Pockets
When my firstborn son Benjamin attended morning preschool, his grandma picked him up afterwards, and they spent afternoons together while I worked. On my birthday, the year he was 3, Benjamin asked his “Gamma” for white fabric. He cut out four jagged cotton squares, enlisting her help to stitch each pair together on three sides. On the open sides, he clipped safety pins to the corners.
When I arrived to pick him up, he danced around the room, blue eyes alight, clutching a package wrapped in crumpled green paper with too much tape. “I made it for you, Mom, and it’s a surprise! Happy Birthday! Open it now!”
I tore open the wrapping paper and pulled out the squares, both decorated in marker with clumsily drawn flowers and designs, my full name inscribed on the front of each one by his grandma. A fabric birthday card covered in red hearts accompanied the gift – twenty hearts in all, outlined by Gamma, painstakingly colored in by Benjamin.
“They’re pockets, for you!” he exclaimed, grinning and bouncing in place. “See, you can pin them on your shirt and you’ll always have pockets to put stuff in! And they’re portable pockets, so you can move them when you change your clothes! See?”
I sat down to pin the pockets onto my dress, moved by the tenderness of his gift, admiring his ingenuity. When I stood to model the new pockets, I asked, “Whose idea was this?”
Delight shone on his face, and Gamma nodded, as he declared, “It was my idea! Gamma just helped!”
Benjamin died suddenly on New Year’s Day when he was 23. Today I stroke the worn cotton pockets in my lap, tracing the marks made by his small hands, marveling at his loving creativity, longing. If only I could have tucked Benjamin inside these pockets like a baby kangaroo, protecting him from harm.
Lucinda Cummings
Lucinda Cummings is a writer and retired psychologist who lives in Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, The Baltimore Review, Woven Tale Press, Glassworks, and other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays 2023. She is working on a memoir about erasure.
