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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Column
Kiss for luck
My daughter's eighth-grade graduation is a ritual like none I've ever experienced.
By Sallie Tisdale
[06/17/99]

Snack time with Jesus
Christian preschool turned my 4-year-old into a fundamentalist.
By Natalie Pearson
[06/16/99]

Trading places
A first-year teacher turns the tables on an unruly student.
By Esmé Raji Codell
[06/14/99]

Tough lessons
An interview with firebrand educator Esmé Raji Codell.
By Fiona Morgan
[06/14/99]

The art of giving up men
In theory, swearing off male attention is easy, but ignoring a flirtatious smile is almost impossible.
By Kate Convissor
[06/11/99]

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He sat across from me in his dusty office pressing the crackly bodies of insects into soft wads of cotton lining a shallow wooden box. Pale sunlight washed into the room. On a coal black Smith Corona, he used two fingers to type the insects' Latin names onto thin white paper: Photinus pyralis, Bombus pennsylvanicus. Those were the same two fingers and the same typewriter on which he would type my essay on Virginia Woolf when I was a sophomore in college, because I refused to learn how to type, because I thought if I did learn how, it would doom me to a life of secretarial work.

He pulled the paper from the typewriter, cut it into strips, dabbed a bit of glue on the strips and placed them next to the insects. Then he lowered a plate of glass over the bugs and bent forward, admiring his work. He liked to gaze at these bugs, to tell me the exact spot of shade in the woods where he caught each one: next to the Flint River, Bainbridge Landing; Mosquito Creek Bridge; Boat house, Lake Seminole. Looking at his face as he murmured the names of places, I imagined he heard a humming, felt the damp heat of the hot yellow summer, saw the cool green of leaves.

Eventually he decided to turn his vision into substance; he had to have the leaves, too. So he began walking in the woods collecting plants: ferns, flowers, weeds, even plants that grew underwater in Lake Seminole. These he dried and pressed between rough pieces of paper right beneath their Latin names. One summer morning, my father took us kids along on one of those walks through the woods at Faceville Landing. We passed a waterfall and he noticed a tiny plant, its leaves a variegated green. This I've never seen before, he said, stopping to bend over the plant. He plucked it from the earth. Something about that, my father plucking the tiny plant from the soil, made me think of him as an Adam. After all, he discovered the plant, I thought; no one had ever seen it before. But it already had a name -- trillium -- and once we saw the first one, we saw another and another and another. Still, every time I saw one, I'd think, there's that plant my father discovered.

But my father wasn't an Adam. He was a child like my brothers and sister and me -- he was as astonished at the natural world as we were, or maybe we were astonished at the natural world because of him. When my sister and I were knobby-kneed, flat-chested little girls, my father took us for rides in the back of his government truck as he cruised down the river road. The air was cool, fragrant with the delicate scent of pink mimosas. We laid flat on the cold metal bed of the truck, looking at sky, clouds, trees, the world above our town. We played a game of guessing where we were by looking at the lacy branches of the trees. We could always guess our grandmother's street because oaks dripping with Spanish moss grew together over the road like giant fingers twined together, blocking out the sky. My father drove us all over town as light faded and we looked at the world over our heads, changing right before our eyes, a world we never really noticed when we were upright.

Years later, my father arranged with a government pilot to take me up in a little Cessna. We flew into the same blue sky that hovered over my sister and me on our truck rides, then sailed out over a shimmering Lake Seminole, then back over town, the airplane buzzing like a giant bumblebee. From my perspective Chattahoochee looked insubstantial, the buildings blocky and small like buildings in a play town. I put my hand out, covered the whole thing from one end to the other. I knew I didn't belong on those narrow streets, couldn't make myself fit between the lines, and I knew it was OK. My brothers and sister and I were the only kids in the neighborhood who knew what an Aëdes aegypti was, who let mosquitoes bite us while we looked closely at the markings on their legs and wings, trying to decide to what species they belonged.

Next page | Some fathers beat their children; others cruised the public restrooms looking for men