Sleepwalking Through Life

And poems to your tooth fairy

My children have their own nighttime stories — things that happen while they sleep. And on special nights, the tooth fairy leaves small things. Not just coins like I got, but treasures and toys and tiny books and notes written in slender capital letters. And they write her back, long notes with questions like, What do you look like? What is your name? Can you send me a picture of you? Are you a poet? 

She writes back, always in poetry, and signs her name — something nature-based that rhymes with the name of the child. Once my daughter noted that her fairy’s hand-writing had changed since last time. I made no comment.

On tour last summer, we were gifted an overstuffed orange dinosaur and snuck it into the glove compartment since our son had a very loose tooth. When he looked under his pillow and saw the Dorito-colored stuffed animal, his eyes sagged. That night he replaced it under his pillow with a note that he dictated to his sister. She wrote with careful lettering: Dear T.F. Could you bring me another thing instead of this dinosaur? Thanks, Moses. And in parenthesis his sister wrote, I don’t thing this is appropriate. Love, Calliope.  

Sometimes I think we’ve gotten ourselves in too deep with the myth of the fairy, but I always tell my children the world is filled with so much magic and unbelievable things and inexplicable wonders, we just don’t quite know what is going on. And to me, the spirit of the tooth fairy is working through me when I write those notes. And she is choosing gifts for them to mark the passage of their little tooth that popped mysteriously into their baby gums when they still nursed at my breast, and the arrival of the tooth that they will likely die with.

The other day I heard Andrea Gibson, the poet, say that as soon as they’d gotten their cancer diagnosis they began looking at their partner as this mysterious being — an embodied mystery walking around the house. So I tried it. Letting go of preconceived notions of who my partner is, and who I am, and leaning into the Rosetta Stone of the inner self. The impossible translations. The lines between intentional and unintentional blurring, like the sleepwalker. Like the tooth fairy’s realness. Like the days I wake with a brain or no brain. Like the sweaty clothes hanging on the line. The lead seeping into the soil. The glyphosate wreaking havoc on the planet. The hopelessness and the hope intermingling in strange human ways. 

This morning I woke before the sun and looked up at the brightness of the waning moon. I had just dreamt about Luke, my friend who died 27 years ago this week. It was complicated. I asked him to live another year. I told him he should experience each season one more time. And then when I realized how unhappy he was, I suggested just another week. I don’t remember what happened after that. But when I woke, the moon was there out my window to the southwest. And I thought of how he’d told me he would always be in the moon. I thought of the brown spiced candle he gave me. The crumpled dried out carnation in the cigar box. The poem his brother wrote for his obituary. I saw the deep red fabrics with the drops of wax from the candle at his memorial. I saw the few photos I have of his laughing face — always laughing and looking deeply and caringly into one of our eyes. Even when he was in the background of a picture his eyes were laughing. 

Then I pulled out my phone and googled the meaning of the name Luke, something I’d never done before. And to my delight, Luke means, Bringer of Light. And then the moon began to fade, as the sun rose higher, turning into is dusty white. I watched the blue light and heard David in the kitchen turning on the oven, mixing something to bake for breakfast. I heard the ring of the spoon on the circular bowl, high pitched but hollow. A gong. I’ll just lie here, I thought depressively. I’ll just have another day in bed like I’ve been having for months now. But instead I rose. And in the kitchen the light fell on the squashes and pears of the fall harvest. It fell on the overflowing compost bucket. It fell on my heart still missing someone 27 years later. It fell and I tried to rise while simultaneously knowing my sleepwalking is not over. I cannot just wish it away, even though the wise ones say we most certainly can. 

At breakfast our daughter asks if she can read us a poem. It’s from a book of autumn flower fairy poems that the tooth fairy brought her for her first molar. She reads of the dogwood fairy and I look outside at our own dying dogwood with its reddening, mildewed leaves from a fungus or a plight. I see the laundry on the line which I have chosen to hang where the birdfeeder once was. I have chosen to dry my laundry in the sun rather than put seeds in the feeder so that the birds won’t poop on my clean clothes. I have chosen to save the energy of the dryer instead of nourishing the birds. It’s hard to win. All culpable, both sinning and trying to save ourselves one day at a time.