Plasma (Reunion of 1971)

Say ‘Montessori’ in any kid’s ear, and visions

of raptors will likely appear. I pre-schooled at

home, nineteen-seventy-one, touched the flank

of a moose and told everyone, and some made me

doubt the experience was real. Comme ci comme

ça, phenomenology hatched in the deal! The moose

sauntered up to our parsonage door, and I from

inside eeked my way out… More happened then

than memory holds, yet as anything since, the

moment only unfolds to say ‘seize!’ and ‘let go.’

Like Polaroid plasma framed in our hands, that

tangible summer engrained who I am: a grandson

of John and Berenice Sluphaug Vold, whose children

(without them, now fully grown) posed for a snap

shot in front of that stoop: the first Vold reunion—

now a biennial loop—for children of children

of children and more… We sat indian-style the

parsonage wide: dozens of cousins it seemed

(and would be). Central to all, enjoying the sun,

Uncle Paul sat, the last family gathering he saw.

The term ‘Montessori’ emerged some years on,

when my young brother’s teachers urged deliberate

play, connecting the dots, caring and sharing and

carrying the day. Lots of free choices, more to be

found, turned up-side-down, rejected, discovered

again. The summer of seventy-one affected all

things; when Leo the Lion (our golden retriever)

got caught in the wheels of a sugar beet truck, and

Josh was a toddler and Jon was at school, and

I montessoried that cruel stroke of fate, and

nothing again from a parsonage view meant

anything easy. In seventy-two we moved to

Chicago and learned a new life. Dad brought us

to Wrigley and (allaying all strife) pointed out

curiously José Cardinal, now playing for the Cubs,

erstwhile a Red Bird, his St Louis background

and our feeling-way-forward. We cheered, among

chants, for the short gift of Leo, in heaven

of sorts, and for Paul, who’d live twenty years

away from us all. We cheered and we cared.

And post-Montessori we do so again. For such

is the litmus of forty-year olds (or fifty or sixty):

raw learning done, wisdom begun, some Polaroid

pictures of what we’ve become. Will we be raptors

to some point of view? Roaming and ruling ‘til

meteorite doom, whiling away definitive days?

Maybe we’ll “rage, rage against the dying of the

light”, or rather embrace the year seventy-one,

and seventy-two, and children of children as

heaven ordains. I will then ‘seize!’ and ‘let go.’