Dear Heavenly Father

You gotta know the rules. And the rules are different everywhere you go.

In our house, supper starts with grace. Dear heavenly father. We don’t say it at breakfast or lunch or dinner out or dinner at friends. So its dear heavenly father when its just the four of us there in the kitchen for supper, packed tight, elbow to elbow. Dear heavenly father. Sometimes mom says let’s say grace and we all bow our heads like your supposed to and dad says just the word grace real quick and funny and we laugh and then start up like usual. Dear heavenly father.

Chris and I share a side of the table, small wooden chairs, kitchen not much bigger than the table, the stove, the sink and the fridge. We get trapped up against that wall and fight each other for elbow room. Sometimes it gets serious and finally dad takes a measuring tape, finds the middle and saws a clean line in the metal rim of the table to show us what’s what. There, he snorts, that’ll keep you quiet.

Quiet’s another one of the rules. Dear heavenly father and quiet.

I went to Tricia’s house across the street and had Italian dressing on my salad. I got home and mom asked what I had for dinner and when I told her about the Italian she seemed mad. Like thousand island ought to be good enough. Like Italian was uppity. I just liked it better I guess.

Like I said, you gotta know the rules. And one of the biggest rules is that you don’t always get to understand the rules.

After dear heavenly father comes bless this food for our good. And after that its and us to thy service. In Jesus’ name. Amen. That’s how grace goes. I get the part about blessing the food and that food is good for us but I’ve never been real sure about Jesus and us to thy service. We go to church and I know that on Christmas Jesus was just a little baby boy that got born outside with his mom and dad, the goats, and three wise men. I know that much but I still don’t know about us to thy service.

I like Tricia’s church better than ours. Her family goes to St. Agnes and they kneel a lot and touch their fingers to their body to make the cross and they even get up in the middle to get in line and stick out their tongues for a cracker. In my church the main thing is to be quiet and still and listen even when something is so funny you can hardly stand it. I draw a lot. Mostly pictures of houses. I like to make big chimneys out of brick and round windows above the front door. But sometimes Chris and I get to thinking something is so funny that we can hardly follow the be quiet rule. One time it was because Pastor Almquist hiccupped in the middle of his sermon, talking about Jesus and his friends and then real loud, bouncing off all that quiet, a giant hiccup. I like the Pastor even though his talks are boring. He’s missing one of his fingers and I think Dad said it got chopped off somehow when he was in Africa teaching Africans about Jesus. I imagine little African kids and wonder if they ever heard the Pastor hiccup or if they draw houses instead of listening.

Another one of the rules is go to your room.

It’s supposed to be a punishment but sometimes I feel real good about the fact that it doesn’t really feel like one. My room is better than the living room for sure, mainly because I have an even better couch in my room, one without wooden arms, PLUS everything else. There’s my bed with my favorite yellow bedspread that’s itchy but pretty. There’s also my doll house and my shelves and shelves of stuffed animals that came from all over. The knitted ones are from Grandpa Johnson’s neighbor at the Manor. She’s right next door and way less scary than Grandpa J. because she smiles and remembers me and gives me things. She even pats her big tall bed and invites me up while she knits. I like to watch her hands. Even though one of the rules is don’t touch, I always want touch her skin because it looks so soft and loose and freckled. I guess some of the rules don’t apply when you are just a baby because everyone likes to tell the story about how I used to be hitched up on Grandma Johnson’s hip, taking my little baby fingers and touching all her moles, tracing the lines of the loose soft skin under her chin. Everyone says she liked it and thought it was funny. I wonder if she were still alive if she’d let me touch her skin still. I wish I could remember how she laughed when I did.

There’s one person in my family who used to make me forget the rules and that’s my Grandpa Stewart.

It’s not that I broke all the rules when we’d go see him or anything, its just that when we sat down and did a puzzle or something I just felt the rules leave my body. He and my Dad liked each other a whole lot too. It always looked like the rules left my Dad’s body around Grandpa S. too, not like with his own dad. Sometimes the rules seem like they belong to everyone, but they didn’t seem to belong to Grandpa S. He especially didn’t have the no touching rule. He’d wrap his arm around me tight when I was on his lap and if I stood next to him he would lean into me a little until I knew to lean into him. My Dad would always smile and stick out his hand to Grandpa S. when we’d leave Hutch and he always took it and then pulled my Dad’s big stiff body into himself. When he released him he’d keep his eyes on his and pat and rub the outside of my Dad’s shoulders, kind of like my Dad was a kid like me, maybe a little sad to go and maybe a little scared just in general.

I had a really good dream about Grandpa Stewart one night and when I woke up in the morning and went to the living room Mom and Dad told me he was dead. Just like that. I could tell that they were trying not to upset me by trying to hide their sadness from me but it was all over the room. Even the early morning sun light speckled on the couch seemed sad. The one person in our family that didn’t have the rules just died and all of us sat in the living room and knew we’d miss him forever.