Free Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) by Tracy K. Smith

understanding had tipped them into. It felt good to be awake and accompanied at this hour, an hour when I might otherwise have been lying in bed struggling to relax into sleep. I tried my hand at using the phrase, too, though I got mixed up along the way and said “chuck it” instead of “sock it,” and I suppose the error of what I’d said was funny in its own way, and it got everyone laughing all over again.
    It was late when our laughter died down, after midnight,though the sky had been pitch-dark with just the pinprick light of stars for hours. Waiting for Mom to brush her teeth and prepare for bed, I studied the pattern on the quilt in our room, trying to take it in as if my own story were stitched into its blocks. And as I breathed in the smells of the place, still strange, though less so by then, it struck me. There was so much I would never understand, so much that would never belong to me, not really. There were even parts of my mother that I might never fully get a handle on—aspects that had come to life upon her return here and that would go dormant again once we were back in California—but wasn’t there a way to see all of that as a good thing, to take it as proof that we are, all of us, made up of near infinite facets? It wasn’t a calming thought, but at that very moment, happy from the evening, and with my mother all to myself again for the night, I wasn’t in need of assurances. Chuck it to me . We were one day closer to leaving, and I had one very small thing to carry away with me.

A HOME IN THE WORLD

    S chool days, I’d wake up to eggs and toast, and after my mother had tied my hair in one or two or three ribboned pigtails, I’d walk the few blocks up Cement Hill Road with Benji and Bryan, neighbor boys in my second-grade class at Amy Blanc Elementary School. I was proud to be setting out on my own, but occasional rumors of far-off kidnappings—children who had been lured into strange cars and never seen again—made me cautious. “Walk straight to school,” my parents would tell me. “Stay together and don’t go off with anyone, no matter what they say.” Once, when a city worker spreading a fresh layer of asphalt onto the pavement whistled in my direction, I challenged Benji and Bryan to an impromptu race, just in case the man was scheming to abduct us. I was jittery and out of breath when we made it to the playground but also relieved, as if a tremendous threat had been cleverly averted. It wasn’t until I sat down at my desk that I realized the man had merely been trying to alert me to a bookmark that had fallen from my open schoolbag.
    While I was at school, my mother taught basic reading, math, and a class called Life Skills to men and women at the local adult school two miles away in the old part of town. It was the first job I’d ever known her to have, and the idea of her as somebody else’s teacher rendered her inscrutable, someone who no longer fit easily within the cage of my mind. She had held down a job teachinggrade school years before I was born, but I only ever thought of her as mine, ours, snug in the center of our home, cooking for us, loving us, keeping us clothed and fed. It’s not that I thought she was incapable of more; I’d just assumed that the world was of interest to her only when it crossed into our private sphere, a view that had likely been shaped by my own seven-year-old sense of what mattered most. Still, if Mom had been a teacher once upon a time, it meant that she had belonged to more than just us. It meant that she had held sway over classrooms of boys and girls, captivating them or leaving them feeling restless and bored. It meant that she had caused them to smile or struggle or groan at the prospect of some new challenge and that she was expert enough to sit over their work with a red pen, filling the margins with her praise and censure.
    The very next thing that entered my mind, when I thought of her like this, was a feeling of alarm. Alarm