on cleared ground in Maine, as one forester told me, “trees grow back thick as hair on a dog’s back.”
             And so we are living with that legacy: millions of acres of forests stuffed with gangly trees, all the same size and age. Pole trees, they’re called. Moving through them is nearly impossible, whether you’re human or animal. Also, they’ve developed neither solid root masses nor healthy crowns. When heavy winds hit, they tend to tumble over en masse. 
            A few decades ago those crowded stands might have been cut for pulp or paper making. But the advent of computers, coupled with the relocation of paper and pulp factories to the U.S. South and abroad (thanks to cheaper labor and faster tree growth rates), greatly diminished those markets in Maine.
            Fortunately, as with all good stories, some heroes have stepped in. Over time conservation organizations like the Appalachian Mountain Club and The Nature Conservancy have purchased large tracts of timberland and now manage it with ecological principles to increase its value as wild habitat. In addition, the Forest Society of Maine has negotiated deals with quite a few landowners to place forest conservation easements on thousands of acres. These will never be developed—a major fear as increasing numbers of people move into the state. 
            Only about 20 percent of the North Woods is permanently protected from intensive commercial cutting, maybe a bit less. But that’s still millions of acres of timberland that will forever be managed using what’s known as ecological forestry. (See article #2 for a description of how that works!) 
            There’s hope that incentives will become available to encourage land owners to manage their forests for carbon storage. Forests with older trees tend to have superior wildlife habitat, and they also pull and store the most carbon from the atmosphere. There are excellent reasons to leave them standing. The only question is whether our society will have the wisdom to do so. The New England Forestry Foundation was awarded a grant through the federal government that would pay a group of Maine’s commercial land owners to manage their forests for carbon storage instead of cutting them down. There's hope all of that money will be released, but these are strange times.
            And so the dance continues: Humans do what they do, and Nature—well, Nature is going to have the last laugh. That’s inevitable. Meanwhile, there will be legions of us working to make our relationship with her a partnership and not a competition. That’s just plain “smaht,” as a Main-ah would say. 
            A case in point: Spruce budworms will almost certainly attack the North Woods in large numbers this summer. But since the last surge, many forest owners have thinned out balsam firs, on which the insects feed most voraciously. The leading edge of the attack is being closely monitored, and owners are prepared to spray to control budworm numbers. The damage this time, we hope, will be much more limited. We’ll see.
 
       Thanks for reading! Below are links to my Monitor articles, if you’d like more detailed info about Maine’s forests and the push-pull over their cutting and care.  One last thing: Digital newspapers and magazines are doing some of the best reporting right now in the U.S. If one of these is operating in your region, please consider subscribing.

See you again soon!  Jan

Facing New Spruce Budworm Outbreak, Maine Foresters Look to History as a Guide
https://themainemonitor.org/spruce-budworm-outbreak/

Maine Landowners See A Future in Managing Forests with Ecological Principles
https://themainemonitor.org/ecological-forest-management-future/

Landowners Shape Forests for Maximum Carbon Storage
https://themainemonitor.org/forestry-carbon-storage/

Young Old Gal

The little cabin sat beside a sizeable pond, in a valley of forested hills and a rocky cleft we hiked through one afternoon. Mornings the low sun briefly cast ghostly shadows of tree trunks across the water’s icy-snowy surface. It was familiar territory but like the best special places different this time, as with each time we go.
            This was my fifth stay in the Midcoast Conservancy’s Hidden Valley Nature Center, and my third with this group: six or seven women on a weekend sabbatical from husbands and children. Most of the others had been coming on this trip for years. I was a relative newbie—and I almost hadn’t come.
            Face it, I’m nearly a generation older than the others in this group. I feel good: spunky, sassy, eager to step out and explore the world. I have a friend who insists that 70 is the new 50, making, I suppose, 60 the new 40, or maybe 45, and on down. I’ll take it. 
           Even so, by coming with these women I knew I’d need to resign myself to being the slowest hiker and skier, the most hesitant to take a dip in the pond, should someone pull out an ice axe and proceed to chop a hole, as is usual with this crowd. I couldn’t help thinking of Blanche DuBlois in A Streetcar Named Desire, hiding from the light, pretending to be younger than she was.
            Shortly after we moved to Maine (seven years ago now),  my “70-is-the-new-50” friend had told me about her annual winter trips with women friends to a remote cabin in Baxter State Park. They skied 12 miles into the park, toting their food and gear. I thought, “I want to do that sometime!” I had yet to don a pair of cross country skis, but I’d done lots of downhill skiing. How different could it be? 
          Plenty, it turned out. There’s something about not having your heels locked into your bindings that utterly changes the equation. Still, I practiced, and practiced—and I got . . . okay at it. Not great, but passably adept. So three years ago when my friend Susan, the long-time organizer of the Hidden Valley weekend, invited me along, I eagerly accepted. We’d only need to ski in two miles. I could handle that, right?
          Possibly. But there was still the matter of hauling food and gear. For our own trip to Hidden Valley one snowless winter, Jeff and I had purchased a heavy plastic “jet sled,” the kind hunters use to haul their game out of the woods. It came with a rope handle, which was fine for hiking but not skiing. I needed something stiff to prevent the sled from riding up behind me when I skied downhill. A friend showed me how to rig a harness with two pieces of narrow PVC pipe: a simple, economical solution.
           Susan and I drove together to the trailhead that Friday afternoon. We were to haul much of the group’s gear (food, cookware and stove, plus our clothes, headlamps, sleeping bags and pads) using my sled. We’d take turns pulling it. We loaded it up—there certainly was a lot!—secured the gear with bungies, and maneuvered it the few feet to the trailhead.
            It wasn’t until then that I noticed the conditions. Uh-oh. There had been a lot of thawing and refreezing that year, and the snow was hard and fast.
            Susan offered to take the first turn pulling the sled. I hooked the harness to her daypack, and she took off, going downhill faster perhaps than she expected but looking like the veteran that she is. I clipped on my skis to follow. 
            I managed the first decline, which was short and not at all steep, and made my way as well as I could up the next hill. The snow beneath me was white, but it just as well might have been blue ice. Speeding downhill I tried to turn to avoid the trail edge, which dropped steeply into woods. My skis wouldn’t respond! I crashed to the ground and lay there, thinking how comical I must look. 
I glanced up to see Susan disappearing over the third hill, her back to me, the sled obediently following. I managed to get myself righted and up—and almost fell again. 
            I took off my skis and began walking.
            And so it went that weekend: Everyone else stepping out confidently, on skis or not, while I took things more cautiously. There was no judgment from the other women. Quite the opposite: They were warm and welcoming. The problem was my own mind talk. I couldn’t help feeling a bit different, having no children at home or full-time job to talk about. Being a self-employed writer can be hard to explain. What do you do? Um, I write about what interests me. It’s great, except when my mind goes utterly blank. Still, I enjoyed myself. I was doing something women from Maine do! I didn’t take a dip in the bathtub-sized hole that my companions chopped in the ice that sunny Sunday morning, though everyone else did. Susan had included “bathing suit” on the list of items we should bring, but I’d thought it was a joke.
           The following March we had a glorious six-or-so inches of snow after we’d walked into the cabin on mostly bare ground. I’d again brought my skis—and I had fun, lots of it.
            Even so, as we took starry nighttime walks across the snowy pond, exploring its thickly wooded islands, I pushed myself hard trying to keep up with the others. These are fit, energetic, mostly long-legged women. They strode along, talking and laughing—and finally I had to decide whether to ask them to slow down or just lag behind. I lagged, taunted by a vision of myself as the slower, shorter little sister. Saturday afternoon, when my friends went skiing on some of the steeper, more remote trails, I set out alone, sticking to trails I knew I could handle. My skiing had vastly improved. I wound past snow-laden conifers and through groves of leafless hardwoods, their trunks sprayed white on the windward side. I skied to the end of the trail through sodden groves of thin-trunked red maples to where the stream that feeds the pond sluices through a rocky cut. In the winter quiet it seemed that my real life was far away.
            Last March I was in Alaska when my young friends went to the cabin by the pond. This February, when Susan sent out her invitation (Come with us!), I sat looking at it for a long time. 
            Did I want to spend three days as the older-younger sister? 
            I sat down to write Susan and explain that I just felt too different from the rest of the group, and that I’d be staying home. But I couldn’t make myself type those words. Instead I wrote my feelings:
            “I can’t keep up with you youngsters,” I wrote. I’d found that “as the years roll by, you revert to your less-capable self. Humbling and enlightening.”
            “I’ll admit to thoughts along the lines of: ‘This is ridiculous. I’ve aged out. I just need to accept that.’ But I think it’s something even more difficult: I should come with you and face up to my limitations. I should cut myself a big piece of humble pie and enjoy it. I’ve earned it.”
And so I did.
            Warm rains arrived before our trip to the cabin this year, so there wasn’t any skiing. But there was exploring and feasting and lots of laughter. There were long evenings by the woodstove, talking about our lives. Saturday afternoon, after a lengthy hike, someone said, “We walked six miles! I don’t feel like we went nearly that far!”
            I said, “I do!” And everyone laughed.
            I had my bathing suit with me this time. The ice on the edge of the pond was slushy--no axe required. I was the last one in and probably stayed in the shortest time. But in I went. It’s true what they say: Cold water brings you alive.

The Chestnut Tree

My neighbor Julie gave us two baby American chestnut trees. They were adorably small, just twigs, each with a few tiny branches. And they were special, bred to be resistant to the blight that killed the great chestnut forests of the eastern United States. The American chestnut was said to be the perfect tree: strong, straight-grained, huge, and a prolific bearer of a tasty, highly nutritious nut. By the early 1900s an Asian blight had arrived in our eastern forests. Within 40 years it destroyed the native chestnut as a commercial species.

But now we had two, and the blight wouldn’t kill them! Unfortunately, something else well might. We selected a spot for them in our new yard, carefully planted them, and surrounded them with chicken wire fencing to keep deer from nibbling their little lives away. One succumbed anyway, just up and died for no obvious reason.

The second hung on. Its enclosure seemed ridiculously large, but I was taking no chances. Julie had three more, which she planted in her yard nearby. This was in mid-2019, back when the world seemed shinier, especially to us, new as we were to Maine.

During the previous 18 months we’d managed to move north, buy land, build a house, and begin our lives as New Englanders. Now we were planting trees in the old meadows we called home. Most we took from fields and hedgerows and groves too crowded for the youngest ever to prosper. We purchased a couple of sugar maples from a nursery, along with some rhododendrons for the yard. But we had so much pastureland begging for trees that we liberated as many as we could from sketchy habitat.

And now we had a chestnut. I tried to leave it alone (a watched chestnut never grows, right?) but found myself checking on it every day. It stood quietly in its enclosure, its long, slender, serrated leaves looking a bit yellow. I carefully applied some fertilizer—not too much, because of the tree’s small size. I made a point of passing by, saying hello, wishing it well.

What a long time ago that seems.

The chestnut grew the following summer, and the next. Its skinny little trunk split into two shoots, then three. Their crotches were only a few inches above the ground—not at all ideal—but I kept putting off the day when I’d trim them away. The tree still seemed so fragile! Its leaves continued to yellow unless I fed it frequently with a phosphorous compound. We tested the soil and found it to be of abysmal quality. Our land has been in farm field for a couple of centuries, and its rich topsoil long ago washed or blew away. All that remains is a mucky blue clay. So we began top dressing the ground around the chestnut with good soil. The yellowing in the leaves disappeared. The little tree fairly glowed.

I hoped Julie’s young chestnuts were doing well, and that hers and ours might cross-pollinate. But it turned out deer had gotten them.  Ours was the lone tree standing.

We’d had a little apple orchard down south, and I’d learned through hard knocks not to fall in love with individual trees. Even so, I’d tip my heart to our chestnut on each morning walk. It grew, and our love for our new home grew. It seemed we were putting down roots together. The seasons turned. Toward the end of last summer I noticed a brown ball hanging from one branch, covered with painfully sharp spines. A burr! The chestnut’s first progeny! We resisted the urge to pick it. In early September it split open to reveal four tiny seeds inside. When it came easily loose from the branch, I gently carried it inside. It opened further. After a week I was able to extract the four seeds. They were too hard and tiny to eat—an adolescent’s first stab at procreation. But they were so beautiful!

I was telling a friend about the burr and how excited I was when she said, “It’s too bad all those trees have turned out not to be blight resistant.”

What???

It’s true: A widely distributed, supposedly blight-proof chestnut strain has been found to muster only a weak genetic response to the disease. Known as Darling 54s, these received their resistance from an inserted wheat gene, which (in addition to being rather worthless in combatting blight) makes them more susceptible to drought.

Is ours one? I don’t think I want to know.

I spent the next couple of weeks hurting a little whenever I passed our chestnut tree. Then I decided just to love it, to happily enjoy its presence and hope for the best.

We had snow for Christmas Eve and a few days beyond. The chestnut still held its leaves, though they were brown and dry and rattling. I sneaked away from the waiting chores and went skiing as much as I could, knowing that within days the snow would grow slushy and be washed away by rain—even in late December. This is new in Maine. Climate change is ratcheting up, and short of massive shifts in the world’s energy usage (which, face it, ain’t coming), all we can do is hang on and hope.

And oh, the world feels unsettled in so many ways! War in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in other places to which Americans pay less attention. Trade wars, drone wars, a deep political split in the U.S.: There’s an unencouraging sense of frailty to these times. That’s a sad word: “un-courage-inspiring,” in an era when we may need all the courage we can muster. Kindness too, and the willingness to accept the differences between us, while still pushing for what’s right.

So whenever I can, I’ll plant chestnuts. I’ll seek out the most blight-resistant strain, of course. I’ll plant chestnuts and rescue trees from overcrowded woodlots. I’ll work a little at the local food pantry and take whatever other steps I can to make this planet a better place. I’ll smile at people I don’t know. I’ll move carefully in a world that seems balanced on the head of a pin, gauging how best to work for goodness, and hoping, always hoping.

Thanks for reading! I publish about eight blogs a year. If you’d like to subscribe to receive them in your email box, click here.

Written in Ink

            “More coffee?”

            The waitress, a round, pleasant woman, was a bit bee-like as she reached in, reached out, and backed away to regard our table. She had a thick country twang and beautiful coloring: jet-black hair and café-con-leche skin. When she tipped the coffeepot to refill my cup, I noticed a thin tracing of ink along the inside of her wrist, a garland folded gracefully back on itself to form an elongated figure eight. An infinity sign. Each loop was adorned with tiny figures, but I couldn’t tell what they were.

            I sat up in my chair.

            My parents and I were in the Virginia Blue Ridge for an autumn reunion of cousins on my father’s side. In their nineties now, Mom and Dad had reached the age where I treated them like fine crystal, steering them through the world with care, thrusting myself between them and any potential harm. The weekend’s full schedule was clearly taxing them. This breakfast was the only quiet time we expected to have, and we were lingering over it.

            “More coffee, Dad?” I prompted, trying to get another peek at the woman’s wrist. Her nametag identified her as Danielle. As she circled us, clearing plates, I decided to take a chance. “Could I see your tattoo?”

            She set the plates on a tray and extended her arm, wrist up. “I just got it a few months ago,” she said. She brushed it with her fingertips. “I probably shouldn’t have done it.” Meaning, I supposed, that in her forties she was too old for such silliness.

            “I love it,” I said, and I did. It was one color, navy blue. Silhouetted birds and stars swirled around the filigreed loops.

            Danielle gave me a pensive look. “It’s in honor of my sister,” she said slowly. “She’s got one just like it.”

            I sat back. “You two must be really close,” I said.

            “We are now.” She smiled and, blinking quickly, looked out toward the lake.

            As young children Danielle and her sister were inseparable. Unfortunately, they were born into a large family—ten children—to a woman who never should have been a mother. When they were nine and ten they were put up for adoption and placed with different couples. Their new parents didn’t share contact information.

Was her sister happy? Married? Was she still living? Danielle couldn’t help wondering. She knew their birthmother’s name but not much more, not even her sister’s adopted name. A few months earlier she had set out to find her. When at last she came across her sister’s picture on Facebook, “it was like looking at myself in the mirror.” They got together in her sister’s home in Chicago and fell back in love.

            “You were so lucky to find each other,” I said.

            “I know.” Danielle smiled widely. “She makes me feel like I’ve rediscovered myself.”

            A tattoo, a simple “let me see,” and a glimpse into another’s life.

            In the children’s novel Wayside School is Falling Down, a boy named Calvin implores his parents to let him get a tattoo for his birthday. When they agree, Calvin agonizes over what image he should choose. The morning after his birthday, Calvin’s classmates wait for him, eager to see his tattoo. He proudly lifts a pant leg to reveal a small brown, rather lumpy oval near his ankle. “It’s a potato,” Calvin says. “I just love potatoes.”

            When our son, Reid, was young, our family listened to a tape of Wayside School over and over on driving trips. It was hilarious. But I wasn’t amused when at 16 Reid began talking about what he’d get for his first tattoo. “No potatoes!” I told him. And no tattoos at all until he turned 18.

            “Why?” he demanded.

            “Because I’m the mom.” I couldn’t believe I was using that lame old phrase. But we’d argued so endlessly about tattoos that I was at a loss for anything better.

            He tipped back his head rakishly. “Once I’m 18 you can’t stop me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get a sleeve.”

            “Have at it,” I said, even as my stomach clenched.

            Reid never got a tattoo. A few weeks after that conversation, just three months shy of his 17th birthday, he was killed in a car accident.

            Among the people who helped prop me up in the months and years after Reid’s death was a woman named Kim, a high school teacher and skilled martial artist. When Reid was 12, Kim had taken him with some other students to Japan as part of an elite martial arts team. She was tough, strict, and caring, a mentor to more students than anyone would ever be able to count. Our son was among them.

            One day I found myself seated next to Kim on a train bound for my parents’ house in Delaware. At Reid’s memorial service, my mother had issued an unwitting invitation to the women of the dojo, an offhand “you’ll have to come see us sometime,” never imagining that they’d take her up on the offer. Now twelve of us were hurtling north toward the house where I’d grown up. We all planned to stay there, sleeping bags spread through every room. I was nervous about the strain on my parents. Also, my ego was screaming, “You can’t entertain these smart, strong women all weekend in a boring suburb!” It was like being in one of those dreams you can’t wake from.

            I had trained alongside Reid in martial arts. Compared to this group, though, I was a rank beginner. Seated alone, I was a little startled when Kim dropped into the seat next to me, carrying two beers. Both were for her. I was drinking rum, a choice that, I realized belatedly, gave me way too little staying power in this group. In the dojo Kim could be demanding and at moments a little frightening. Outside it she turned out to be personable and funny. As we finished our drinks, she said, “You should get a tattoo.”

            I’d sworn over and again that my body would never be inked. My expression must have shown it.

            “I’m serious,” Kim said. “In memory of Reid. I’ve got one in memory of my sister.” She pulled down the neck of her T-shirt to reveal a simple peace sign on her back, above her right shoulder blade. It was the size of a quarter. “I love having it,” she said.

            Marking myself to show how grief had marked me: That made more sense than anything I’d ever heard. As the weekend unfolded, as Kim and her cohorts drew me into their circle and made me laugh so hard that I forgot to be sad, I decided I would get a tattoo.

            But of what? I had no idea, other than that it needed to be small, easily concealed, and colorful, as gem-like as possible. The un-potato. It might be wise to put it somewhere I couldn’t see it, in case regret ever set in. My back seemed a plausible choice, and it had the added advantage that the skin there was unlikely to sag as I aged.

            Was I really going to do this? I was. It seemed like the perfect expression of outrage at losing my only child.

All that autumn and into the winter I thought about designs for my tattoo. Finally I settled on a small, blue-green sphere, an Earth Star—the jokey name we’d called Reid before his birth. He was and would always be the bright point of my life. Around this pretty planet I drew a yellow corona, with the hope that his presence here would continue to shine.

            The following spring, feeling a bit shaky, I walked into a tattoo parlor and asked for an artist whom I knew had a good reputation. He traced my design onto a template and held it out for my inspection. It was here that I had my worst moment. Oldster that I am, I needed to pull out my reading glasses to approve the design for my first tattoo.

            The inking went quickly and hurt less than I’d feared.

Back home, I cozied up to the bathroom mirror and craned my neck to see my little Earth Star. I’d designed as a yin-yang symbol, in Earth’s colors. As I moved closer and farther from the mirror, it came in and out of focus. Even so, I could tell it was exactly what I’d wanted.

            Afterwards I found myself smitten with tattoos. I quietly stalked people who had the colorful kind I liked, maneuvering close enough to them to examine their body art. Since we lived near the ocean, this was easy. Tattoos were everywhere, on the beach beneath layers of sunscreen and in the grocery store peeking from halter tops.

            Some of the designs were stunning: a silhouetted cityscape across the back of a young woman who told me she hoped to become an artist. A set of footprints in the sand running down a waitress’ inner forearm, some more faintly inked as if they’d been washed over by a wave. A foot-long orange lily off a friend’s shoulder.

            One winter on a cross-country driving trip, in a café in a small Illinois town, I noticed a button-like image on the wrist of our waitress. “What’s your tattoo?” I asked.

            She reflexively looked at it. “That one’s a peppermint,” she said. “My granddad used to always give me peppermints. He was my favorite person in the world.”

            “Is he still alive?”

            She shook her head sadly.

            In an Iowa City steak house, our waitress’ hands and forearms were covered with lines and swirls of henna, nothing permanent, but lovely nonetheless. “Where’d you get all that?” I asked.

            She stretched out both hands and admired them. “I just got back from India.” She’d been working as a volunteer with street children. “Wish I was still there,” she said. “It changed my life.”

            “How?”

            She lowered her voice. “It made me realize that I want to live a life of service—and I don’t mean as a waitress.”

            Back home hot weather rolled around again, and the tattoos came out for the summer. Stopping at a coffee shop one day, I squinted at the lines written on the barista’s back. I couldn’t make them out, but the script was pretty.

            The young woman caught me looking. “It says, ‘You are a mist that appears for a while and then vanishes.’”

            I liked it and told her so.

            “It’s from James,” she said. “My favorite book.”

I was surprised. The quote struck me as more New Age than Biblical. But indeed, we are here for only a short while, as Reid’s death had so wrenchingly shown. Here, and vanished. Only the coin-sized drawing of an Earth Star remains. 

            Many tattoos are simply larks, of course, something put on one day for entertainment. Or they’re attempts by boys and girls on the brink of adulthood to catapult themselves onto what they imagine will be the steadier footing of personal independence.

The tattoos that matter, though, hold within their shapes and script the most elemental themes of human existence: love, loss, and hope. They are outward expressions of our inner desires, hints of who we are at a level far, far deeper than that which can be touched. And so whenever possible, I collect the stories behind them. It’s a way of connecting with people I’d otherwise brush by, of sharing a few words about things not easily expressed; a way of letting them known they’re seen—and, as we move among the strangers of this world, perhaps of being seen myself.

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