Thoughts on Elizabeth's birthday

When I think of Elizabeth, I think of her head on her cat's head, kissing his nose, her voice coming from the other room, laughing on the phone, her walking miles through the city, in her fringed suede boots, in her sneakers with the holes in them. 


She was raised reading Harry Potter, listening to Harry Potter on tape, going to Harry Potter movies.  She was part of the Harry Potter nation, the Harry Potter generation who are now graduating from college.  She thought of her cafeteria at school as part of Hogwarts, and it did share a certain grandeur, with its open atrium high ceilinged space, with Hogwarts.


Elizabeth wrote notes in a tiny precise hand writing.  She put her long straight hair up in a bun.

Today I went swimming in the Delaware, and did the back stroke so that I could look at the swallows darting for bugs.  I thought of her.

Meditation on a piece of string

A funny thing happened when I went to use the leather strip I had bought years ago to repair my raccoon fur hat. That hat was six inches  high,  lined with red felt, and had ear flaps with a leather thong that tied under your chin. It was really warm. But its last use by Elizabeth was in the Christmas pageant when she was asked to dress as one of the animals in the manger. She didn’t want to be a sheep or a cow. She wanted to wear the hat.

The fur itself piled high on her eight year old head said to the crowd I am a beast, not human, not vegetable or mineral, but animal, present at his birth.

She walked with the other children, four feet high most of them, down the aisles of church to the altar where the manger was set up.

Years after I wore the hat on sub zero days until the thongs broke. I bought some leather string to fix it but could not successfully anchor the piece in the mounded fur. Now the hat and Elizabeth are gone, and I only have the string.