Rope

It's become a bit of a family joke how various household objects make their theatrical debut at the high school every time Eleanor and Walker are in a play. This spring the play is called Merry Murders at Montmarie; Eleanor plays the headmistress, an absent-minded ex-actress, and Walker plays an Australian Interpol agent. I'm sure they will be hysterical when the show opens next week (April 22,23,24 at 7:30). In the meantime, Ron and I are busily collecting things like a lantern, attache case with "legal papers," wallet with badge, brooms, flashlights, pill bottle, ice pack, and books (stuff we can find around the house). In addition, I found Eleanor a pair of eyeglasses with a chain (there are stores that sell eyeglasses with clear glass in them!) and we're hoping that someone else is going to supply Walker with a cap pistol and bullets...he has a purple squirt gun to practice with.

I did not even help to make the list of props needed in the play; I'm just scurrying around to collect the needed items, and thinking that it takes a lot of volunteer time and effort to put on a show, and it's increasingly hard to find high school parents who have the time to volunteer--we're all working! Our kids can drive themselves, so we don't even see each other or the teachers when we drop them off and pick them up! The parent who called me last night to ask me to chaperone in the green room on opening night said that when the kids were asked for phone numbers, they all put their own cell phones, so she didn't have home phone numbers to contact the parents--but she could call me, because she still had an old list from the elementary school both our kids attended.

The process of helping the kids put on a show makes me think of this poem, the title one of the volume, Rope by Alison Hawthorne Deming:

The man gathers rope every summer
off the stone beaches of the North.
There is no sand in this place
where the Labrador current runs
like an artery through the body of the Atlantic,
channeling particles that once were glacial ice
and now are molecules making
not one promise to anyone.
The man gathers rope with his hands,
both the rope and the hands
worn from use. The rope from hauling
up traps and trawl lines, the hands
from banging into rocks, rusted nails,
fish knives, winch gears, and bark.
The rope starts to pull apart fiber by fiber
like the glacial ice, and the man wishes
he could find a way to bind it
back together the way a cook binds
syrup or sauce with corn starch.
The rope lies in the cellar for years,
coiled, stinking of the sea and the fish
that once lived in the sea and the sweat
of the man who wishes he could save one
strand of the world from unraveling.

Parents of high schoolers can be "molecules making/not one promise to anyone" except for the periods of frantic activity when the kids say they need us and we rush in to gather things up for them, the things and our hands "worn from use." And then after the show is over we'll all go back to our routines and the kids won't say they need us for anything for a while. Years from now I expect, we'll look at some of those things--the wallet and badge, the eyeglasses--and think about this play, and how the strands of our family life were still together, even in the inevitable process of being pulled apart.

This is why I'm a pack rat. Memories are in things.