“Maybe. Maybe it’s like the nursery.”
“Why don’t you believe in heaven?”
“I don’t know. I never did. You can if you want to. I’ll take you to Sunday school. They’ll tell you about it. Some people might say the aunties are still right here, all around us, in the city they loved, right here in the air but invisible. That means we can’t see them.”
“I know that. Do you think so?”
“Maybe. That makes more sense to me. I still feel them in the air, don’t you?”
He said, “I still feel them in the backseat.”
We turned off onto Hildebrand Street and found the industrial warehouse called Electrotex and pulled into the parking lot. As I hopped out of the car, the little white scrap of paper blew up out of my hand in a sudden gusty wind. “Oh no!” I shouted. My son was unstrapping himself from his car seat and ran around to my side of the car to see what had happened. “Look!” I pointed at the small white paper blowing high into the air, whirling over the telephone wires, over the train track we had just crossed. Bells started clanging on the railroad poles and the train crossing bars fell down across the road.
“I can’t believe it!” I said. “What timing! It’s gone forever!” I wasn’t sure I remembered the dimensions on it, either.
A blustery train with many freight cars rattled between us and the little piece of paper, now vanished into the parking lots of a popular Chinese restaurant and a rug warehouse. I threw up my hands. “Oh well! That’s it! We’ll see what we can do without it.”
“Can we wait till the train passes and go and get it?”
“I think it’s gone forever. Very bad!”
But we went into the warehouse and the smart man inside knew just what we were looking for when we said “purple martins.” We didn’t need any dimensions after all.
The man taped some brown paper around the sharp ends of the pole and asked if it would fit in our car. I said it could ride in the partially open trunk with a red bandanna attached. I would tie the trunk with a rope so it didn’t bounce too much.
“Good idea,” said the man. My son was fingering silver nuts and bolts in the big delicious tubs.
“Come on,” I said to him. “We’re outta here. Let’s go make some birds happy.”
Back at the car, while I was tying the trunk, my son saw the small folded white paper tucked beneath our windshield wiper.
“Mom! Mom! Look! They brought it back to us!” he called out, pointing.
It took me a moment to catch his meaning.
“They saw the paper blow away and since they are invisible, they could chase it. Look, it’s their surprise!”
I was tongue-tied. Surely not.
I pulled the small paper from under the windshield wiper, unfolded it, stared at it. Same paper. Same scrawl of dimensions.
How had this happened?
“Mom, it’s our paper, right?”
Of course, we didn’t need it now, but the paper glistened in my hand in the sunlight, a coded message saying something I couldn’t quite read. How?
No one had been in the parking lot when it blew away. It was already high across the tracks and still blowing when we went into the store. The engineer could hardly have leaped off the train when he saw me pointing after it….
“That’s great,” my son said confidently, climbing up and strapping himself back into his car seat. “Let’s keep it.”
I poked the key into the ignition with a trembling hand as he turned toward the backseat.
“Thank you,” he said.
Acknowledgments
With appreciation to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine, and Stuart Kestenbaum, who steers so well.
Thanks ongoing to the Lannan Foundation.
Cheers to The Loft in Minnesota, especially Jerod Santek and Bart Schneider, and to the Poetry Trust in England and director Naomi Jaffa.
Thanks forever to my family and friends, especially Roberto Bonazzi. The paintings of Paula Owen and Roberto Munguia lift up my heart. The songs of Eliza Gilkyson help me feel brave and hopeful. Molly Ivins, oh favorite patriot, you kept us cheerful in the darkest days.
I’m grateful to Michael Nye, who never once said, “Can’t you stay home more?” and to Madison Nye, who liked it when I left, and to Virginia Duncan, who does not have her own driver’s license yet.
About the Author
Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She has received a Lannan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and four Pushcart Prizes, and her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas.
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Copyright
I’LL ASK YOU THREE TIMES, ARE YOU OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven. Copyright © 2007 by Naomi Shihab Nye. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“Free Day in Toronto” appeared in a slightly different form in Hunger Mountain.
The “Joe of Rose Cab” section of “Gifts” appeared in a slightly different form in the San Antonio Express-News.
Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195845-8
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