THE SONG of
SUMMER Bathing a son, “haltingly, reverently, singing, untamed, impolite, praying...” by Dave Devine
I
s written on the slim submerged legs in the bathtub beneath me, blunt verses carved into a pair of knobby limbs attached to my six year-old son, limbs I gather now — haltingly, reverently — from the dust-tinged water, angling forward from my bath towel kneeler like a supplicant, cupping each bony heel, each tender calf, surfacing calloused feet past a flotilla of plastic dinosaurs, a whorl of Legos, a capsized sailboat, retrieving in the available autumn light a freshly unwrapped bar of soap, the neat almond shape of it suspended in the space between me and my slippery son, because a waning season is engraved on these legs, and it must be sung: the welt at his hip, authored by a final plunge down a poorly anchored Slip-n-Slide; the bruise on his thigh, contributed by a fence rail collapsing midclimb; the scabbed-over abrasion behind his knee, of uncertain and untraceable origin; the complex constellation of mosquito bites and ant bites and spider bites, all of them scratched and badgered and bothered for days, and then wincingly, fleetingly ignored for a single night, and then pawed again to semi-permanence, a collection now of gentle calderas the length of each lanky bough; the symmetric cerise scuffs adorning both knees, inscriptions from a week of skidding soccer camp; the perennially damaged shins, dented that same week despite the sock-buried safeguards, but victims as well of a misjudged porch step in June, a wagon crash in July, a dive through a minivan door in August; the thorn-scribbled calves, remnants of an outdoor
camp which deposited him daily to the pick-up line looking foxed and bramble hatched, as if he’d spent the afternoon with Ralph and Piggy on the far side of the island searching for additional plane crash survivors; and the ruined toenail, blackened like a spent fuse after a trip through a chain ring on a barefoot bike ride; these rangy, ill-mannered limbs, these roaring Huckleberry Finn legs, untamed and impolite, connected to this boy I bathed with a wash cloth, a whale sponge, on a countertop, in a kitchen sink, supported in the shallows between my wrist and elbow, stretched out now the length of the tub, water lapping at his chin, eyes closed, lids fluttering, the way he looks sometimes when he prays, which is what I’m doing now, this ancient parental prayer of kneeling and soaping and sluicing, singing scratches and scabs, which is the act of singing a child, which is something as fleeting and ephemeral as the square of September light sliding now, elegiacally, up the water-spattered wall. Dave Devine ’97 runs the University’s Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education (PACE), which sends young people to Catholic schools in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Utah, and California, to teach as they earn their master’s degrees. More than 100 graduates of the program are teachers today. Great program. Want to slather generous gobs of money on it, and help make more cool new bright graceful eager witty teachers? Call Dave: 503.943.7344, devine @up.edu. Portland 24