She wonders

Did she ever tell him

About the movement
How she was moved
How she moved

To the patches
Of sadness in
The letters
He sent across
All those miles
And miles of
Ocean

How she couldn't

Drop him
Crumble him
Break him

How she

Stitched him into her skin
Wore him close upon her back
Combed him through
Braided him into
The strands of her hair

Did she ever say

Those words
Were startling
The smell of plumeria
After rain
The sight of
The Southern Cross
Floating in sky
Over ocean

Did she ever mention

It was
Pleasant to share
Rain under
One tin roof

That there were
Times she bent
Times she swayed
There were times
She crumbled in
His light and dark

She should have said

Let's not wear all
Our blue so raw exposed
Sad stories like
Muck in a barn

She should have said

Let's transcend
Just a little of it

She should have

Sung more
Cooed more
Tried playing
Maybe a trombone

How loudly
Can you yell it

How loudly can
Can you scream it

(I will try not to drop you)
(I will try not to break you)

MEMBER LINKS

ULA

Get the flowers fresh...best to buy them wholesale, no stems. Order ahead...much cheaper by the bucket.

I remember my mohter's words as I pay for five dozen very expensive carnations from the market down the street -- three bunches of red, one yellow, one white. Carnations are passe`, too high school prom nightmarish for the fancier florists to keep on hand in bulk.

So many mornings, before feasts and celebrations, I sat with my mother and her five gallon buckets of carnations, stringing together ula, Samoan sister to the Hawaiian lei. For weddings and funerals, she or an auntie always made a special ula for the priest, something from gardenia petals or delicate blosoms of white ginger.

The sweet and powdery smell of the carnations hypnotizes me a little as I unwrap the crackling cellophane. I remember my cousin Tasi's wedding; I was about seven. We made twenty pink and yellow ula for the bridesmaids and ushers. For the occasion, my mother sewed a jumpsuit for me from yellow cotton with a white hibiscus print. She stitched up the most chic bellbottom legs and dainty cap sleeves. She made a special ula for me: all pink.

In the photo, among the satin dresses and cummerbunds, I am the one in the great jumpsuit, the perfect flower necklace, and a set of plastic Count Dracula fangs I had saved from Halloween.

Be careful trimming the stem. If you cut it too long, the flower will not open, your ula will be skinny, like a wet cat. If you cut it too short, the flower will fall apart, nothing but petals all over the floor. If you cut it just right, and you peel away those leaves that hold the petals, the flower will open, fluffy and loose.

I trim away the long stems as I am interested only in the velvet, the cloud of flower which I will loosen from the green. I cut close to the base of the flowers with my shapr Fiskars scissors, the ones with the orange plastic handles. One or two of them I lose, cutting the stems too short. I snip the calyx and peel it away, exposing the petals with their white and delicate bases.

Don't use cheap thread. You want the ula to break, flower petals falling all over someone's dress or suit? Find some fishing line, or dental floss is good...something nice and tough to hold everything together.

Pick the colors carefully. Ula of one color are nice. Or you can use a lot of different colors, yellow, pink, red, white -- like a rainbow. Or you can make a pattern -- red, then white, then red again. But if you start with red, end with white. Then when you tie it together in a ring, the colors will be nice and even.

Don't be ai'u with the flowers, be sure there are plenty. If you are stingy, people will know -- at the end of the day when the flowers start to wilt, your green dental floss will show through.

Be generous, get plenty of flowers. Order ahead, by the bucket. I thread the dental floss through the eye of a needle. I poke the needle through the base of the flower, carefully pushing up through the pistil, so that the flower is strung snugly, securely onto the floss. Each flower after is stacked one on top of another, four red, two yellow, two white. I will try to end with white so that when I tie the ends together to form the ula, the pattern will be even.

The ula are for alofa, love and respect. We make them for brides and kids graduating from school, even for the dead, so that they feel special. Hold it with two hands, so that it is open wide to go over the head. Rest it on the shoulders so it looks nice. Make sure the best color is in the front. If you add a ribbon, be sure it rests over the heart. Kiss the person on the cheek and smile or say something nice.

Show your alofa.

I measure the string of flowers around my own neck. It is long enough. The pattern is right, ending with white. I tie the ends together and adjust the flowers to make sure the floss does not show. I hold it up to the light with two hands. Carefully, I lay it on wet paper towels in a shoe box. I spritz it with water and cover it lightly with more towels. I change into a dress with a sarong skirt and hibiscus print. I arrive at the party, a gallery reception for my friend, Benny. After opening the shoe box, I present the ula, my two hands holding it high and out in front, placing it gently across his chest, across his heart. Benny, in his hip black T-shirt and jeans, is wide-eyed, delighted, I think. The red is vibrant against his black. I kiss him on the cheek. I say, "Manuia," blessings and good luck. He pulls the ring of flowers close to his face. He breathes them in and closes his eyes for just an instant, thinking maybe of a beautiful island where there are jewels of wild plumeria and ginger.

My mother taught me this, how to make the ula, sitting cross-legged next to five gallon buckets, pushing needles though the delicate flesh of flowers.

My mother taught me this.

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DUMP CAKE

Growing up I learned there's nothing a nice potato chip topping can't make better. I grew up on cuisine de church potluck, which is by turns salty and crunchy or sweet and mushy. But it is always careful and colorful, full of lime Jell-O, Dundee onion crispies and the ubiquitous potato chip topping. In these times of cilantro madness and Mediterranean this, or baba ganoush that, I must admit that I find true comfort in the casserole.

I was not born into this cuisine. My roots are in the depths of the South Pacific ocean, in the rocky, salty island soil that grows gnarls of taro roots and palm trees reaching toward the ocean with jewels of niu, the fizz-filled green coconuts.

My parents immigrated to the mainland in the 1960's. My mother bought a trio of avocado-green casserole dishes, an electric frying pan, and a fancy ring-shaped mold for Jell-O salads and bundt cakes. She learned Americana through a subscription to Good Housekeeping Magazine.

We ate beans and weenies and pigs in blankets. We ate chicken casseroles and tuna casseroles. We ate everything from here to Timbuktu slathered in cans of cream of mushroom soup, with those rubbery black-brown cubes of mushrooms. We lived for the crunchy, salty potato chip topping. Sometimes there was spicy Chicken Ole', decorated with electric yellow triangles of processed American cheese. We were living our mother's lessons in home economics. It was like The Brady Bunch.

My father, however, insisted on the foods from his childhood, cubes of pink, raw fish in lime juice, sprinkled with stinky spring onions; chunks of gray taro root covered in coconut cream; hot Korean kim chee to sop it up and wash it all down. My brothers and I avoided looking directly at these foods, lest they turn us to pillars of salt. No one at Grapevine Elementary Schoo, home of the Grapevine Grizzlies, brought kim chee in their Charlie's Angels lunch boxes. We didn't understand that his food was our food too.

It is a good potato salad, a tray of deviled eggs, a red Jell-O salad with a dollop of Cool Whip that can, to this day, make my eyes a little dewy. I ate these foods -- at so many summer potlucks in city parks, with others in my extended family, other trying to make ends meet, others trying to melt in the pot.

A friend recently told me about a wedding she'd been invited to. It was for a distant cousin in the Midwest. The invitation said, "RSVP with your potluck contribution." We had a good, hard bourgeois laugh about that, though in my heart, I knew I had attended putluck wedding receptions.

She hooted, telling me about her great-aunt's recipe for Dump Cake: "Dump in Krusteaz All-Purpose Baking Mix. Dump in Del Monte Fruit Cocktail. Dump in various other colorfully preserved food items of your choice." Then you bake it all up into a cake and that cake is perfect for a birthday, or a baby shower, or even a wedding potluck in a pinch.

I eat lots of different things now that I am all grown up: spicy Thai food and squid and smelly feta cheese. I even eat my father's crazy foods. But I will tell you, I really believe in Dump Cake. I believe in scraping together the things that can fill your belly, until you can afford things that aren't always in cans, things that are exotic and delicious. I believe that if you dump and stir and hope, something comes together and rises to the surface. Something turns into food to grow on, food to laugh over, food to bring people together.

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WHEN I SIT

How supremely ironic to call it babysitting, as though I sit on the babies, or I sit with the babies, like the Madonna with Jesus. When I am with my charges, Three, Six and Nine here in the Pacific Northwest, I do very little sitting at all.

I stand behind Six as I brush her sleep-tangled hair into ringlets that shine like early morning sunlight. She fusses quite a lot, insisting that I tell a story to distract her from the tangle yanking. I'll admit, it is difficult for me to stand, brush, part, braid, think and talk story, all amidst the chaos of the family preparing for the day. I usually recite something asinine like "The Three Little Pigs". But Six's tastes are becomimg more sophisticated.

Six's mother can brush and talk like nobody's business. She pulls rabbits and foxes from some hat of magic adventures and she hyptonizes Six into anti-tangle-fussing trances. All the while, she tugs the tangles and wrangles the tangles. She defeats the tangles and Six doesn't fuss.

I tried once to tell Six the Polynesian love story of Fatu and Futi, how their doomed romance ended with a walk into the ocean, how they were transformed into two tiny islands. Six didn't fuss a bit during the story. But, at the end, she asked, "They died?" I hesitated, then replied, "Well, yes. But, there were turned into two beautiful flowerpot islands." Her face turned alarmingly red as it crumpled and she asked again, "They died?!" Then she sputtered like the motor of an old lawnmower and finally wept outright, "Boo hoo! They died?! Why'd they have to die?" Her half-brushed head fell to the table and she shook with sobbing for the unfortunate lovers. I felt like a murderer.

Her mother, looking on sympathetically, stage whispered, "No stories with dying." These children have very limited TV privileges, and I have recently sunken to synopses of "Gilligan's Island," which Six loves. She thinks Gilligan is an epic hero.

I sing all the greatest hits. "Drink Your Milk" and "Don't Touch Breakables in the Store." I sing one for Three called "Hurry to the Privy Before You Wet Your Pants." I sing him songs with rooster crows and undignified pig snorts. He giggles like a pot of soup, bubbling gently on a low flame. He forgets that really, I am scolding him. lately though, as he gets closer to being Four, he sniffs distastefully at the farm noises. He says, "Will you stop singing those songs?" So, I just tell him to pick up his toys. I just scold him the normal way and I feel a twinge of defeat.

I negotiate. Actually, I try not to negotiate. Nine tries to cut deal after deal with me: "I'll put out the trash if you'll buy me a Slurpee." "I'll do my homework if you'll let me eat all the applesauce." Generally, I counter with the No-Way-Jose veto. He does his chores grudgingly, but he always tries again. Nine is a slingshot pulled tight -- that sort of tension and energy and potential. He has memorized huge sections of "The Guiness Book of World Records." He challenges me at nearly every turn, wanting to know why he has to do as I ask. I am embarrassed to admit that I have often been reduced to the, "Because I said so," position. I am trying to learn not to debate with Nine, when I get too embroiled in discussions with him, and when he is brilliantly right, I find that I want to stick out my tongue and yell, "You are a noodle head!" I try to imitate his father's elegant way of raising his eyebrows, deepening his voice, and speaking very slowly. I must remember. I am the adult.

Parents of small children are snickering, thinking, "That's nothing." One should remember, however: These are not my children. They are mine in the tribal-community sense. But I am the babysitter and this is, after, a service industry. I don't say "Would you like fries with that order?" I do say, "Please don't pick your nose in public." It is a bit humbling; as though by virtue of my middle class upbringing and college education, I should be the duchess, and here I am the handmaiden. But it is humbling, too, in a way that makes me grateful: that I am privy to this education on the depth and brilliance of children and family.

The parents I work for encourage the idea that I am an important part of the family equation. I sing parental praises all day, trying never to resort to the, "You wait untiil your big, bad bogey-man parents get home! Then you'll really get it," kinds of threats. Everyday, I hum songs that will stick pleasantly in the children's heads and I try not to say the words that will turn one of them into an ax murderer or an international terrorist.

There are people in my line of work who neglect and hurt children. Remember that movie, "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle?" And we've all heard the story of the parent who drops a child at the sitter's, never to see that child again. This is the darkness of childcare. It's the darkness of hardworking parents who sometimes have the leave their children with God-knows-who, so that they can earn the money to pay God-knows-who to watch the children, so that they can earn the money.

I fight this darkness and my little humility by remembering what Barbara Kingsolver says in her book, "Hide Tide in Tucson": "If you work in the kitchen and you have the mind of a rocket scientist, you're going to organize your cupboards like Mission Control." I AM THE ROCKET SCIENTIST OF BABYSITTING. I choose to be fantastic at this, to babysit like a son of a gun, like Barbara Walters is watching over my shoulder, like so much depends on tending to and caring for and loving the children. And so much does.

OK, I do sometimes sit. Some days, when our Oregon rain falls in its inevitable way, casting blue-gray light into the parlor where the children like to play, Six will say, "OK, Three, I'm a poor peasant girl and you're a blacksmith, and Nine, you're our puppy..." Then, they disappear into a place where they say other people's words. Sometimes I hear my words. Sometimes I hear my songs. I sit, smiling like the Mona Lisa, only maybe a little more deliriously.

Copyright 1998 by Bobbie Willis. All rights reserved.