FROM ISSUE #56: WAITING
JUDITH KITCHEN (1941–2014) was a prizewinning novelist, poet, and critic. She was the author of five collections of essays, including the novella-length The Circus Train (2014), and the winner of two Pushcart Prizes in nonfiction. She was cofounder of the Ranier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program and founder of Ovenbird Books, specializing in literary nonfiction.
On any given day, something claims our attention.
—HARUKI MURAKAMI
MONDAY:
May. I’ve been waiting for this all year, and now the talk of the World Cup is all about injury. Suárez, Costa, even Cristiano Ronaldo—all a bit iffy. Ghana’s team doctor—a witch doctor whose name translates into “Devil of Wednesday”—is claiming credit for Ronaldo’s problems, says he is “working on” a curse that will keep him from playing. My boys—Messi, Modric, di María, Marcelo—will be scattered over the map to represent the places they call “home.” Surely they’ve been away too long. And yet there is something at the back of the brain, maybe a remembered touch, or smell, a ball rolling down a set of steps, a grandmother stirring soup, something that spells the dream of playing for where you belong.
What are the trappings of home? Do they go back to childhood, or can I look for them outside my front door? Sand: the drift of it through the fingers and the glint of stone or shell, small enough to carry in the pocket, small enough to turn in the palm with a grandson. Sand: where to take off your shoes is to enter another dimension, and to wade out into surf is to realize there is no real division between water and land.
Water: spewing from the hose as you race through it on hot August afternoons; New England brooks that rush downhill in patchy light; creeks, we called them in upstate New
