The Next Forty Years
If I never have children, I will bequeath the gold heart ring on my index finger to the sweetest aide in the nursing home, the one who saves me extra tapioca, because it was always too big for my ring finger, and it has passed over the knuckles of six Sicilian women, and it is not done traveling, and you can get upstairs without a double helix.
If I never have children, I will wear caftans with dahlias the size of my bosoms, which would mortify the academic flesh of my flesh, and I would spare them that, but they are not forthcoming, and I have to do something with these bosoms, so I am prepared to cause a minor frisson in the supermarket.
If I never have children, I will tuck myself in bed with the plush animals and the real animals, and we will read The Hobbit and The Secret Garden, and we will talk about which characters we want to be when we get bigger, and we will do all the voices in the Gospels, but we will probably skip The Runaway Bunny, since I can still hear my mother reading it to me, and I do not want to interrupt.
If I never have children, I will pitch Hollywood a film called “You Save the Cats, You Save the World,” a summer blockbuster that will make people drop their popcorn, where all the volunteers at the animal shelter are secretly assassins trained to take out warlords, even the mee-maws whose eyes disappear when they smile, and they all shape-shift into cats, and you can never be sure which cats are cats and which cats are averting Armageddon, and my only request is that I am played by a calico.
If I never have children, I will probably not get many stomach viruses.
If I never have children, I will write about resurrection and chin hairs and cats and wombats and individual cups of pudding and cats and the invincibility of innocence in a nuclear age and my grandfather’s letter opener and watermelons and cats and the basilica of my uterus and why Julian of Norwich was not canonized and whether Guy Fieri was duly elected as Mayor of Flavortown and mostly resurrection and cats.
If I never have children, I will summon the full plenary session of animals and arguments to secure God’s cooperation in ensuring my mother outlives me, which means that I can actually leave the gold heart ring to her, and although it has never gone back up the ladder before, I am pretty sure it will know the way.
If I never have children, I will make funny faces in the mirror until I see my grandfather and all the Sicilian women and hypothetical youths and possibly even also God, although minus the chin hair and probably also the scrunchie.
If I never have children, I will go on a scavenger hunt for people in need of muffins, with the understanding that both “people” and “muffins” are elastic terms resistant to definition, and I will bring cold pop to the parched, and I will send flapjacks across the diner to the stranger who only ordered a coffee, and I will describe the timid as “magisterial,” and I will save up to buy good bread for someone who is smaller than me, and I may not be able to find anyone smaller than me.
If I never have children, I will write to the makers of light-up sneakers requesting they expand their size range.
If I never have children, I will apologize to my mother, even though she will stop me mid-sentence, even though this was not exactly a case of poor planning, even though I believe there is a plan and sometimes I get to hold the magic marker.
If I never have children, I will order a fifty-ounce diet cola and sit in the front row of films about sensitive wombats and talking teapots and Parisian gerbils and terriers who teach the whole town that there is something more important than winning, and then I will call Hollywood to say we should scrap the movie about the assassins because maybe even the warlords can be saved.
If I never have children, I will report to my desk chair whose buttons fell out when I wasn’t paying attention, and I will churn out bayous of self-indulgent prose, and occasionally I will catch a crawfish in my bare hand and write some words that make some people feel better about something, and Jesus can even turn dreck into something potable, so I will just keep showing up and splashing around.
If I never have children, I will name my exercise bicycle and my hatchback and my winter boots and my HVAC system and all the neighbors whose names I don’t know, but who should have been named Butterbean and Flavian and Mafalda and Optiumus, and maybe someday I will tell them, if I am wearing my dahlia caftan.
If I never have children, God is obligated to make me a happy mother, because it says it right there in the Psalms, and I know poetry is not a contract, but poetry is a promise, and some of the best words are elastic and resist definition.