Is the parade over yet?
Is it time yet?
Is it done yet?
Can we go?

When I was eleven, they sent me to a hippie school.
We called the teachers by their first names.

One teacher, Sam, let us have some of her soda at recess.
We stole sips of her warm Pepsi while she smoked.
Newports, I think.
She wore dark glasses inside.

Were the students too bright?

Class was in an old house in the parking lot of a Unitarian church.
This was the ’80s. The faculty were all refugees from the ’60s.

I was a refugee, too.
I wanted to get out and grow up and go away.
It’s all I thought about.

There was a lot of validation, a little patchouli, and no learning.
No grades. Too establishment.

I wanted to establish something.
I wanted progress indicators.
I wanted progress.
I wanted to win.
I wanted to go.

Can we go?

The school day ended after mandatory group singing.
We couldn’t leave until we got through The Circle Game, or Corner of the Sky, or Cat’s in the Cradle.

No eleven-year-old should be forced to sing Harry Chapin. It’s not for them.
Cruel and unusual.
Against the Geneva Convention.

When you are a prisoner of war, it is your duty to try and escape.

I changed the lyrics.
My secret versions were inappropriate.
On the edge of obscene.
As close as I could get at eleven.
Just loud enough to make my friends laugh and like me.
Just quiet enough to not get caught.

Though I don’t remember anybody ever getting punished.

I never made fun of Simple Gifts.

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Joni Mitchell, Jesus Christ Superstar were my parents’ property.
A world I was trying to escape.
Not cool.

Not even safe.
Safety was not on the menu at my house.

But Simple Gifts was from someplace else.
Nowhere I’d ever been.
Somehow someplace I wanted to go.

It wasn’t cool to ask for a song. I never asked.
I was so thankful when somebody else chose Simple Gifts.
I’d heard it was a Thanksgiving song.

At my house, nobody sang on Thanksgiving.
Too busy getting done with the day.

Our holiday was about efficiency.
Turkey from Honeybaked.
Pie from Village Inn.
Potatoes from a box.
Dialog from the DSM-IV.

From somewhere else.
To somewhere else.
A to-go menu.

Can we go?

My memories of those meals and those days and that life are blurred into one moment.
Like somebody took pictures of a hundred toxic family gatherings but forgot to advance the film.

One dusty old picture in the back of a dusty old photo album in the back of a dusty old drawer in the back of a dusty old closet in the back of a dusty old room.

Now I am old, too.
Now I have my own family.
Now we take our own pictures.
Now we make our own memories.

I learned that you can get away.
I made it.

You can, too.

There is a table where you are welcome.
There is a place where you can stay.
There is room for you and food for you and love for you.

I learned that racing the parade prevented me from watching it.
I learned to watch.
I learned to sing and stay and love this beautiful now, these beautiful people.

Together we made a place different than what we’d known.
We learned to exchange obligation and martyrdom for joy and gratitude.

I don’t want to go anywhere.
I am somewhere.

We don’t sing to get to the end of the song.
Not here.
Here we sing to sing.

This simple gift is presence.
This valley of love and delight is reached not by striving, but by being.

We don’t pass time around here.
We pass potatoes.

Can we stay?