I will meet you there

by Jeffrey Harrison

When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways to drink directly from the stream of cool water, I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone, who used to do the same thing at that age;

And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied, wipes the water dripping from his cheek with his shirtsleeve, it's the same casual gesture my brother used to make; and I don't tell him to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,

because I like remembering my brother when he was young, decades before anything went wrong, and I like the way my son becomes a little more my brother for a moment through this small habit born of a simple need,

There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.

As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.

A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye.

He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone."

Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.

Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.

"Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.

DO NOT DO IT! It is not safe, you risk botulism!

Generally speaking, you probably shouldn't use canning recipes from blogs either. Your safest bet is to use recipes from the US National Center for Home Food Preservation, next in safety would be recipes from companies like Ball, Sure-Jell or Pomona's Pectin (for low sugar canning).

me: no live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality

(Pssssst, order it here: https://www.guerrillagirls.com/store/book-bedside)

Anyway. On the first day of class my professor says, “we had you all purchase the Guerrilla Girls book because we realized that the History of Western Art book we assigned didn’t have a single woman artist in it and it was too late to select a new book for the course.”