When Elder Becomes Child by Guest Storyteller Tania Pryputniewicz

Once my father played guitar in a trio. Once he carried me on his shoulders, paired rotors of elm leaves spiraling to land in my hair. He spun with his hands the playground carousel as I gripped silver rails, metronome wand of his body reappearing each pass where I left it. I fell asleep anchored to the rhythm of his voice reading me book after book from The Hobbit to The Song of Hiawatha to The Chronicles of Narnia.

Once he waved goodbye as I rode off to college on the back of a motorcycle. To the trill of Hermit Thrush, the day I wed, he walked me down a cotton-lined path strewn with rose petals. Once he came every Friday to care for my children when they were infants, then toddlers, just so I could write poems at the coffee shop until we moved 600 miles away along the coast.

 

The days have turned their pages to the part in the story where it is my turn to play guitar for him. My turn to read, record poems, send sound files, so that where eyes fail to see, his ears may hear the family voice he once midwifed as nightly he drifts dreamward in sleep. If I could, I would carry him on my shoulders so he might catch the falling stars. 

Tania Pryputniewicz, author of November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014), teaches Wheel of Archetypal Selves Tarot Writing classes and is using the Tarot cards to finish writing her second poetry manuscript about an Illinois commune she lived on as a child.

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