For the past twelve years or so I have been working as a private tutor for fourth through twelfth graders primarily in the subject area of language arts and writing. I do this for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is that I love teaching, love getting kids excited about reading and writing, and working one-on-one this way instead of getting a full-time teaching job has afforded me flexibility to write, and now write and have and raise my children.
Most of the time, almost always in fact, I feel really good about the work I do with these kids and the relationships I develop with them. Every once in a while, however, I get a request from a student, or more often a parent, that surprises me in its inappropriateness, the assumption that of course I would slide into the realm of the unethical to help little son or daughter get the highest possible grade. I always say no, and express my displeasure in a subtle yet I hope unmistakable way, and it has happened so rarely that it has been easy to shake off when it does.
Lately, however, I have been thinking a lot about homework. I have been thinking of it partly in the context of being a parent, assessing how I feel, and why I feel this way, about homework in terms of my own children, and partly because it is such a massive topic of discussion among anyone who works in schools. There is just so, so much of it now, and it starts getting dished out so, so early. But from where I'm sitting, that's not even the problem.
I have many memories involving homework from my homework days as a kid, primarily from seventh grade through twelfth. Many of them involve me lying on my back in my bed with an open book on my stomach, drool collecting in the corner of my mouth as I slept. A scene of me waking up at 6 in the morning and realizing I had fallen asleep (Hmm. I wonder why?) while "doing my homework" could be played over and over again as in the Bill Murray vehicle Groundhog Day. I was also a big fan of the "getting together to do homework with friends" model, the doing homework in the car on the way to school model, the doing homework in the library between classes model, and the simple yet effective stance of passive resistance as demonstrated so beautifully by Martin Luther King and a number of my high school classmates who shall remain nameless of: not doing homework.
What I have few memories of are my parents doing my homework. This is because, well, it never happened. In the evenings when I was writing sonnets to my friend Kate in the voice of a senior boy named Rob, my parents were sipping chardonnay with their friends while eating cheese and crackers and laughing raucously in the living room (Mom), grading papers (Mom, again), doing projects on behalf of her school or one of ours (Mom, again, again) or watching sports on the TV in the den (Dad).
Don't get me wrong. They would have helped, did help, if I asked, but asking would have required a level of involvement in the homework that I think I have made it clear I was unwilling to give. My mother pitched in on craft projects, anything with an artistic component. My dad grilled me on vocabulary words in preparation for the SAT as we rode back and forth to the Boston Garden, home of the then World Champion Boston Celtics. I have a cousin and an uncle I called in the case of math emergencies. But that was it. The homework I did, I did myself. I'm not sure if I knew what a tutor was, exactly. I never went to an SAT prep class, although I think I had a practice test book. I didn't know anybody who did.
At the schools I work in, private and selective publics in Manhattan, more kids than not have tutors, and many of then have two or three. This is not just a New York thing. I know firsthand that it is almost as much a fabric of high school life these days in Boston and San Francisco as it is here. So okay. It's an upper middle class thing. Fine. But it's pervasive, growing and--when you stop to think about it--really pretty disturbing how much it contributes to the growing divide between the have and have-nots. I am not talking about kids with learning needs whose parents can afford to get them supplemental assistance. I am talking about bright kids who are lazy (a type I know well) whose parents don't want their laziness to keep them out of Princeton.
I have never once heard a parent speculate to me if the tutoring assistance I--or one of the family's other employed educational staff--provide to their child is necessary. Or useful. The word I hear is effective, as in getting results. Now I don't do this, although plenty of people I know do--it's a decent living. I am referring to the class of tutoring known as "homework help." Homework help? I thought the entire point was to do the work, at home, by yourself. When I was a kid, if desperate, it was acceptable to bond a little with a parent who hadn't seen a trigonometry textbook in twenty years and beg them for a little help, knowing there would be some grimaces, wrinkled brows and ultimately the "have you tried calling Uncle Karl?" response.
But this cowardly new world in which parents are exempt from even peripheral participation in their children's academic life (I am not talking about those parents who for reasons either fiscal or vain actually do the child's homework themselves--they're out there too)--I don't know. It strikes me as verging on insane that schools are requiring teachers to give more and more homework, parents are hiring tutors to help the kids do it, and the parents who can afford the better help have kids who get better grades and go onto better colleges. It's like Donald Trump is running the school system. It's capitalism at its worst. I hear the "but if you have the money, why not spend it on your kids and their education" argument all the time. I'm not buying it in the context of tutoring.
I don't want to be part of this problem. I make a point not to be part of this problem. But I'm expensive. And I'm good. So as much I can feel good about the work I do with the kids I work with, I need to think a little more about the ramifications. It doesn't negate the bad to do some volunteer tutoring with kids whose parents can't afford it, which I do, too, although it makes a little inroad, no? Anyway. That's all for now. More on this later, I think.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
100, With a Whisper, Not a Shout
Well, here it is: my 100th post. I sort of expected it to seem more monumental than it does, but then again I am the kind of person who is always a little bit disappointed by my birthday as I am falling asleep that night. Not a good quality; I'm trying to change it, honest. If one's expectations are uniformly unmeetably high, one is bound to exist in a state of constant disappointment. Which is a graceless way to live. Not that I think all of my expectations are too high, or that I am always disappointed, but still. I can veer in this direction at the slightest hint of a breeze, and I'd like to be better able to dig in my heels and stand straight when it happens.
So 100 posts. What does this mean? I will be honest again: when I started this, 100 days ago, I know that somewhere in the back of my mind I did not think I'd keep going. Why? Because I am very good at short bursts of enthusiasm, grand scale projects in the moment, doing just about anything--really-under massive amounts of pressure and in a state of adrenaline-fueled anxiety. What I am not good at? Sustained, careful, thoughtful, mindful commitment, real concentration, anything that requires a long term investment, especially of time.
I'd better explain that because it didn't seem quite right as I was writing it, and I guess I mean in the arena of work. When it comes to writing, in my adult life, anyway, I have perfected the art of being a dilettante. I have often scoffed at the idea, internally, that writing is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, or whatever that saying is. It's talent, I would always say in my head. Talent and voice, sometimes a sort of mystical process in which the words appear on the page almost without the involvement of your conscious mind.
But another little voice would always nag: No, no. Without that you have nothing, it's true, but without the work, the talent is irrelevant. And you just don't want to do the real work.
Well guess what? It turns out that I do. And I can. And day by day, or should I say night by night, I am chipping away at that misconception. I am going back to ideas I generate here and working them out off the blog. I am allowing myself the time and space to develop articles and stories that have had or will have practical applications in my professional life. I am, in spots, figuring out what I want my next book to be, or my next two or three or four books, because I know I want to write them, and I know that I can.
I've said this before but I am a sort of life agnostic. I don't like to sign onto things, to be pigeonholed in any way, shape or form. I have always prided myself on being an iconoclast, someone who doesn't need to exist within the confines of other people's straight and narrow rules and ideas about how people should be. What arrogance! What naivete!
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned about writing, about myself, in setting--and meeting--this challenge is this: It's about the work. About deciding to wholly, passionately and persistently pursue what you love or rather want or even need to do because there is no other way to do it right.
And I know that spending an hour here or there writing this blog does not demonstrate this kind of commitment. But it demonstrates a step outside the path of the breeze, a commitment, if you will: to myself, my adult and independent and non wife and mother self, which is important, and to my work, which I care about so much on some level it has been easier not to face it, to pretend it didn't matter.
It does. I do. And this does too.
Looking forward to 101. Let's make a deal. For 200: I'll do a shout and not a whisper. But tonight, a whisper feels right. A humbled yet satisfied whisper in the cool spring night.
So 100 posts. What does this mean? I will be honest again: when I started this, 100 days ago, I know that somewhere in the back of my mind I did not think I'd keep going. Why? Because I am very good at short bursts of enthusiasm, grand scale projects in the moment, doing just about anything--really-under massive amounts of pressure and in a state of adrenaline-fueled anxiety. What I am not good at? Sustained, careful, thoughtful, mindful commitment, real concentration, anything that requires a long term investment, especially of time.
I'd better explain that because it didn't seem quite right as I was writing it, and I guess I mean in the arena of work. When it comes to writing, in my adult life, anyway, I have perfected the art of being a dilettante. I have often scoffed at the idea, internally, that writing is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, or whatever that saying is. It's talent, I would always say in my head. Talent and voice, sometimes a sort of mystical process in which the words appear on the page almost without the involvement of your conscious mind.
But another little voice would always nag: No, no. Without that you have nothing, it's true, but without the work, the talent is irrelevant. And you just don't want to do the real work.
Well guess what? It turns out that I do. And I can. And day by day, or should I say night by night, I am chipping away at that misconception. I am going back to ideas I generate here and working them out off the blog. I am allowing myself the time and space to develop articles and stories that have had or will have practical applications in my professional life. I am, in spots, figuring out what I want my next book to be, or my next two or three or four books, because I know I want to write them, and I know that I can.
I've said this before but I am a sort of life agnostic. I don't like to sign onto things, to be pigeonholed in any way, shape or form. I have always prided myself on being an iconoclast, someone who doesn't need to exist within the confines of other people's straight and narrow rules and ideas about how people should be. What arrogance! What naivete!
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned about writing, about myself, in setting--and meeting--this challenge is this: It's about the work. About deciding to wholly, passionately and persistently pursue what you love or rather want or even need to do because there is no other way to do it right.
And I know that spending an hour here or there writing this blog does not demonstrate this kind of commitment. But it demonstrates a step outside the path of the breeze, a commitment, if you will: to myself, my adult and independent and non wife and mother self, which is important, and to my work, which I care about so much on some level it has been easier not to face it, to pretend it didn't matter.
It does. I do. And this does too.
Looking forward to 101. Let's make a deal. For 200: I'll do a shout and not a whisper. But tonight, a whisper feels right. A humbled yet satisfied whisper in the cool spring night.
Monday, April 28, 2008
On the Mend, with Optimism
Blog, blog. I've missed you, sort of. This will be abbreviated because I've only taken two of my antibiotic pills and am operating at about 50% capacity just in the past few hours. I also have an uneasy feeling that this is my 100th post, although I can't seem to tell for sure. I am going to pretend it's tomorrow's though, regardless, as I think 100 is a pretty significant milestone, and I am hoping to be at least 75% after my third pill.
I guess what I'd like to say, however briefly, is that being sick is truly horrendous. This is the sickest I have been in a long time. The doctor said I have bronchitis, and a bad case of it, and that I may have pneumonia, but she doesn't want to do a chest X-ray unless I don't get better, as she thinks it more likely it's just the bronchitis. What made being sick this time so much worse than it has been in the past (although don't get me wrong; it's always bad), is that until today when I literally couldn't get out of bed in the morning and just lay there, drenched in sweat, shivering, coughing and even crying a little, was that I couldn't actually really be sick.
It makes Lily really upset and confused when I am sick, and although she is so self-sufficient, she is only four. And I have a baby. And a husband who travels for work and who would readily admit that tending to the sick is not a particular talent or even ability. And so, over the past five days or so, I made myself sicker; I knew in the back of my mind I was doing it even as I was doing it. The night Annika couldn't sleep and I had a fever but stayed up rocking her nonetheless was the lowest point, although I will say it was one of those nights I emerged from thinking: If I know nothing else, I know I can take care of these children.
I don't mean to make myself out to be a martyr here. First of all, I am not a martyr. It is not a role I enjoy or seek out. And my point is actually a selfish one, or at least a realization that does make me feel, just a little bit, sorry for myself, especially as I sit here surrounded by wads of crumpled Kleenex, still a little feverish sweat on the brow, and a body gone limp from days of existence on water and tea. In this incarnation of mother, which I have signed on to for life, I can't be sick in the same way I used to be sick. For no matter how terrible I feel, how much my bones ache, head pounds, throat rages, sinuses pulse, there may at any moment in the middle of the night come a cry from someone who needs me, and I have no choice, if humanly possible, to get up out of that bed.
So here we are. I am sick, but getting better. I make the same pledge to myself tonight that I make every time in recent years I see health on the horizon after a grim experience: to take care of myself so I can take care of the girls, to appreciate my general good health when it returns. And I do it knowing that as soon as I am able--here I am now, at midnight, writing (and badly, I can tell, but it's my 99th post!)--I will go right back to packing what I can into the meager 24 hours of a day.
Don't write and tell me I need to take care of myself or about the oxygen mask metaphor or that I shouldn't feel badly about the posts I missed when I was sick. I know all this. And putting the care-taking needs of my children before my own doesn't make me special or worthy of praise. I know plenty of people who do it daily without so much as a peep for sympathy, and there are millions of people who do it every day in circumstances I cannot fathom without the merest soupcon of self-pity. All this makes a person is a loving parent.
All I want to say is that it's late. I'm still a little feverish, and my nose is running, and I do feel bad about the posts I missed, but I also feel glad that I knew I couldn't write them. And I also know that when both girls are a little older, it will be easier and easier to take care of them and myself with less self-pity and a more generous heart. And tomorrow morning, when Lily asks me, "Feeling better now, Mama?" as she will at about 6 in the morning, I will feel well enough to get up and make her oatmeal. And for one morning, maybe more, I will actively, clear-headedly appreciate the ability to do so.
I guess what I'd like to say, however briefly, is that being sick is truly horrendous. This is the sickest I have been in a long time. The doctor said I have bronchitis, and a bad case of it, and that I may have pneumonia, but she doesn't want to do a chest X-ray unless I don't get better, as she thinks it more likely it's just the bronchitis. What made being sick this time so much worse than it has been in the past (although don't get me wrong; it's always bad), is that until today when I literally couldn't get out of bed in the morning and just lay there, drenched in sweat, shivering, coughing and even crying a little, was that I couldn't actually really be sick.
It makes Lily really upset and confused when I am sick, and although she is so self-sufficient, she is only four. And I have a baby. And a husband who travels for work and who would readily admit that tending to the sick is not a particular talent or even ability. And so, over the past five days or so, I made myself sicker; I knew in the back of my mind I was doing it even as I was doing it. The night Annika couldn't sleep and I had a fever but stayed up rocking her nonetheless was the lowest point, although I will say it was one of those nights I emerged from thinking: If I know nothing else, I know I can take care of these children.
I don't mean to make myself out to be a martyr here. First of all, I am not a martyr. It is not a role I enjoy or seek out. And my point is actually a selfish one, or at least a realization that does make me feel, just a little bit, sorry for myself, especially as I sit here surrounded by wads of crumpled Kleenex, still a little feverish sweat on the brow, and a body gone limp from days of existence on water and tea. In this incarnation of mother, which I have signed on to for life, I can't be sick in the same way I used to be sick. For no matter how terrible I feel, how much my bones ache, head pounds, throat rages, sinuses pulse, there may at any moment in the middle of the night come a cry from someone who needs me, and I have no choice, if humanly possible, to get up out of that bed.
So here we are. I am sick, but getting better. I make the same pledge to myself tonight that I make every time in recent years I see health on the horizon after a grim experience: to take care of myself so I can take care of the girls, to appreciate my general good health when it returns. And I do it knowing that as soon as I am able--here I am now, at midnight, writing (and badly, I can tell, but it's my 99th post!)--I will go right back to packing what I can into the meager 24 hours of a day.
Don't write and tell me I need to take care of myself or about the oxygen mask metaphor or that I shouldn't feel badly about the posts I missed when I was sick. I know all this. And putting the care-taking needs of my children before my own doesn't make me special or worthy of praise. I know plenty of people who do it daily without so much as a peep for sympathy, and there are millions of people who do it every day in circumstances I cannot fathom without the merest soupcon of self-pity. All this makes a person is a loving parent.
All I want to say is that it's late. I'm still a little feverish, and my nose is running, and I do feel bad about the posts I missed, but I also feel glad that I knew I couldn't write them. And I also know that when both girls are a little older, it will be easier and easier to take care of them and myself with less self-pity and a more generous heart. And tomorrow morning, when Lily asks me, "Feeling better now, Mama?" as she will at about 6 in the morning, I will feel well enough to get up and make her oatmeal. And for one morning, maybe more, I will actively, clear-headedly appreciate the ability to do so.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Imprimateur
Because apparently I work, in part, for encouragement, I am going to run with the sibling theme again. Also, as you will see, it is pressing, pressing on me.
I was waiting for it, somewhere in the back of my mind, although I hadn't fully acknowledged it to myself. We had skirted around it in some of the conversations I've had with Lily and recounted here, the "why don't you smile at me like you smile at Annika" comments, the inner wincing and all-consuming balancing act that has become the melody of my life.
She said it, asked me, a few days ago, earlier in the week. We were playing with blocks on the rug; she was building a palace. I made a hallway with a roof. She removed the roof. It doesn't have a roof, she explained. Ah.
Then: You love me, Mama. A statement.
Yes, of course I do. You know that. Do you want to know how much? (Our usual game, ignored.)
You love me more than Annika, right?
I was holding a block. I moved it from one hand to the other, the way babies do when they hit that developmental marker.
I love you differently, I said. But I love you both. She looked at me from under her eyelashes, a little coy, maybe.
But you love me a little more.
No, I said slowly. You are my firstborn girl. My oldest girl. And I love you to infinity and back and even more than that. But I love you both.
And that was that. We started building again. Annika crawled around us, pulling pieces of dog hair off the rug.
Now, as I am sitting here writing this, Lily's babysitter is giving her a bath, while holding Annika on her lap. I hear a pleasant hum of conversation, light, acceptable splashing, little cooing sounds from Annika. And then, louder (or does it seem that way because I hear it?), Lily says: You know, I don't remember when Annika was born. It was so such a long time ago.
I want to rush in and ask her what she means. She has said, in recent days, that she does remember before Annika was here, but now I wonder. Is it the notion of an Annika-free existence that she wants to remember? Is it already a ghost memory, this having of me to herself, the completeness of my attention and affection? Or does she mean the day itself, the ride in the cab up to the hospital, the moment when she saw me, saw through the mess I was, unrecognizable to myself in the mirror, and her eyes lit up because there I was, before she saw the baby, before she saw anyone else in the room.
And then I feel a wash of panic, this by now familiar identification. Do I remember? Do I really remember or am I, too, idealizing, recreating, constructing the memories myself--with a different sort of Plexiglas magnetic shapes, actual shapes, not fabricated shapes, with real magnetic edges, but able to be moved and manipulated, laid together in an infinite number of equally stable if ephemeral ways. Magnetic shapes, the three-dimensional objects they can be used to build, are not meant to last, as I am always telling Lily. They are meant to be disassembled, then built up again. But into what? What is real?
I have no memory of before Alison was born. I was barely a year old. But I will confess to wondering if some part of my brain stores a visceral memory of that time, those thirteen-and-a-half months when I was all there was: the sun, the moon, the stars--all of infinity--the first.
I was waiting for it, somewhere in the back of my mind, although I hadn't fully acknowledged it to myself. We had skirted around it in some of the conversations I've had with Lily and recounted here, the "why don't you smile at me like you smile at Annika" comments, the inner wincing and all-consuming balancing act that has become the melody of my life.
She said it, asked me, a few days ago, earlier in the week. We were playing with blocks on the rug; she was building a palace. I made a hallway with a roof. She removed the roof. It doesn't have a roof, she explained. Ah.
Then: You love me, Mama. A statement.
Yes, of course I do. You know that. Do you want to know how much? (Our usual game, ignored.)
You love me more than Annika, right?
I was holding a block. I moved it from one hand to the other, the way babies do when they hit that developmental marker.
I love you differently, I said. But I love you both. She looked at me from under her eyelashes, a little coy, maybe.
But you love me a little more.
No, I said slowly. You are my firstborn girl. My oldest girl. And I love you to infinity and back and even more than that. But I love you both.
And that was that. We started building again. Annika crawled around us, pulling pieces of dog hair off the rug.
Now, as I am sitting here writing this, Lily's babysitter is giving her a bath, while holding Annika on her lap. I hear a pleasant hum of conversation, light, acceptable splashing, little cooing sounds from Annika. And then, louder (or does it seem that way because I hear it?), Lily says: You know, I don't remember when Annika was born. It was so such a long time ago.
I want to rush in and ask her what she means. She has said, in recent days, that she does remember before Annika was here, but now I wonder. Is it the notion of an Annika-free existence that she wants to remember? Is it already a ghost memory, this having of me to herself, the completeness of my attention and affection? Or does she mean the day itself, the ride in the cab up to the hospital, the moment when she saw me, saw through the mess I was, unrecognizable to myself in the mirror, and her eyes lit up because there I was, before she saw the baby, before she saw anyone else in the room.
And then I feel a wash of panic, this by now familiar identification. Do I remember? Do I really remember or am I, too, idealizing, recreating, constructing the memories myself--with a different sort of Plexiglas magnetic shapes, actual shapes, not fabricated shapes, with real magnetic edges, but able to be moved and manipulated, laid together in an infinite number of equally stable if ephemeral ways. Magnetic shapes, the three-dimensional objects they can be used to build, are not meant to last, as I am always telling Lily. They are meant to be disassembled, then built up again. But into what? What is real?
I have no memory of before Alison was born. I was barely a year old. But I will confess to wondering if some part of my brain stores a visceral memory of that time, those thirteen-and-a-half months when I was all there was: the sun, the moon, the stars--all of infinity--the first.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Siblings Ad Infinitum
Sibling rivalry is one of the major, hot-button parenting issues, covered exhaustively by pediatricians and educators, discussed at length by all who have a sibling or are parents to siblings, made the subject of myriad books and articles. It would seem, on this, there is little else to say. And yet.
I am interested in the ways siblings interact as a sibling myself, as an avid amateur observer of sibling dynamics, and now, as a parent. I have read many books on the subject, hundreds of articles, and have discussed all manner of sibling issues with pediatricians, educators and neighbors with whom I find myself trapped in the elevator. I even wrote a book on the subject, a book that began with a different focus, on weight and its role in a family, but took on a life of its own and became about sisters: the way in which siblings help create each other's self.
When I watch Lily and Annika together, or spend focused time with them both, as I do so very often these days, I am not generally surprised by the ways in which they interact. From the very beginning, Annika has watched Lily, been unable to look away if she is in the room. Lily is oblivious to this unless it is pointed out, at which point she seems, briefly, pleased, before turning back to whatever it was she was doing beforehand. From as soon as she was able, Annika has tried to emulate Lily. If Lily laughs, Annika laughs. If Lily cries, Annika's eyes widen, her mouth makes a tiny worried O. Now that she has so much control over her hands and fingers and is crawling around like a demon, she follows her, literally, from room to room, always so far behind that she sometimes ends up at a wall (quite literally), shrieking with frustration.
Annika's mobility, increasing interactiveness, has had the expected effect of annoying Lily, in spite of her regularly expressed desire for Annika to be big enough to play with. I think she is getting an inkling of Annika's impending free will, realizing that Annika will not be merely a ball of clay in her hands, a prop in her productions, although of course she will be those, sometimes, too.
Yesterday afternoon, I was with both girls, and Lily asked me if we could play with her magnetic shapes. She has a very cool set of colored shapes that have magnetic edges so you can construct three-dimensional creations with them, build houses, castles, pyramids, whatever inspires you. I said sure, but explained that Annika would want to watch and that we would have to let her play with the shapes too. Lily suggested we give her something else instead, and I said we could try it but that it was likely she would want what Lily had and that we needed to be prepared for this to happen.
Which, of course, it did. For a few minutes Annika was content with the two dinky wooden blocks Lily had ostentatiously bestowed upon her. Then she caught wind of what we were doing, of the prettier, colorful, translucent shapes that made clicking sounds and appeared to stick together like magic. Or rather she saw what Lily was doing and the rest of the world faded away. I see that: how Lily exists for her already in sharp focus as all else becomes so much background static.
After some construction, or rather letting Lily boss me around for a few minutes while she constructed (with Annika watching, the apprentice bossee), I went into the kitchen to remove a pan from the oven. I was gone for about 10 seconds. When I returned, Annika was in the corner of the room, sort of wedged into the corner, whimpering in a sad--not an injured or desperate--way. Lily was playing, a bit too innocently, I thought, with her magnetic shapes.
"Lil?" I asked. "How did Annika get over there so fast?" She turned to see that I had scooped up Annika and was holding her on my lap on the couch.
"I moved her there," she said.
"Why?" I asked. Relatively new lesson: It is the idiot job of the idiot parent to always, always ask the rhetorical question.
"She wouldn't stop grabbing my magnets," she said, as I mouthed the words along with her.
And there it is: no surprises. When I think of my earliest memories of being with Alison, they fall into one of two categories. Either she is a pawn in my game, the nurse to my doctor, the student to my teacher, for as long as I want her to be. Or, she is an obstacle in my path, the destructor of towers, the thrower of board games, the scribbler of coloring books, the--sigh, again--stealer of magnets.
But as I said, none of this surprises me. What does is how much Lily's frustration seems legitimate to me, how little I am able to comfort myself with the "she'll be glad for it later" explanation, how often I, too feel at odds with the situation, the dramatic shift borne of necessity in the ways Lily and I focus on each other, along with an equally sharp pang when I realize all the one-on-one attention--more than three-and-a-half years worth, a lifetime in early childhood--that Annika will never have.
Anyway. More to come. Crying baby calls. Fortunately, Lily is asleep.
I am interested in the ways siblings interact as a sibling myself, as an avid amateur observer of sibling dynamics, and now, as a parent. I have read many books on the subject, hundreds of articles, and have discussed all manner of sibling issues with pediatricians, educators and neighbors with whom I find myself trapped in the elevator. I even wrote a book on the subject, a book that began with a different focus, on weight and its role in a family, but took on a life of its own and became about sisters: the way in which siblings help create each other's self.
When I watch Lily and Annika together, or spend focused time with them both, as I do so very often these days, I am not generally surprised by the ways in which they interact. From the very beginning, Annika has watched Lily, been unable to look away if she is in the room. Lily is oblivious to this unless it is pointed out, at which point she seems, briefly, pleased, before turning back to whatever it was she was doing beforehand. From as soon as she was able, Annika has tried to emulate Lily. If Lily laughs, Annika laughs. If Lily cries, Annika's eyes widen, her mouth makes a tiny worried O. Now that she has so much control over her hands and fingers and is crawling around like a demon, she follows her, literally, from room to room, always so far behind that she sometimes ends up at a wall (quite literally), shrieking with frustration.
Annika's mobility, increasing interactiveness, has had the expected effect of annoying Lily, in spite of her regularly expressed desire for Annika to be big enough to play with. I think she is getting an inkling of Annika's impending free will, realizing that Annika will not be merely a ball of clay in her hands, a prop in her productions, although of course she will be those, sometimes, too.
Yesterday afternoon, I was with both girls, and Lily asked me if we could play with her magnetic shapes. She has a very cool set of colored shapes that have magnetic edges so you can construct three-dimensional creations with them, build houses, castles, pyramids, whatever inspires you. I said sure, but explained that Annika would want to watch and that we would have to let her play with the shapes too. Lily suggested we give her something else instead, and I said we could try it but that it was likely she would want what Lily had and that we needed to be prepared for this to happen.
Which, of course, it did. For a few minutes Annika was content with the two dinky wooden blocks Lily had ostentatiously bestowed upon her. Then she caught wind of what we were doing, of the prettier, colorful, translucent shapes that made clicking sounds and appeared to stick together like magic. Or rather she saw what Lily was doing and the rest of the world faded away. I see that: how Lily exists for her already in sharp focus as all else becomes so much background static.
After some construction, or rather letting Lily boss me around for a few minutes while she constructed (with Annika watching, the apprentice bossee), I went into the kitchen to remove a pan from the oven. I was gone for about 10 seconds. When I returned, Annika was in the corner of the room, sort of wedged into the corner, whimpering in a sad--not an injured or desperate--way. Lily was playing, a bit too innocently, I thought, with her magnetic shapes.
"Lil?" I asked. "How did Annika get over there so fast?" She turned to see that I had scooped up Annika and was holding her on my lap on the couch.
"I moved her there," she said.
"Why?" I asked. Relatively new lesson: It is the idiot job of the idiot parent to always, always ask the rhetorical question.
"She wouldn't stop grabbing my magnets," she said, as I mouthed the words along with her.
And there it is: no surprises. When I think of my earliest memories of being with Alison, they fall into one of two categories. Either she is a pawn in my game, the nurse to my doctor, the student to my teacher, for as long as I want her to be. Or, she is an obstacle in my path, the destructor of towers, the thrower of board games, the scribbler of coloring books, the--sigh, again--stealer of magnets.
But as I said, none of this surprises me. What does is how much Lily's frustration seems legitimate to me, how little I am able to comfort myself with the "she'll be glad for it later" explanation, how often I, too feel at odds with the situation, the dramatic shift borne of necessity in the ways Lily and I focus on each other, along with an equally sharp pang when I realize all the one-on-one attention--more than three-and-a-half years worth, a lifetime in early childhood--that Annika will never have.
Anyway. More to come. Crying baby calls. Fortunately, Lily is asleep.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Not the Real Thing
So as I'm certifiably sick, fever and all, I will again be brief. (I may have promised a more polished post than yesterday's yesterday, but what can you do? I will try tomorrow.) Writing this just reminded me of the time I turned in an English paper headed by the quotation, "Brevity is the soul of wit." And writing that, I am reminded of the time I turned in an English paper co-written with my roommate on which we pasted a sticker bearing the words: Two for the price of one. Ah, such cleverness. As my mother likes to say, that and a dime will buy you a coke. FYI, in the first case, it didn't help. In the second, it did.
So, as an antidote to all that cleverness (I am never sure how well sarcasm comes across online), I will relay a brief anecdote from earlier in the evening. On the way to school the other morning, a friend, whose child goes to school with Lily, was raving about the Kosher Coke she'd ordered from Fresh Direct, the grocery delivery service we have here in New York. Now I used to be a bigtime coke drinker but, I've been off the stuff for years. Somehow, though, listening to her go on about how refreshing it was, how much like the vastly superior coke in Mexico and Europe it was (which I knew to be true based on my own experience), how delicious it was on ice after her kids had gone to bed (okay, she didn't say that, but that's what I was picturing for me, although motor oil would probably taste decent to me after my kids have gone to bed). And on and on, until I knew that I, too, would have to order some of the Kosher Coke for myself.
I placed a delivery order yesterday, adding two 2-liter bottles of the stuff, which took me forever to find, as it was not listed under either "soda" or "Kosher" on the website. Tonight, the order came while we were eating dinner, and all through dinner, the early part of the evening, bedtime, I imagined pouring myself a tall fizzy glass of Coke, the first I'd had in a while. I imagined sinking into the reclining chair with my glass and watching Jim Lehrer (which is my own personal code for Gossip Girl, so I can try to trick myself into thinking I don't actually watch it) with my feet up. I'd decided against a lemon slice. I'd chosen my glass.
Because I am whatever the opposite is of a fount of amusing or enlightening things to say these days, when I was finally ready to pour, I came out with one of the bottles to show Ben the yellow cap, tell him what I was about to do. I shared the story, my friend's exciting tip, and waited for, well, him to drop dead of boredom or embarrassment for me? I don't know. Instead, he asked what was different about the Kosher Coke, and I--thrilled by a glimmer of interest--explained sagely that it had no corn syrup. That it is better for you (?) because it is made with sugar instead. I actually made this up, I confess to you now; it may actually just be that it's blessed by a rabbi.
Ben looked confused. He looked at the bottle I was holding like an Academy Award, close to my heart. Isn't that Diet Coke? he said. Diet Coke doesn't have any corn syrup anyway, right?
Sigh. In case you are not sufficiently Jewish, I will impart the one new thing I learned today: Aspartame is rabbi-approved.
So, as an antidote to all that cleverness (I am never sure how well sarcasm comes across online), I will relay a brief anecdote from earlier in the evening. On the way to school the other morning, a friend, whose child goes to school with Lily, was raving about the Kosher Coke she'd ordered from Fresh Direct, the grocery delivery service we have here in New York. Now I used to be a bigtime coke drinker but, I've been off the stuff for years. Somehow, though, listening to her go on about how refreshing it was, how much like the vastly superior coke in Mexico and Europe it was (which I knew to be true based on my own experience), how delicious it was on ice after her kids had gone to bed (okay, she didn't say that, but that's what I was picturing for me, although motor oil would probably taste decent to me after my kids have gone to bed). And on and on, until I knew that I, too, would have to order some of the Kosher Coke for myself.
I placed a delivery order yesterday, adding two 2-liter bottles of the stuff, which took me forever to find, as it was not listed under either "soda" or "Kosher" on the website. Tonight, the order came while we were eating dinner, and all through dinner, the early part of the evening, bedtime, I imagined pouring myself a tall fizzy glass of Coke, the first I'd had in a while. I imagined sinking into the reclining chair with my glass and watching Jim Lehrer (which is my own personal code for Gossip Girl, so I can try to trick myself into thinking I don't actually watch it) with my feet up. I'd decided against a lemon slice. I'd chosen my glass.
Because I am whatever the opposite is of a fount of amusing or enlightening things to say these days, when I was finally ready to pour, I came out with one of the bottles to show Ben the yellow cap, tell him what I was about to do. I shared the story, my friend's exciting tip, and waited for, well, him to drop dead of boredom or embarrassment for me? I don't know. Instead, he asked what was different about the Kosher Coke, and I--thrilled by a glimmer of interest--explained sagely that it had no corn syrup. That it is better for you (?) because it is made with sugar instead. I actually made this up, I confess to you now; it may actually just be that it's blessed by a rabbi.
Ben looked confused. He looked at the bottle I was holding like an Academy Award, close to my heart. Isn't that Diet Coke? he said. Diet Coke doesn't have any corn syrup anyway, right?
Sigh. In case you are not sufficiently Jewish, I will impart the one new thing I learned today: Aspartame is rabbi-approved.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
A Fragment
Am bone-tired and headachey and a little spent from finishing the draft of the second Felix and Boo story. For tonight a wisp of a memory for no apparent reason. It just popped into my head.
An image: I am lying on the floor holding a book above my head, reading. I often choose, still, to lie on the floor to read--a habit begun in the days when my parents kept our drafty colonial house cold in the winter and I would lie on the heating vent--but in this image I am 22. It is my first job. I work in publishing, as an editor, and I love it: I may be one of the few people I know who thrive on office life, which is ironic, considering I have not worked in an office in a very long time.
I shared my office space, my first year of work, with a bitter, funny, insecure red-haired guy named Daryl, whose passion was ska music and who played the saxophone in a well-known ska band when he wasn't being rude to people on the telephone. Most days at lunch I would go outside, either alone or with one of the other young editors or to meet one of several college friends who also worked downtown in Boston. But sometimes, when I was reading something especially good, or just in the mood, I would walk up to the very top floor of the elegant Beacon Hill brownstone the publishing company I worked for was fortunate enough to own, and quietly close the door behind me.
It occurred to me once that I could have lived up there; no one would ever have known. Hundreds of years before it became a sort of forgotten storage area it had probably been maids' quarters. Light streamed in the thick original window panes and onto the carpeted floor; someone had put down a carpet in a pale neutral color, a beigey-pink. Dusty boxes were set by a few of the walls, along with stacks of paper and a couple of outdated computers, but I don't think most of the other people who worked in the building even knew the floor existed, or if they did, they'd never had the temptation to go there.
I don't remember how I discovered it, but one afternoon, at my lunch hour, when I was headed out, I thought of the door on the fourth floor, the door that I knew must lead to a staircase, as the building had a fifth floor, if you thought about it. You could see from the street.
So nothing special. I just remembered this tonight: reading up there by myself in a beam of sunlight, the absolute quiet when the door was closed, the sense of a place or a time out of time. And then, the deliberately quiet walk back down, the careful closing of the door behind me, the re-entry into the office, the summons for someones birthday cake, a meeting, Daryl's desire to have me hear a riff that we both knew I wouldn't understand on his headphones.
And writing this, ending it now, I smile, because it has actually, unexpectedly opened a number of doors, other memories from this time, this office, this age. But tomorrow is, if we are lucky, another day.
An image: I am lying on the floor holding a book above my head, reading. I often choose, still, to lie on the floor to read--a habit begun in the days when my parents kept our drafty colonial house cold in the winter and I would lie on the heating vent--but in this image I am 22. It is my first job. I work in publishing, as an editor, and I love it: I may be one of the few people I know who thrive on office life, which is ironic, considering I have not worked in an office in a very long time.
I shared my office space, my first year of work, with a bitter, funny, insecure red-haired guy named Daryl, whose passion was ska music and who played the saxophone in a well-known ska band when he wasn't being rude to people on the telephone. Most days at lunch I would go outside, either alone or with one of the other young editors or to meet one of several college friends who also worked downtown in Boston. But sometimes, when I was reading something especially good, or just in the mood, I would walk up to the very top floor of the elegant Beacon Hill brownstone the publishing company I worked for was fortunate enough to own, and quietly close the door behind me.
It occurred to me once that I could have lived up there; no one would ever have known. Hundreds of years before it became a sort of forgotten storage area it had probably been maids' quarters. Light streamed in the thick original window panes and onto the carpeted floor; someone had put down a carpet in a pale neutral color, a beigey-pink. Dusty boxes were set by a few of the walls, along with stacks of paper and a couple of outdated computers, but I don't think most of the other people who worked in the building even knew the floor existed, or if they did, they'd never had the temptation to go there.
I don't remember how I discovered it, but one afternoon, at my lunch hour, when I was headed out, I thought of the door on the fourth floor, the door that I knew must lead to a staircase, as the building had a fifth floor, if you thought about it. You could see from the street.
So nothing special. I just remembered this tonight: reading up there by myself in a beam of sunlight, the absolute quiet when the door was closed, the sense of a place or a time out of time. And then, the deliberately quiet walk back down, the careful closing of the door behind me, the re-entry into the office, the summons for someones birthday cake, a meeting, Daryl's desire to have me hear a riff that we both knew I wouldn't understand on his headphones.
And writing this, ending it now, I smile, because it has actually, unexpectedly opened a number of doors, other memories from this time, this office, this age. But tomorrow is, if we are lucky, another day.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
And the End. (But I am going to post it in entirety.)
The Other Island
By Amy Wilensky
One morning, as the sand glinted in the sunlight and the waves sent white froth up on the shore of a beautiful island, two friends were sitting on a pile of smooth grey rocks, gazing out at the horizon. The friends were Felix, a small but very determined bird, and his best friend Boo, the kindest, most good-natured giraffe you could ever hope to meet. The object of their gaze was another island: a speck in the distance that seemed about a million miles away.
The island where Felix and Boo lived was a lush, green place with beaches all around of soft pink sand, and trees heavy with ripe pomegranates all the year through. It was populated mostly by birds, as many kinds as there are shells in the sea, but also by friendly speckled crabs, lean gentle wolves with mournful howls, and giraffes, all of whom were somehow related to Boo. Boo thought their island was just about perfect. Felix had always thought so too--until he’d decided that this other island, this green speck out in the middle of nowhere, was possibly even a better one.
After a while, Boo grew tired of gazing out to sea, at the other island. She stood up and stretched her long neck, moving in front of Felix so he couldn’t see the other island anymore. Felix immediately hopped onto another rock with an unspoiled view. Boo rolled her eyes. “What should we do today, Felix?” she asked, to distract him. Felix always had the best ideas.
Felix didn’t answer. “I wonder if they have peacocks there?” he mused instead, in a dreamy voice Boo had never heard before. Peacocks were perhaps the only kind of bird they didn’t have on their own island. Felix had heard some of the older birds talking about them once, their iridescent turquoise feathers, the way their enormous tails caught the light and shone like the sea itself.
“I doubt it,” said Boo, her head drooping a little. Felix hopped from rock to rock, shaking sand from his wings.
“And coconuts!” he added, as if Boo had not spoken. “I hear coconut milk is indescribably delicious.” Boo imagined little Felix, fierce as he was, trying to peck a hole in a rock-hard coconut.
“Hey!” Felix said then, as Boo was picturing his tender little beak with a bandage wrapped around it from all the pecking. “I do have a plan! A terrific one!”
“What is it?” said Boo. When Felix had an especially good idea his tail feathers shook a little. They were shaking now.
“We’ll go to that island, the other island. We’ll find out for ourselves if they have peacocks and coconuts. I’m tired of crabs and wolves and pomegranates. I want to have a real adventure for a change.” Felix looked very pleased with himself. Boo tried to hide her disappointment. Felix’s tail feathers were shaking again.
“We need to build a boat!” This sounded more promising. Boo loved to build things. And if the boat-building project took long enough, maybe Felix would forget all about the other island. They could launch their boat in the salt-water pond in the middle of their own island, by the base of the mountain where the wolves prowled and napped in the shade. They could row out to the middle of the pond and nap on the boat in the sunshine, while crabs chattered at one another on the lily pads around them.
“Okay,” said Boo. “How do we start?”
Together, with Felix leading the way, they wove through the woods to a clearing that had been hit hard by a recent thunderstorm. As Felix directed her to the straightest, strongest branches, Boo picked them up in her mouth, making a pile in the middle of the grass. Felix flew to the swamp and plucked reeds with his beak. When he’d gathered enough, he flew back to Boo, who bound the branches together with the reeds.
When they had a sturdy raft large enough to hold them both comfortably, as well as two flat branches for oars, Felix tied a rope to one end and gave the other end of the rope to Boo, who chomped down on it with her large, flat teeth. She pulled the raft through the woods and down to the beach, to the very edge of the water. Felix landed on one corner, and Boo arranged herself in the middle, a little nervous suddenly about the actual rowing. Felix, of course, Mr. Big Ideas, was too small to row.
They pushed off, let the current carry out the boat until the water grew darker, deeper, and it was time for Boo to put the oars in the water. Felix navigated, which made him feel important, puffed up, like a real ship captain. As the other island got closer and closer, Felix’s tail feathers shook so hard Boo was worried they would all fall off. “Maybe we’ll want to live there,” Felix said, as Boo panted with the effort of pulling the oars through the water. “Maybe we won’t even want to go home!” Boo remained silent.
After what seemed like hours to Boo, a flash of lightning to Felix, the bottom of the boat bumped up on sand. Boo pulled the boat up on shore. Felix flew onto her shoulder. For a moment, they just stood there, looking around. Boo had to admit that the other island was glorious. The sand was white instead of pink but as soft as baby powder, and the trees bore small, fuzzy, oval-shaped brown fruits instead of large glossy pomegranates. Suddenly, a voice broke the silence, and Boo jumped, throwing Felix into the air.
“And who are you?” said the slow, gravely voice, from down on the sand. It was a turtle, not much bigger than Felix, with a mottled dark green shell and an inquisitive face. “Or should I say, what are you?”
“Um, I’m a bird,” said Felix, looking sideways at Boo to see what she made of this. “Like a peacock?” he said.
“I don’t know what that is,” the turtle said, even more slowly this time, turning his tiny head to look at Boo. “And what’s she?”
“I’m a giraffe,” Boo said, in a high, tinkly, nervous voice. The turtle looked back at Felix.
“Hmph,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what use we have for birds and giraffes around here, but we don’t get many visitors. Actually, I’m almost four hundred years old, and you’re the first in my lifetime. You might as well come meet the rest of the island.”
Felix looked at Boo, who raised her eyebrows (yes, some giraffes do have eyebrows). “And what about you?” Felix asked. He didn’t like being bossed around. “What are you? You’re certainly not a wolf or a crab.”
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count."
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count.’ Felix and Boo exchanged looks of confusion. The turtle motioned for them to follow, and so they did, along the beach for a while, and then into a cool, piney forest, and then through a meadow in which wildflowers bloomed in bursts of orange and red like miniature planets and suns.
Finally, the turtle stopped and held out his arm as though to say, “Well? What do you make of this?” Felix and Boo had no words. They were at the top of a hill that sloped so gently they had not realized they were climbing it. But now they could survey the entire island. It looked like a patchwork quilt with colorful squares of flowering trees in full bloom, the greenest pastures, buttery yellow sandy stretches rippled with blue bubbling brooks. Felix let out a breath. Boo sat beside him. It was spectacular.
After a few minutes, they realized that they were surrounded. Turtles had gathered in clusters, from enormous sea versions to the tiniest painters. Large tan creatures with pronounced humps on their backs, the size of horses with faces like llamas, stared openly at them. Felix whispered to Boo, “The camels.”
One of the sea turtles lumbered up to where Felix and Boo were standing with the turtle who’d found them on the beach. “Welcome,” he said. “I suppose you know you’ve stumbled on the most special island in the wide and wonderful universe?” Felix gave Boo's foot a sharp peck before she could protest.
“Yes,” said Felix. “And if you don’t mind, we’d like to have a look around.” It was arranged for a couple of camels to take them touring for a few hours, show them the sights. But first: a feast. Platters of woven reeds were brought out, on which sat piles of the brown fuzzy fruits they’d noticed in the trees, cut open to reveal green insides flecked with tiny black seeds.
Felix and Boo ate the kiwi fruit, which tasted a little like lime, a little like banana but was more delicious than either. They sipped what turned out to be coconut milk from actual coconuts, and even Boo had to admit it was like drinking an afternoon breeze. A camel stood behind each of them as they feasted, and on the back of each camel sat a turtle, with an enormous fan made of kiwi tree leaves, for the purpose of ensuring the comfort of the newcomers. Although the sun was brilliant, Felix and Boo were cool as clams.
All that afternoon, they explored the island. In spite of what their turtle host, whose name was Horace, had said about the camels, they were lovely creatures with shy smiles and soothing voices. They took Felix and Boo to a spring where the water bubbled up in all the colors of a sunrise, a cave with walls like crystals, and a spot in the middle of the densest woods where stars shone in the sky in spite of the daylight.
When they were thirsty, turtles appeared with coconut milk. When they were hungry, turtles appeared with slices of kiwi on ice. When they needed a rest, they were led to hammocks, where more turtles fanned them, and unseen birds sang songs that were both strange and familiar, soothing them almost to sleep.
When dusk fell, and the sun hovered low above the horizon, Felix and Boo found themselves back at the spot on the beach where they'd landed that morning. Their boat sat back by the dunes. It appeared to have been polished and repaired, as though it had never been used. Horace was there, waiting. "So?" he said. "Was I exaggerating?" Boo looked at Felix. Felix looked out at the ocean where their island, their boring old beautiful old island, could be seen as a speck of green in the distance. Suddenly Felix found himself, for the first time all day, craving a pomegranate.
"No," said Felix, honestly. The other island was a magical place, and he was sure that for the turtles and camels and birds (but no peacocks, as far as he could tell) who lived there, it was just about perfect. "You were right. You're very lucky." Horace looked satisfied, as satisfied as a turtle can look.
"We were talking," he said, "about the two of you, while you were out with the camels. We've decided that you may remain. We have already starting preparing your castle." Boo took a step forward, but it was Felix who spoke.
"That's so lovely of you," he said, "but actually, we'll be needing our boat. If we leave now, we'll make it home before the moon concert." Boo breathed an enormous sigh of relief. Not a moment too soon.
A little while later, as she pulled the oars easily through the calm, green sea, gazing ahead all the while at their island, she thought about waking up Felix. He was sleeping peacefully beside her with one wing around the coconut he'd sweet-talked out of Horace, whistling a bit through his beak.
Instead, she looked up at the moon, a crescent in the navy expanse. They were close enough now that the evening concert could be heard, ever so faintly, across the water. She was glad they had gone to the other island, after all. And somehow she knew that Felix would let them launch their boat the next day in the pond in the middle of theirs. Sometimes you need to leave to come back home.
The End
By Amy Wilensky
One morning, as the sand glinted in the sunlight and the waves sent white froth up on the shore of a beautiful island, two friends were sitting on a pile of smooth grey rocks, gazing out at the horizon. The friends were Felix, a small but very determined bird, and his best friend Boo, the kindest, most good-natured giraffe you could ever hope to meet. The object of their gaze was another island: a speck in the distance that seemed about a million miles away.
The island where Felix and Boo lived was a lush, green place with beaches all around of soft pink sand, and trees heavy with ripe pomegranates all the year through. It was populated mostly by birds, as many kinds as there are shells in the sea, but also by friendly speckled crabs, lean gentle wolves with mournful howls, and giraffes, all of whom were somehow related to Boo. Boo thought their island was just about perfect. Felix had always thought so too--until he’d decided that this other island, this green speck out in the middle of nowhere, was possibly even a better one.
After a while, Boo grew tired of gazing out to sea, at the other island. She stood up and stretched her long neck, moving in front of Felix so he couldn’t see the other island anymore. Felix immediately hopped onto another rock with an unspoiled view. Boo rolled her eyes. “What should we do today, Felix?” she asked, to distract him. Felix always had the best ideas.
Felix didn’t answer. “I wonder if they have peacocks there?” he mused instead, in a dreamy voice Boo had never heard before. Peacocks were perhaps the only kind of bird they didn’t have on their own island. Felix had heard some of the older birds talking about them once, their iridescent turquoise feathers, the way their enormous tails caught the light and shone like the sea itself.
“I doubt it,” said Boo, her head drooping a little. Felix hopped from rock to rock, shaking sand from his wings.
“And coconuts!” he added, as if Boo had not spoken. “I hear coconut milk is indescribably delicious.” Boo imagined little Felix, fierce as he was, trying to peck a hole in a rock-hard coconut.
“Hey!” Felix said then, as Boo was picturing his tender little beak with a bandage wrapped around it from all the pecking. “I do have a plan! A terrific one!”
“What is it?” said Boo. When Felix had an especially good idea his tail feathers shook a little. They were shaking now.
“We’ll go to that island, the other island. We’ll find out for ourselves if they have peacocks and coconuts. I’m tired of crabs and wolves and pomegranates. I want to have a real adventure for a change.” Felix looked very pleased with himself. Boo tried to hide her disappointment. Felix’s tail feathers were shaking again.
“We need to build a boat!” This sounded more promising. Boo loved to build things. And if the boat-building project took long enough, maybe Felix would forget all about the other island. They could launch their boat in the salt-water pond in the middle of their own island, by the base of the mountain where the wolves prowled and napped in the shade. They could row out to the middle of the pond and nap on the boat in the sunshine, while crabs chattered at one another on the lily pads around them.
“Okay,” said Boo. “How do we start?”
Together, with Felix leading the way, they wove through the woods to a clearing that had been hit hard by a recent thunderstorm. As Felix directed her to the straightest, strongest branches, Boo picked them up in her mouth, making a pile in the middle of the grass. Felix flew to the swamp and plucked reeds with his beak. When he’d gathered enough, he flew back to Boo, who bound the branches together with the reeds.
When they had a sturdy raft large enough to hold them both comfortably, as well as two flat branches for oars, Felix tied a rope to one end and gave the other end of the rope to Boo, who chomped down on it with her large, flat teeth. She pulled the raft through the woods and down to the beach, to the very edge of the water. Felix landed on one corner, and Boo arranged herself in the middle, a little nervous suddenly about the actual rowing. Felix, of course, Mr. Big Ideas, was too small to row.
They pushed off, let the current carry out the boat until the water grew darker, deeper, and it was time for Boo to put the oars in the water. Felix navigated, which made him feel important, puffed up, like a real ship captain. As the other island got closer and closer, Felix’s tail feathers shook so hard Boo was worried they would all fall off. “Maybe we’ll want to live there,” Felix said, as Boo panted with the effort of pulling the oars through the water. “Maybe we won’t even want to go home!” Boo remained silent.
After what seemed like hours to Boo, a flash of lightning to Felix, the bottom of the boat bumped up on sand. Boo pulled the boat up on shore. Felix flew onto her shoulder. For a moment, they just stood there, looking around. Boo had to admit that the other island was glorious. The sand was white instead of pink but as soft as baby powder, and the trees bore small, fuzzy, oval-shaped brown fruits instead of large glossy pomegranates. Suddenly, a voice broke the silence, and Boo jumped, throwing Felix into the air.
“And who are you?” said the slow, gravely voice, from down on the sand. It was a turtle, not much bigger than Felix, with a mottled dark green shell and an inquisitive face. “Or should I say, what are you?”
“Um, I’m a bird,” said Felix, looking sideways at Boo to see what she made of this. “Like a peacock?” he said.
“I don’t know what that is,” the turtle said, even more slowly this time, turning his tiny head to look at Boo. “And what’s she?”
“I’m a giraffe,” Boo said, in a high, tinkly, nervous voice. The turtle looked back at Felix.
“Hmph,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what use we have for birds and giraffes around here, but we don’t get many visitors. Actually, I’m almost four hundred years old, and you’re the first in my lifetime. You might as well come meet the rest of the island.”
Felix looked at Boo, who raised her eyebrows (yes, some giraffes do have eyebrows). “And what about you?” Felix asked. He didn’t like being bossed around. “What are you? You’re certainly not a wolf or a crab.”
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count."
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count.’ Felix and Boo exchanged looks of confusion. The turtle motioned for them to follow, and so they did, along the beach for a while, and then into a cool, piney forest, and then through a meadow in which wildflowers bloomed in bursts of orange and red like miniature planets and suns.
Finally, the turtle stopped and held out his arm as though to say, “Well? What do you make of this?” Felix and Boo had no words. They were at the top of a hill that sloped so gently they had not realized they were climbing it. But now they could survey the entire island. It looked like a patchwork quilt with colorful squares of flowering trees in full bloom, the greenest pastures, buttery yellow sandy stretches rippled with blue bubbling brooks. Felix let out a breath. Boo sat beside him. It was spectacular.
After a few minutes, they realized that they were surrounded. Turtles had gathered in clusters, from enormous sea versions to the tiniest painters. Large tan creatures with pronounced humps on their backs, the size of horses with faces like llamas, stared openly at them. Felix whispered to Boo, “The camels.”
One of the sea turtles lumbered up to where Felix and Boo were standing with the turtle who’d found them on the beach. “Welcome,” he said. “I suppose you know you’ve stumbled on the most special island in the wide and wonderful universe?” Felix gave Boo's foot a sharp peck before she could protest.
“Yes,” said Felix. “And if you don’t mind, we’d like to have a look around.” It was arranged for a couple of camels to take them touring for a few hours, show them the sights. But first: a feast. Platters of woven reeds were brought out, on which sat piles of the brown fuzzy fruits they’d noticed in the trees, cut open to reveal green insides flecked with tiny black seeds.
Felix and Boo ate the kiwi fruit, which tasted a little like lime, a little like banana but was more delicious than either. They sipped what turned out to be coconut milk from actual coconuts, and even Boo had to admit it was like drinking an afternoon breeze. A camel stood behind each of them as they feasted, and on the back of each camel sat a turtle, with an enormous fan made of kiwi tree leaves, for the purpose of ensuring the comfort of the newcomers. Although the sun was brilliant, Felix and Boo were cool as clams.
All that afternoon, they explored the island. In spite of what their turtle host, whose name was Horace, had said about the camels, they were lovely creatures with shy smiles and soothing voices. They took Felix and Boo to a spring where the water bubbled up in all the colors of a sunrise, a cave with walls like crystals, and a spot in the middle of the densest woods where stars shone in the sky in spite of the daylight.
When they were thirsty, turtles appeared with coconut milk. When they were hungry, turtles appeared with slices of kiwi on ice. When they needed a rest, they were led to hammocks, where more turtles fanned them, and unseen birds sang songs that were both strange and familiar, soothing them almost to sleep.
When dusk fell, and the sun hovered low above the horizon, Felix and Boo found themselves back at the spot on the beach where they'd landed that morning. Their boat sat back by the dunes. It appeared to have been polished and repaired, as though it had never been used. Horace was there, waiting. "So?" he said. "Was I exaggerating?" Boo looked at Felix. Felix looked out at the ocean where their island, their boring old beautiful old island, could be seen as a speck of green in the distance. Suddenly Felix found himself, for the first time all day, craving a pomegranate.
"No," said Felix, honestly. The other island was a magical place, and he was sure that for the turtles and camels and birds (but no peacocks, as far as he could tell) who lived there, it was just about perfect. "You were right. You're very lucky." Horace looked satisfied, as satisfied as a turtle can look.
"We were talking," he said, "about the two of you, while you were out with the camels. We've decided that you may remain. We have already starting preparing your castle." Boo took a step forward, but it was Felix who spoke.
"That's so lovely of you," he said, "but actually, we'll be needing our boat. If we leave now, we'll make it home before the moon concert." Boo breathed an enormous sigh of relief. Not a moment too soon.
A little while later, as she pulled the oars easily through the calm, green sea, gazing ahead all the while at their island, she thought about waking up Felix. He was sleeping peacefully beside her with one wing around the coconut he'd sweet-talked out of Horace, whistling a bit through his beak.
Instead, she looked up at the moon, a crescent in the navy expanse. They were close enough now that the evening concert could be heard, ever so faintly, across the water. She was glad they had gone to the other island, after all. And somehow she knew that Felix would let them launch their boat the next day in the pond in the middle of theirs. Sometimes you need to leave to come back home.
The End
Not Finished Yet, but Here's Another Chunk
(see yesterday's post for first part of story, tomorrow's for conclusion)
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count.’ Felix and Boo exchanged looks of confusion. The turtle motioned for them to follow, and so they did, along the beach for a while, and then into a cool, piney forest, and then through a meadow in which wildflowers bloomed in bursts of orange and red like miniature planets and suns.
Finally, the turtle stopped and held out his arm as though to say, “Well? What do you make of this?” Felix and Boo had no words. They were at the top of a hill that sloped so gently they had not realized they were climbing it. But now they could survey the entire island. It looked like a patchwork quilt with colorful squares of flowering trees in full bloom, the greenest pastures, buttery yellow sandy stretches rippled with blue bubbling brooks. Felix let out a breath. Boo sat beside him. It was spectacular.
After a few minutes, they realized that they were surrounded. Turtles had gathered in clusters, from enormous sea versions to the tiniest painters. Large tan creatures with pronounced humps on their backs, the size of horses with faces like llamas, stared openly at them. Felix whispered to Boo, “The camels.”
One of the sea turtles lumbered up to where Felix and Boo were standing with the turtle who’d found them on the beach. “Welcome,” he said. “I suppose you know you’ve stumbled on the most special island in the wide and wonderful universe?” Felix gave Boo's foot a sharp peck before she could protest.
“Yes,” said Felix. “And if you don’t mind, we’d like to have a look around.” It was arranged for a couple of camels to take them touring for a few hours, show them the sights. But first: a feast. Platters of woven reeds were brought out, on which sat piles of the brown fuzzy fruits they’d noticed in the trees, cut open to reveal green insides flecked with tiny black seeds.
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count.’ Felix and Boo exchanged looks of confusion. The turtle motioned for them to follow, and so they did, along the beach for a while, and then into a cool, piney forest, and then through a meadow in which wildflowers bloomed in bursts of orange and red like miniature planets and suns.
Finally, the turtle stopped and held out his arm as though to say, “Well? What do you make of this?” Felix and Boo had no words. They were at the top of a hill that sloped so gently they had not realized they were climbing it. But now they could survey the entire island. It looked like a patchwork quilt with colorful squares of flowering trees in full bloom, the greenest pastures, buttery yellow sandy stretches rippled with blue bubbling brooks. Felix let out a breath. Boo sat beside him. It was spectacular.
After a few minutes, they realized that they were surrounded. Turtles had gathered in clusters, from enormous sea versions to the tiniest painters. Large tan creatures with pronounced humps on their backs, the size of horses with faces like llamas, stared openly at them. Felix whispered to Boo, “The camels.”
One of the sea turtles lumbered up to where Felix and Boo were standing with the turtle who’d found them on the beach. “Welcome,” he said. “I suppose you know you’ve stumbled on the most special island in the wide and wonderful universe?” Felix gave Boo's foot a sharp peck before she could protest.
“Yes,” said Felix. “And if you don’t mind, we’d like to have a look around.” It was arranged for a couple of camels to take them touring for a few hours, show them the sights. But first: a feast. Platters of woven reeds were brought out, on which sat piles of the brown fuzzy fruits they’d noticed in the trees, cut open to reveal green insides flecked with tiny black seeds.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Pretend You're Five Again...and Get the Conclusion Tomorrow
The Other Island
By Amy Wilensky
One morning, as the sand glinted in the sunlight and the waves sent white froth up on the sandy shore of a beautiful island, two friends were sitting on a pile of smooth grey rocks, gazing out at the horizon. The friends were Felix, a small but very determined bird, and his best friend Boo, the kindest, most good-natured giraffe you could ever hope to meet. The object of their gaze was another island: a speck in the distance that seemed about a million miles away.
The island where Felix and Boo lived was a lush, green place with beaches all around of soft pink sand, and trees heavy with ripe pomegranates all the year through. It was populated mostly by birds, as many kinds as there are shells in the sea, but also by friendly speckled crabs, lean gentle wolves with mournful howls, and an extended family of giraffes, all of whom were somehow related to Boo. Boo thought their island was just about perfect. Felix had always thought so too--until he’d decided that this other island, this green speck out in the middle of nowhere, was possible even a better one.
After a while, Boo grew tired of gazing out to sea, at the other island. She stood up and stretched her long neck, moving in front of Felix so he couldn’t see the other island anymore. Felix immediately hopped onto another rock with an unspoiled view. Boo rolled her eyes. “What should we do today, Felix?” she asked, to distract him. Felix always had the best ideas.
Felix didn’t answer. “I wonder if they have peacocks there?” he mused instead, in a dreamy voice Boo had never heard before. Peacocks were perhaps the only kind of bird they didn’t have on their own island. Felix had heard some of the older birds talking about them once, their iridescent turquoise feathers, the way their enormous tails caught the light and shone like the sea itself.
“I doubt it,” said Boo, her head drooping a little. Felix hopped from rock to rock, shaking sand from his wings.
“And coconuts!” he added, as if Boo had not spoken. “I hear coconut milk is indescribably delicious.” Boo imagined little Felix, fierce as he was, trying to peck a hole in a rock-hard coconut.
“Hey!” Felix said then, as Boo was picturing his tender little beak with a bandage wrapped around it from all the pecking. “I do have a plan! A terrific one!”
“What is it?” said Boo. When Felix had an especially good idea his tail feathers shook a little. They were shaking now.
“We’ll go to that island, the other island. We’ll find out for ourselves if they have peacocks and coconuts. I’m tired of crabs and wolves and pomegranates. I want to have a real adventure for a change.” Felix looked very pleased with himself. Boo tried to hide her disappointment. Felix’s tail feathers were shaking again.
“We need to build a boat!” This sounded more promising. Boo loved to build things. And if the boat-building project took long enough, maybe Felix would forget all about the other island. They could launch their boat in the salt-water pond in the middle of their own island, by the base of the mountain where the wolves prowled and napped in the shade. They could row out to the middle of the pond and nap on the boat in the sunshine, while crabs chattered at one another on the lily pads around them.
“Okay,” said Boo. “How do we start?”
Together, with Felix leading the way, they wove through the woods to a clearing that had been hit hard by a recent thunderstorm. As Felix directed her to the straightest, strongest branches, Boo picked them up in her mouth, making a pile in the middle of the grass. Felix flew to the swamp and plucked reeds with his beak. When he’d gathered enough, he flew back to Boo, who bound the branches together with the reeds.
When they had a sturdy raft large enough to hold them both comfortably, as well as two flat branches for oars, Felix tied a rope to one end and gave the other end of the rope to Boo, who chomped down on it with her large, flat teeth. She pulled the raft through the woods and down to the beach, to the very edge of the water. Felix landed on one corner, and Boo arranged herself in the middle, a little nervous suddenly about the actual rowing. Felix, of course, Mr. Big Ideas, was too small to row.
They pushed off, let the current carry out the boat until the water grew darker, deeper, and it was time for Boo to put the oars in the water. Felix navigated, which made him feel important, puffed up, like a real ship captain. As the other island got closer and closer, Felix’s tail feathers shook so hard Boo was worried they would all fall off. “Maybe we’ll want to live there,” Felix said, as Boo panted with the effort of pulling the oars through the water. “Maybe we won’t even want to go home!” Boo remained silent.
After what seemed like hours to Boo, a flash of lightning to Felix, the bottom of the boat bumped up on sand. Boo pulled the boat up on shore. Felix flew onto her shoulder. For a moment, they just stood there, looking around. Boo had to admit that the other island was glorious. The sand was white instead of pink but as soft as baby powder, and the trees bore small, fuzzy, oval-shaped brown fruits instead of large glossy pomegranates. Suddenly, a voice broke the silence, and Boo jumped, throwing Felix into the air.
“And who are you?” said the slow, gravely voice, from down on the sand. It was a turtle, not much bigger than Felix, with a mottled dark green shell and an inquisitive face. “Or should I say, what are you?”
“Um, I’m a bird,” said Felix, looking sideways at Boo to see what she made of this. “Like a peacock?” he said.
“I don’t know what that is,” the turtle said, even more slowly this time, turning his tiny head to look at Boo. “And what’s she?”
“I’m a giraffe,” Boo said, in a high, tinkly, nervous voice. The turtle looked back at Felix.
“Hmph,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what use we have for birds and giraffes around here, but we don’t get many visitors. Actually, I’m almost four hundred years old, and you’re the first in my lifetime. You might as well come meet the rest of the island.”
Felix looked at Boo, who raised her eyebrows (yes, some giraffes do have eyebrows). “And what about you?” Felix asked. He didn’t like being bossed around. “What are you? You’re certainly not a wolf or a crab.”
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count."
By Amy Wilensky
One morning, as the sand glinted in the sunlight and the waves sent white froth up on the sandy shore of a beautiful island, two friends were sitting on a pile of smooth grey rocks, gazing out at the horizon. The friends were Felix, a small but very determined bird, and his best friend Boo, the kindest, most good-natured giraffe you could ever hope to meet. The object of their gaze was another island: a speck in the distance that seemed about a million miles away.
The island where Felix and Boo lived was a lush, green place with beaches all around of soft pink sand, and trees heavy with ripe pomegranates all the year through. It was populated mostly by birds, as many kinds as there are shells in the sea, but also by friendly speckled crabs, lean gentle wolves with mournful howls, and an extended family of giraffes, all of whom were somehow related to Boo. Boo thought their island was just about perfect. Felix had always thought so too--until he’d decided that this other island, this green speck out in the middle of nowhere, was possible even a better one.
After a while, Boo grew tired of gazing out to sea, at the other island. She stood up and stretched her long neck, moving in front of Felix so he couldn’t see the other island anymore. Felix immediately hopped onto another rock with an unspoiled view. Boo rolled her eyes. “What should we do today, Felix?” she asked, to distract him. Felix always had the best ideas.
Felix didn’t answer. “I wonder if they have peacocks there?” he mused instead, in a dreamy voice Boo had never heard before. Peacocks were perhaps the only kind of bird they didn’t have on their own island. Felix had heard some of the older birds talking about them once, their iridescent turquoise feathers, the way their enormous tails caught the light and shone like the sea itself.
“I doubt it,” said Boo, her head drooping a little. Felix hopped from rock to rock, shaking sand from his wings.
“And coconuts!” he added, as if Boo had not spoken. “I hear coconut milk is indescribably delicious.” Boo imagined little Felix, fierce as he was, trying to peck a hole in a rock-hard coconut.
“Hey!” Felix said then, as Boo was picturing his tender little beak with a bandage wrapped around it from all the pecking. “I do have a plan! A terrific one!”
“What is it?” said Boo. When Felix had an especially good idea his tail feathers shook a little. They were shaking now.
“We’ll go to that island, the other island. We’ll find out for ourselves if they have peacocks and coconuts. I’m tired of crabs and wolves and pomegranates. I want to have a real adventure for a change.” Felix looked very pleased with himself. Boo tried to hide her disappointment. Felix’s tail feathers were shaking again.
“We need to build a boat!” This sounded more promising. Boo loved to build things. And if the boat-building project took long enough, maybe Felix would forget all about the other island. They could launch their boat in the salt-water pond in the middle of their own island, by the base of the mountain where the wolves prowled and napped in the shade. They could row out to the middle of the pond and nap on the boat in the sunshine, while crabs chattered at one another on the lily pads around them.
“Okay,” said Boo. “How do we start?”
Together, with Felix leading the way, they wove through the woods to a clearing that had been hit hard by a recent thunderstorm. As Felix directed her to the straightest, strongest branches, Boo picked them up in her mouth, making a pile in the middle of the grass. Felix flew to the swamp and plucked reeds with his beak. When he’d gathered enough, he flew back to Boo, who bound the branches together with the reeds.
When they had a sturdy raft large enough to hold them both comfortably, as well as two flat branches for oars, Felix tied a rope to one end and gave the other end of the rope to Boo, who chomped down on it with her large, flat teeth. She pulled the raft through the woods and down to the beach, to the very edge of the water. Felix landed on one corner, and Boo arranged herself in the middle, a little nervous suddenly about the actual rowing. Felix, of course, Mr. Big Ideas, was too small to row.
They pushed off, let the current carry out the boat until the water grew darker, deeper, and it was time for Boo to put the oars in the water. Felix navigated, which made him feel important, puffed up, like a real ship captain. As the other island got closer and closer, Felix’s tail feathers shook so hard Boo was worried they would all fall off. “Maybe we’ll want to live there,” Felix said, as Boo panted with the effort of pulling the oars through the water. “Maybe we won’t even want to go home!” Boo remained silent.
After what seemed like hours to Boo, a flash of lightning to Felix, the bottom of the boat bumped up on sand. Boo pulled the boat up on shore. Felix flew onto her shoulder. For a moment, they just stood there, looking around. Boo had to admit that the other island was glorious. The sand was white instead of pink but as soft as baby powder, and the trees bore small, fuzzy, oval-shaped brown fruits instead of large glossy pomegranates. Suddenly, a voice broke the silence, and Boo jumped, throwing Felix into the air.
“And who are you?” said the slow, gravely voice, from down on the sand. It was a turtle, not much bigger than Felix, with a mottled dark green shell and an inquisitive face. “Or should I say, what are you?”
“Um, I’m a bird,” said Felix, looking sideways at Boo to see what she made of this. “Like a peacock?” he said.
“I don’t know what that is,” the turtle said, even more slowly this time, turning his tiny head to look at Boo. “And what’s she?”
“I’m a giraffe,” Boo said, in a high, tinkly, nervous voice. The turtle looked back at Felix.
“Hmph,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what use we have for birds and giraffes around here, but we don’t get many visitors. Actually, I’m almost four hundred years old, and you’re the first in my lifetime. You might as well come meet the rest of the island.”
Felix looked at Boo, who raised her eyebrows (yes, some giraffes do have eyebrows). “And what about you?” Felix asked. He didn’t like being bossed around. “What are you? You’re certainly not a wolf or a crab.”
“Wolf or a crab? Of course not,” scoffed the turtle. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a proud member of the ancient race of turtles. We are the only creatures who live here. Except for the camels, of course. But they don’t really count."
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
A Lighter Note
I am often asked by many of my relatives, all 5,000 of whom still live within a 20 miles radius of my hometown, why I choose to live in New York City. Now there are certainly many reasons not to live in New York City, and I am even willing to admit some of them as time goes on, although I won't now, as the purported purpose here is to alleviate tension (yours and mine) after tonight's downer of a debate. I'd also like to steer away, far away, from my melancholy reminiscences of my so-called former self. Self: You're still here. Deal with it or put a sock in it. We were all twenty-five once. It wouldn't be good if it lasted more than a year, and as a few wise if annoying friends have reminded me, it wasn't even all good. So moving on.
I'd like to recount a brief anecdote that serves as a partial response to that question, the "why New York question," that comes with a bonus: total obliteration of my self-satisfied if minutes-long career as a sociologist.
I was riding uptown on the subway this afternoon to work, and for some reason I left my magazine in my bag. I was people-watching instead, a hobby I picked up from my father (my mother pretends to disdain people-watching; she prefers eavesdropping in restaurants). A trio of teenagers across from me caught my attention, and I checked them out pretty aggressively, which was possible because they were--as teenagers I guess are wont to do these days--entranced by some video clip on one of their i-pods.
One was a Hispanic girl with long glossy brown hair, the kind of bad skin that makes you want to hug kids when you see it and tell them that they won't be seventeen forever, tight jeans and sort-of sad eyes. She seemed less a part of the unit than the short skinny kid with the black beret, an enormous belt with metal grommets, a smattering of eye makeup and dyed black hair that appeared to have been ironed straight. It was the middle kid who had all the charisma, who had caught my eye in the first place. He was a he, but about as intentionally feminine a he as you can imagine: permed long hair pulled up in a loose ponytail, huge gold dangly earrings, lip gloss, seemingly women's jeans, plaid cloth sneakers and a yellow cotton vest. He was the one holding the i-pod, the power. It was easy to tell.
But I was interested not in the dynamic between the kids, but by the fact that nobody else was watching them. When the women seated next to them accidentally slid into beret kid when the train skidded to a stop, she checked them out for an instant, then smiled, indulgently, even fondly, and said, "So sorry, guys." Politely, the kids smiled back, said it was no problem, and a few people around us smiled too.
This lack of attention, the lovefest, struck me as a bit odd; I am realizing that unless you were born here, one is always new to New York. Not that I grew up in a Leave it to Beaver episode or anything. My parents sent me to a progressive, super artsy high school where having a mohawk, dyed blue hair, was par for the course, if not de rigeur. I hung out in Harvard Square, where punk-looking kids with safety pins in their ears and shredded jeans skateboarded around looking tough. But at the end of the day, these kids took the train back out to Weston, showered, and ate dinner with their pediatrician and attorney parents in colonial homes with central air conditioning and a golden retriever named Brandy.
My hometown was about as homogenous as you can get without finding yourself deep in Klan country. I will never forget the story in our town paper about the afternoon when the class valedictorian from a neighboring town was sitting in his own car, in his own driveway, reading his own mail. In the space of about thirty minutes more than a handful of passers-by called the police to report somebody stealing a car. By somebody they meant a black kid. The number of black families in our town when I was growing up seemed to be in the single digits. My family, as I may have mentioned before, has lived in this town since before there were dinosaurs, and to be totally honest, I can only think of two.
And cross-dressers? Casual, ethnically and racially diverse cross-dressers, not one but two of them, sitting on the subway with a girl, jabbering away about a video clip and nobody so much as batting an eye? Not where I come from, baby, not even at my high school, where a boy wearing a skirt for a day happened once in a while, not in Harvard Square, where you always felt like one of the punk's mothers was about to show up on the spot with a Talbot's bag to retrieve little Theodore and make him go back home and finish his algebra homework.
So this is what I was thinking as I watched these three teenagers: that in spite of increasing disillusion with certain factors of life in Manhattan, that it was still a place where teenagers, lots of them, look like extras in an even more liberated version of the movie Fame, a place where--if you are not on the Upper East Side (my spies report that the Nanny Diaries is not actually a satire)--you have much more important things to do than worry about conforming to social norms. I was thinking: Not only is New York a place where kids who look like this would never get spit on or beat up, which I happen to know happens in lots of places, when kids even dare to look like this, they are celebrated, beamed at by women with expensive handbags and men with briefcases and shoes with leather soles.
I was feeling really great about this in a sort of misty, Lifetime movie in my head kind of a way, when I both realized I had been staring unabashedly and was now in a veritable stare-down with the middle kid, the most femininely artfully styled boy I had ever seen in my life. My first thought, typically, pathetically, was: Oh my god, he thinks I'm judging him. How can I make it clear that I'm not, that I too embrace his right to wear lip gloss, that I was just thinking how great it was that this is where I'm raising my kids in spite of a recent New York magazine article that referred to a family with a $2,000 annual membership at an exclusive kids club that doesn't include any of the classes for kids as "middle class," but without appearing like a white, upper middle class, over educated, condescending ass (too late, so too late, I know), when he spoke.
"Hey girlfriend," he said. I straightened my spine, stiffened my jaw. Was he challenging me? Was he going to take me to task for checking him out? Was I going to have to attempt my inclusion speech on the B train, with an audience, no less? I smiled, awkwardly, waited for him to continue. I could take it, whatever it was. I just needed to know.
"Either you are some kind of a crazy zookeeper or you live with waaaay too much dog." He turned to his friend. "You feel me? Sister needs to buy herself a lint roller."
I was mortified. But not in the way I'd expected. When I got off the subway, I had ten minutes to spare. I went into Duane Reade and bought lint rollers. A three pack.
I'd like to recount a brief anecdote that serves as a partial response to that question, the "why New York question," that comes with a bonus: total obliteration of my self-satisfied if minutes-long career as a sociologist.
I was riding uptown on the subway this afternoon to work, and for some reason I left my magazine in my bag. I was people-watching instead, a hobby I picked up from my father (my mother pretends to disdain people-watching; she prefers eavesdropping in restaurants). A trio of teenagers across from me caught my attention, and I checked them out pretty aggressively, which was possible because they were--as teenagers I guess are wont to do these days--entranced by some video clip on one of their i-pods.
One was a Hispanic girl with long glossy brown hair, the kind of bad skin that makes you want to hug kids when you see it and tell them that they won't be seventeen forever, tight jeans and sort-of sad eyes. She seemed less a part of the unit than the short skinny kid with the black beret, an enormous belt with metal grommets, a smattering of eye makeup and dyed black hair that appeared to have been ironed straight. It was the middle kid who had all the charisma, who had caught my eye in the first place. He was a he, but about as intentionally feminine a he as you can imagine: permed long hair pulled up in a loose ponytail, huge gold dangly earrings, lip gloss, seemingly women's jeans, plaid cloth sneakers and a yellow cotton vest. He was the one holding the i-pod, the power. It was easy to tell.
But I was interested not in the dynamic between the kids, but by the fact that nobody else was watching them. When the women seated next to them accidentally slid into beret kid when the train skidded to a stop, she checked them out for an instant, then smiled, indulgently, even fondly, and said, "So sorry, guys." Politely, the kids smiled back, said it was no problem, and a few people around us smiled too.
This lack of attention, the lovefest, struck me as a bit odd; I am realizing that unless you were born here, one is always new to New York. Not that I grew up in a Leave it to Beaver episode or anything. My parents sent me to a progressive, super artsy high school where having a mohawk, dyed blue hair, was par for the course, if not de rigeur. I hung out in Harvard Square, where punk-looking kids with safety pins in their ears and shredded jeans skateboarded around looking tough. But at the end of the day, these kids took the train back out to Weston, showered, and ate dinner with their pediatrician and attorney parents in colonial homes with central air conditioning and a golden retriever named Brandy.
My hometown was about as homogenous as you can get without finding yourself deep in Klan country. I will never forget the story in our town paper about the afternoon when the class valedictorian from a neighboring town was sitting in his own car, in his own driveway, reading his own mail. In the space of about thirty minutes more than a handful of passers-by called the police to report somebody stealing a car. By somebody they meant a black kid. The number of black families in our town when I was growing up seemed to be in the single digits. My family, as I may have mentioned before, has lived in this town since before there were dinosaurs, and to be totally honest, I can only think of two.
And cross-dressers? Casual, ethnically and racially diverse cross-dressers, not one but two of them, sitting on the subway with a girl, jabbering away about a video clip and nobody so much as batting an eye? Not where I come from, baby, not even at my high school, where a boy wearing a skirt for a day happened once in a while, not in Harvard Square, where you always felt like one of the punk's mothers was about to show up on the spot with a Talbot's bag to retrieve little Theodore and make him go back home and finish his algebra homework.
So this is what I was thinking as I watched these three teenagers: that in spite of increasing disillusion with certain factors of life in Manhattan, that it was still a place where teenagers, lots of them, look like extras in an even more liberated version of the movie Fame, a place where--if you are not on the Upper East Side (my spies report that the Nanny Diaries is not actually a satire)--you have much more important things to do than worry about conforming to social norms. I was thinking: Not only is New York a place where kids who look like this would never get spit on or beat up, which I happen to know happens in lots of places, when kids even dare to look like this, they are celebrated, beamed at by women with expensive handbags and men with briefcases and shoes with leather soles.
I was feeling really great about this in a sort of misty, Lifetime movie in my head kind of a way, when I both realized I had been staring unabashedly and was now in a veritable stare-down with the middle kid, the most femininely artfully styled boy I had ever seen in my life. My first thought, typically, pathetically, was: Oh my god, he thinks I'm judging him. How can I make it clear that I'm not, that I too embrace his right to wear lip gloss, that I was just thinking how great it was that this is where I'm raising my kids in spite of a recent New York magazine article that referred to a family with a $2,000 annual membership at an exclusive kids club that doesn't include any of the classes for kids as "middle class," but without appearing like a white, upper middle class, over educated, condescending ass (too late, so too late, I know), when he spoke.
"Hey girlfriend," he said. I straightened my spine, stiffened my jaw. Was he challenging me? Was he going to take me to task for checking him out? Was I going to have to attempt my inclusion speech on the B train, with an audience, no less? I smiled, awkwardly, waited for him to continue. I could take it, whatever it was. I just needed to know.
"Either you are some kind of a crazy zookeeper or you live with waaaay too much dog." He turned to his friend. "You feel me? Sister needs to buy herself a lint roller."
I was mortified. But not in the way I'd expected. When I got off the subway, I had ten minutes to spare. I went into Duane Reade and bought lint rollers. A three pack.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Wednesday Evenings in the First Half of 2007
The older I get, the more fearful I become of forgetting things. Not things like where I've left my glasses or my keys--it's decades too late to start being fearful of that kind of absent-mindedness. I actually think I'm better in that regard than I used to be out of necessity and the various coping strategies I've adopted over decades of practice. No, I mean forgetting the things I used to do, the ways I used to feel, what my life was like at given points in time. I recognize that it's a little unusual to be fearful like this. After all, to what end does a person need to remember how she used to spend Wednesday evenings back in the first half of 2007? Well, I will tell you, and you can decide for yourself.
It is not that often that one finds a kindred spirit as an adult. The phenomenon seems to be far more prevalent among the young, for a variety of reasons I will not go into here. But every once in a while, it happens, and it is to be savored. I have been fortunate in the past few years in finding a few, one of whom had a daughter in Lily's first class. When I met this friend, a year and a half ago now, she told me that her husband co-owned a bar, that Lily and I should come to the bar some evening, as she and her daughter did once a week, for an early dinner and some companionship.
My life in the first half of 2007 did not feel very secure. I was newly pregnant and conflicted about becoming a mother of two. My pregnancy was high-risk and stressful; I spent hours and hours at doctors' offices and hospitals. I was trying to figure out my professional plans for the foreseeable future, and we were trying to find, buy and move into a larger apartment. But I had this new friend, whose daughter was beloved by mine, and her husband had a bar. One winter evening, we bundled up warm, and we went.
Over the next few months, Wednesday evenings became something of a habit. Almost always I would return home after a long afternoon of tutoring to find Lily ready and excited to go. She would often pack a small bag with a doll or an animal, or more arbitrary supplies: sunglasses or a favorite rock. We'd walk three long blocks up our street to the big indoor market, where we'd meet our friends, buy dinner to go.
Mostly we bought Italian food: the girls would select a pasta, stuffed zucchini, another vegetable, a meatball or two. We'd buy milk from the dairy store, occasionally cookies, although my friend's husband, the bar-owner/tender usually supplied dessert. For that reason, as well as the pomegranate-based drinks he invented for the girls called Pom Poms and a certain glowing affability, he was the main attraction for the girls once we'd walked across the street with our dinner, settled in at the bar. Which was fine, because then--at least in spurts--my new friend and I could talk.
As someone who always logged hours and hours talking and talking with an uncommonly clever, amusing, and insightful collection of friends, it is one of the things I miss most about my former, pre-child life. Yes, I have dazzling, dizzying and sometimes surreal conversations with Lily, and I call my old friends furtively late at night when walking the dogs or in the rare times I am in a car by myself, but real, adult conversation is something of a luxury these days with all else there is to be done, never completed.
So when Lily--or perhaps an old beloved or another new friend (I have high hopes for more of them once I can get Annika up and running)--asks me in my old age what I used to do on Wednesday evenings in the first half of 2007, I will say this, because now I will be able to make myself remember:
On Wednesday evenings, in the first half of 2007, I walked three long blocks holding hands with a 3-year-old who swung our arms between us as we walked, squeezed my hand at the intersection and smiled up at me with shining eyes. I helped divide the food we'd bought at the Market onto two take-out container lids, cutting meatballs in pieces for the girls with a flimsy plastic knife, eating the rest of the food once they'd finished. I sat at a rickety little table in a perfect little dimly lit bar with a citrus squeezer and songs I'd loved since high school playing in the background, watching as the colored lights glowed as though through a fog in moving circles on the floor, and Lily and her friend--a head taller--jumped on them gleefully, danced in the middle of the floor unselfconsciously, sneaked up onto bar stools and wheedled and flirted pretzels from almost always enchanted actual patrons. And when there were enough actual patrons, I bundled us back up, with some difficulty, as departures are not a 3-year-old's strong suit, and walked back if Lily was up for it, or hailed a cab. And when I went to sleep on those nights, I always thought: Well, that was a really nice evening.
The bar, that bar, is now closed. I have a feeling there will be another one, sooner rather than later, and if there is, and they will have me, I'll take both girls. But it won't be the same, and because it never is, I thought I'd just write it down.
Goodnight.
It is not that often that one finds a kindred spirit as an adult. The phenomenon seems to be far more prevalent among the young, for a variety of reasons I will not go into here. But every once in a while, it happens, and it is to be savored. I have been fortunate in the past few years in finding a few, one of whom had a daughter in Lily's first class. When I met this friend, a year and a half ago now, she told me that her husband co-owned a bar, that Lily and I should come to the bar some evening, as she and her daughter did once a week, for an early dinner and some companionship.
My life in the first half of 2007 did not feel very secure. I was newly pregnant and conflicted about becoming a mother of two. My pregnancy was high-risk and stressful; I spent hours and hours at doctors' offices and hospitals. I was trying to figure out my professional plans for the foreseeable future, and we were trying to find, buy and move into a larger apartment. But I had this new friend, whose daughter was beloved by mine, and her husband had a bar. One winter evening, we bundled up warm, and we went.
Over the next few months, Wednesday evenings became something of a habit. Almost always I would return home after a long afternoon of tutoring to find Lily ready and excited to go. She would often pack a small bag with a doll or an animal, or more arbitrary supplies: sunglasses or a favorite rock. We'd walk three long blocks up our street to the big indoor market, where we'd meet our friends, buy dinner to go.
Mostly we bought Italian food: the girls would select a pasta, stuffed zucchini, another vegetable, a meatball or two. We'd buy milk from the dairy store, occasionally cookies, although my friend's husband, the bar-owner/tender usually supplied dessert. For that reason, as well as the pomegranate-based drinks he invented for the girls called Pom Poms and a certain glowing affability, he was the main attraction for the girls once we'd walked across the street with our dinner, settled in at the bar. Which was fine, because then--at least in spurts--my new friend and I could talk.
As someone who always logged hours and hours talking and talking with an uncommonly clever, amusing, and insightful collection of friends, it is one of the things I miss most about my former, pre-child life. Yes, I have dazzling, dizzying and sometimes surreal conversations with Lily, and I call my old friends furtively late at night when walking the dogs or in the rare times I am in a car by myself, but real, adult conversation is something of a luxury these days with all else there is to be done, never completed.
So when Lily--or perhaps an old beloved or another new friend (I have high hopes for more of them once I can get Annika up and running)--asks me in my old age what I used to do on Wednesday evenings in the first half of 2007, I will say this, because now I will be able to make myself remember:
On Wednesday evenings, in the first half of 2007, I walked three long blocks holding hands with a 3-year-old who swung our arms between us as we walked, squeezed my hand at the intersection and smiled up at me with shining eyes. I helped divide the food we'd bought at the Market onto two take-out container lids, cutting meatballs in pieces for the girls with a flimsy plastic knife, eating the rest of the food once they'd finished. I sat at a rickety little table in a perfect little dimly lit bar with a citrus squeezer and songs I'd loved since high school playing in the background, watching as the colored lights glowed as though through a fog in moving circles on the floor, and Lily and her friend--a head taller--jumped on them gleefully, danced in the middle of the floor unselfconsciously, sneaked up onto bar stools and wheedled and flirted pretzels from almost always enchanted actual patrons. And when there were enough actual patrons, I bundled us back up, with some difficulty, as departures are not a 3-year-old's strong suit, and walked back if Lily was up for it, or hailed a cab. And when I went to sleep on those nights, I always thought: Well, that was a really nice evening.
The bar, that bar, is now closed. I have a feeling there will be another one, sooner rather than later, and if there is, and they will have me, I'll take both girls. But it won't be the same, and because it never is, I thought I'd just write it down.
Goodnight.
Monday, April 14, 2008
What Goes Around, Comes Around or The Return of the Whole-Wheat Pita Pocket (Parts 1 and 2)
I am going to post the entire finished essay; if you already read Part 1, feel free to skim ahead, as I made few changes to the first half (yesterday's post).
Three times a week, to her great satisfaction, Lily stays at preschool until 3 and brings her lunch. All last year, once she picked up on the fact that her friend whose mother is a teacher at the school brought a lunch box each day, she begged for me a lunch box, not to mention the apparently tremendous privilege of being able to eat her lunch at school. No matter how many times I explained that children in the 2s-3s classes whose parents did not teach at the school were not actually allowed to stay for lunch, she was not appeased. So when she learned last summer that as a member of the 3s-4s lunching was, so to speak, on the menu, she started begging to stay every day.
We settled on three days, and although I had seen an adorable and practical canvas lunch sack in a catalog and planned to order it, the day we found ourselves in Target face-to-face with one shaped like a car was the day Lily got her first lunch box. The whole lunch box thing was pretty evocative for me. Although I feel this is akin to referring to a Victrola in casual conversation, I am old enough to have owned--and not ironically as an e-bay purchase--a metal lunch box with a plastic handle that opened with a little latch. One I remember well (I believe there were several over the years) featured a scene of Raggedy Ann and Andy. I suspect, knowing my mother, that this was not the cool lunch box to have, even in 1976. In fact, if I squint I can just barely see shadowy Wonder Woman and Scooby Doo versions parked across from me at the lunch table. But that's what I had, and although I don't remember swooning over it the way Lily does daily over her car, I liked it well enough.
When I was older, I brought my lunch in brown paper bags. Do kids do this anymore? I actually don't know. One year, someone gave me a fairly large supply of brown paper lunch bags for a birthday present that said "Amy" all over them. As was true of anything that had either my name or monogram on it, I LOVED these, remembering feeling devastated when the last one met its sad fate in the cafeteria trash can.
But the lunch boxes, or bags, are not the entree here. What I really remember, with specificity and emotional heft, are the lunches themselves. I also remember a very satisfying conversation as an adult with my cousin Inga, whose mother is my mother's younger sister and lunch-making soulmate, about how we would never fully recover from the unorthodox lunches foisted upon us in elementary school. Unfortunately I had a best friend in 6th grade named Emily Budd whose parents made the most perfect lunches imaginable from the perspective of, well, me. Her lunches had Cape Cod potato chips in little ziplock baggies, tuna salad or bologna sandwiches on Pepperidge Farm white bread, Milano cookies, an actual coke. My lunches featured whole-grains, fruits both fresh and dried, vaguely Middle Eastern ingredients such as hummus, hot, homemade soup in thermoses, cut-up vegetables, chunks of actual cheese (in lieu of coveted sliced American), and on and on.
Sixth grade, the year I fell in love with Emily Budd's lunches (and to feed the fire, her father made milkshakes in the blender when you slept over her house) was also the year my mother catered her cousin Beverly's wedding. This was disastrous for my already untradable lunches. For most of the year, wildly unacceptable leftovers emerged from the deep freezer my mother kept in our basement: miniature frozen quiches, chocolate cheesecakes with apricots, actual cream puffs. All thawed, or semi-thawed, by lunch, but who cared? Who wants to deconstruct a mini cream puff for an audience of bologna sandwich eating J Giles fans in Esprit sweatshirts? Not I, that was for sure.
That was the year, and I am ashamed to write this, that I threw entire lunches in the trash can: whole oranges, stuffed pita pockets, enough tiny cheesecakes in crimped little foil cups to feed another wedding party altogether, preferably one whose idea of culinary greatness was not the Mint Milano.
I found myself thinking about this late one afternoon last week as I opened Lily's lunch box when we got home from school. It was completely, suspiciously empty, but for the little spoon I'd included for the pear-flavored yogurt. "Wow, you ate everything," I marveled.
"No," she said, guilelessly. "I threw lots away. Right in the trash." My face actually felt hot. I had a veritable flashback of my 11-year-old self backing away from a garbage can in my middle school cafeteria to make a hook shot with a gorgeous whole orange a la Kareem Abdul Jabaar. I tried not to think of my mother, after a long day at work, selecting perfect oranges in the produce section of my hometown grocery store, packing my perfect lunches late at night complete with napkins and little handwritten notes.
"You did what?" I grimaced, breathing in hard, then exhaling slowly through pursed lips, which I have realized I do involuntarily when I am trying not to lose my temper.
"Threw it away," she said, again, oblivious to my reaction. "Now can we work on the round puzzle?" I told her we needed to have a little talk. I explained that throwing away perfectly good, untouched food was wasteful, and that if she didn't eat or even open an applesauce or a sandwich that she should keep it in her bag and bring it home again, that certainly someone here would eat it eventually. She nodded, somberly at first, then just to humor me, as I was going on a bit, I confess, about the environment and recycling and lord knows what else. I don't even remember.
And we went and worked on the round puzzle, and before too long it was bedtime, and a few hours later, when both girls had been asleep for a while it was time for me to make Lily's lunch. I took down the car-shaped lunch box and set it on the counter. I put dried apricots in a little bag. I cut some wedges of a really good--if not shrink-wrapped--cheese. I sliced all the way around a whole-wheat pita pocket and said a silent, belated thank-you to my mother.
And at 4, even though certain items apparently end up in the trash can, all in all Lily thinks her school lunches are pretty darn good. I know this because she tells me so. Occasionally she brings up the lunches brought to school by a little boy named Dylan, lunches that feature sandwiches made on bagels and granola bars in shiny wrappers, described with an almost wistful note in her voice. I close my eyes, try not to think about the future, when Dylan--or his sixth grade counterpart--will become the new Emily Budd.
Three times a week, to her great satisfaction, Lily stays at preschool until 3 and brings her lunch. All last year, once she picked up on the fact that her friend whose mother is a teacher at the school brought a lunch box each day, she begged for me a lunch box, not to mention the apparently tremendous privilege of being able to eat her lunch at school. No matter how many times I explained that children in the 2s-3s classes whose parents did not teach at the school were not actually allowed to stay for lunch, she was not appeased. So when she learned last summer that as a member of the 3s-4s lunching was, so to speak, on the menu, she started begging to stay every day.
We settled on three days, and although I had seen an adorable and practical canvas lunch sack in a catalog and planned to order it, the day we found ourselves in Target face-to-face with one shaped like a car was the day Lily got her first lunch box. The whole lunch box thing was pretty evocative for me. Although I feel this is akin to referring to a Victrola in casual conversation, I am old enough to have owned--and not ironically as an e-bay purchase--a metal lunch box with a plastic handle that opened with a little latch. One I remember well (I believe there were several over the years) featured a scene of Raggedy Ann and Andy. I suspect, knowing my mother, that this was not the cool lunch box to have, even in 1976. In fact, if I squint I can just barely see shadowy Wonder Woman and Scooby Doo versions parked across from me at the lunch table. But that's what I had, and although I don't remember swooning over it the way Lily does daily over her car, I liked it well enough.
When I was older, I brought my lunch in brown paper bags. Do kids do this anymore? I actually don't know. One year, someone gave me a fairly large supply of brown paper lunch bags for a birthday present that said "Amy" all over them. As was true of anything that had either my name or monogram on it, I LOVED these, remembering feeling devastated when the last one met its sad fate in the cafeteria trash can.
But the lunch boxes, or bags, are not the entree here. What I really remember, with specificity and emotional heft, are the lunches themselves. I also remember a very satisfying conversation as an adult with my cousin Inga, whose mother is my mother's younger sister and lunch-making soulmate, about how we would never fully recover from the unorthodox lunches foisted upon us in elementary school. Unfortunately I had a best friend in 6th grade named Emily Budd whose parents made the most perfect lunches imaginable from the perspective of, well, me. Her lunches had Cape Cod potato chips in little ziplock baggies, tuna salad or bologna sandwiches on Pepperidge Farm white bread, Milano cookies, an actual coke. My lunches featured whole-grains, fruits both fresh and dried, vaguely Middle Eastern ingredients such as hummus, hot, homemade soup in thermoses, cut-up vegetables, chunks of actual cheese (in lieu of coveted sliced American), and on and on.
Sixth grade, the year I fell in love with Emily Budd's lunches (and to feed the fire, her father made milkshakes in the blender when you slept over her house) was also the year my mother catered her cousin Beverly's wedding. This was disastrous for my already untradable lunches. For most of the year, wildly unacceptable leftovers emerged from the deep freezer my mother kept in our basement: miniature frozen quiches, chocolate cheesecakes with apricots, actual cream puffs. All thawed, or semi-thawed, by lunch, but who cared? Who wants to deconstruct a mini cream puff for an audience of bologna sandwich eating J Giles fans in Esprit sweatshirts? Not I, that was for sure.
That was the year, and I am ashamed to write this, that I threw entire lunches in the trash can: whole oranges, stuffed pita pockets, enough tiny cheesecakes in crimped little foil cups to feed another wedding party altogether, preferably one whose idea of culinary greatness was not the Mint Milano.
I found myself thinking about this late one afternoon last week as I opened Lily's lunch box when we got home from school. It was completely, suspiciously empty, but for the little spoon I'd included for the pear-flavored yogurt. "Wow, you ate everything," I marveled.
"No," she said, guilelessly. "I threw lots away. Right in the trash." My face actually felt hot. I had a veritable flashback of my 11-year-old self backing away from a garbage can in my middle school cafeteria to make a hook shot with a gorgeous whole orange a la Kareem Abdul Jabaar. I tried not to think of my mother, after a long day at work, selecting perfect oranges in the produce section of my hometown grocery store, packing my perfect lunches late at night complete with napkins and little handwritten notes.
"You did what?" I grimaced, breathing in hard, then exhaling slowly through pursed lips, which I have realized I do involuntarily when I am trying not to lose my temper.
"Threw it away," she said, again, oblivious to my reaction. "Now can we work on the round puzzle?" I told her we needed to have a little talk. I explained that throwing away perfectly good, untouched food was wasteful, and that if she didn't eat or even open an applesauce or a sandwich that she should keep it in her bag and bring it home again, that certainly someone here would eat it eventually. She nodded, somberly at first, then just to humor me, as I was going on a bit, I confess, about the environment and recycling and lord knows what else. I don't even remember.
And we went and worked on the round puzzle, and before too long it was bedtime, and a few hours later, when both girls had been asleep for a while it was time for me to make Lily's lunch. I took down the car-shaped lunch box and set it on the counter. I put dried apricots in a little bag. I cut some wedges of a really good--if not shrink-wrapped--cheese. I sliced all the way around a whole-wheat pita pocket and said a silent, belated thank-you to my mother.
And at 4, even though certain items apparently end up in the trash can, all in all Lily thinks her school lunches are pretty darn good. I know this because she tells me so. Occasionally she brings up the lunches brought to school by a little boy named Dylan, lunches that feature sandwiches made on bagels and granola bars in shiny wrappers, described with an almost wistful note in her voice. I close my eyes, try not to think about the future, when Dylan--or his sixth grade counterpart--will become the new Emily Budd.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
What Goes Around, Comes Around or The Return of the Whole-Wheat Pita Pocket (Part 1)
Three times a week, to her great satisfaction, Lily stays at preschool until 3 and brings her lunch. All last year, once she picked up on the fact that her friend whose mother is a teacher at the school brought a lunch box each day, she begged for me a lunch box, not to mention the apparently tremendous privilege of being able to eat her lunch at school. No matter how many times I explained that children in the 2s-3s classes whose parents did not teach at the school were not actually allowed to stay for lunch, she was not appeased. So when she learned last summer that as a member of the 3s-4s lunching was, so to speak, on the menu, she started begging to stay every day.
We settled on three days, and although I had seen an adorable and practical canvas lunch sack in a catalog and planned to order it, the day we found ourselves in Target face-to-face with one shaped like a car was the day Lily got her first lunch box. The whole lunch box thing was pretty evocative for me. Although I feel this is akin to referring to a Victrola in casual conversation, I am old enough to have owned--and not ironically as an e-bay purchase--a metal lunch box with a plastic handle that opened with a little latch. One I remember well (I believe there were several over the years) featured a scene of Raggedy Ann and Andy. I suspect, knowing my mother, that this was not the cool lunch box to have, even in 1976. In fact, if I squint I can just barely see shadowy Wonder Woman and Scooby Doo versions parked across from me at the lunch table. But that's what I had, and although I don't remember swooning over it the way Lily does daily over her car, I liked it well enough.
When I was older, I brought my lunch in brown paper bags. Do kids do this anymore? I actually don't know. One year, someone gave me a fairly large supply of brown paper lunch bags for a birthday present that said "Amy" all over them. As was true of anything that had either my name or monogram on it, I LOVED these, remembering feeling devastated when the last one met its sad fate in the cafeteria trash can.
But the lunch boxes, or bags, are not the entree here. What I really remember, with specificity and emotional heft, are the lunches themselves. I also remember a very satisfying conversation as an adult with my cousin Inga, whose mother is my mother's younger sister and lunch-making soulmate, about how we would never fully recover from the unorthodox lunches foisted upon us in elementary school. Unfortunately I had a best friend in 6th grade named Emily Budd whose parents made the most perfect lunches imaginable from the perspective of, well, me. Her lunches had Cape Cod potato chips in little ziplock baggies, tuna salad or bologna sandwiches on Pepperidge Farm white bread, Milano cookies, an actual coke. My lunches featured whole-grains, fruits both fresh and dried, vaguely Middle Eastern ingredients such as hummus, hot, homemade soup in thermoses, cut-up vegetables, chunks of actual cheese (in lieu of coveted sliced American), and on and on.
Sixth grade, the year I fell in love with Emily Budd's lunches (and to feed the fire, her father made milkshakes in the blender when you slept over her house) was also the year my mother catered her cousin Beverly's wedding. This was disastrous for my already untradable lunches. For most of the year, wildly unacceptable leftovers emerged from the deep freezer my mother kept in our basement: miniature frozen quiches, chocolate cheesecakes with apricots, actual cream puffs. All thawed, or semi-thawed, by lunch, but who cared? Who wants to deconstruct a mini cream puff for an audience of bologna sandwich eating J Giles fans in Esprit sweatshirts? Not I, that was for sure.
That was the year, and I am ashamed to write this, that I threw entire lunches in the trash can: whole oranges, stuffed pita pockets, enough tiny cheesecakes in crimped little foil cups to feed another wedding party altogether, preferably one whose idea of culinary greatness was not the Mint Milano.
More to come.....
We settled on three days, and although I had seen an adorable and practical canvas lunch sack in a catalog and planned to order it, the day we found ourselves in Target face-to-face with one shaped like a car was the day Lily got her first lunch box. The whole lunch box thing was pretty evocative for me. Although I feel this is akin to referring to a Victrola in casual conversation, I am old enough to have owned--and not ironically as an e-bay purchase--a metal lunch box with a plastic handle that opened with a little latch. One I remember well (I believe there were several over the years) featured a scene of Raggedy Ann and Andy. I suspect, knowing my mother, that this was not the cool lunch box to have, even in 1976. In fact, if I squint I can just barely see shadowy Wonder Woman and Scooby Doo versions parked across from me at the lunch table. But that's what I had, and although I don't remember swooning over it the way Lily does daily over her car, I liked it well enough.
When I was older, I brought my lunch in brown paper bags. Do kids do this anymore? I actually don't know. One year, someone gave me a fairly large supply of brown paper lunch bags for a birthday present that said "Amy" all over them. As was true of anything that had either my name or monogram on it, I LOVED these, remembering feeling devastated when the last one met its sad fate in the cafeteria trash can.
But the lunch boxes, or bags, are not the entree here. What I really remember, with specificity and emotional heft, are the lunches themselves. I also remember a very satisfying conversation as an adult with my cousin Inga, whose mother is my mother's younger sister and lunch-making soulmate, about how we would never fully recover from the unorthodox lunches foisted upon us in elementary school. Unfortunately I had a best friend in 6th grade named Emily Budd whose parents made the most perfect lunches imaginable from the perspective of, well, me. Her lunches had Cape Cod potato chips in little ziplock baggies, tuna salad or bologna sandwiches on Pepperidge Farm white bread, Milano cookies, an actual coke. My lunches featured whole-grains, fruits both fresh and dried, vaguely Middle Eastern ingredients such as hummus, hot, homemade soup in thermoses, cut-up vegetables, chunks of actual cheese (in lieu of coveted sliced American), and on and on.
Sixth grade, the year I fell in love with Emily Budd's lunches (and to feed the fire, her father made milkshakes in the blender when you slept over her house) was also the year my mother catered her cousin Beverly's wedding. This was disastrous for my already untradable lunches. For most of the year, wildly unacceptable leftovers emerged from the deep freezer my mother kept in our basement: miniature frozen quiches, chocolate cheesecakes with apricots, actual cream puffs. All thawed, or semi-thawed, by lunch, but who cared? Who wants to deconstruct a mini cream puff for an audience of bologna sandwich eating J Giles fans in Esprit sweatshirts? Not I, that was for sure.
That was the year, and I am ashamed to write this, that I threw entire lunches in the trash can: whole oranges, stuffed pita pockets, enough tiny cheesecakes in crimped little foil cups to feed another wedding party altogether, preferably one whose idea of culinary greatness was not the Mint Milano.
More to come.....
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Blueberry Bushes
My grandparents' house, where my grandmother still lives, is two miles up the street from my parents' house, where I grew up. Although I have often written, here and elsewhere, about their swimming pool and its powerful presence in my childhood, it occurred to me today that I'd never written about the blueberries.
On my grandparents expansive front lawn, my grandfather, who like my grandmother loved to plant and grow things, planted a semi-circle of blueberry bushes: five of them, if I am remembering correctly. Possibly six. I don't have a particular or profound memory of these bushes, but they are very evocative to me nonetheless, as I suspect they would be to my sister and cousins, probably my grandmother too.
It's funny: I can remember vividly which bush was where, although the bushes have been uprooted or left to wither over the past decade or so. Each had its own character, its own pros and cons and preferred style for picking. The first one, closest to the house, was small but bore well for its size; the berries got blue fast and grew in clusters. The second bush was perhaps the most lush. Always thick with berries, it was the most sought after if more than one person was harvesting. I remember arguments about who was "hogging it." The third was under the radar, relatively sparse, as was the fourth. The fifth was a different variety, wild I think. The berries were noticably smaller, sweet but harder to accumulate en masse.
For the period in summer that these bushes bore fruit, we picked regularly, individually and together. We made muffins, mostly, with the berries. My mother had acquired the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin recipe, and it will forever be the iconographic muffin for me: thick with berries, best eaten warm, incomplete without a crackly top of sugar.
When I think about the blueberry bushes, though, it is not just the bushes themselves, the berries, that come to mind. They are a conduit to so many other childhood memories, images: making paper on the stone patio outside my grandparents' sun porch, playing whiffle ball in the yard and using one of the bushes as second base, my sister and two of my cousins playing with stuffed bears at the foot of one after my grandfather's funeral, as people circulated among these bushes in strangely formal clothing for a hot morning in early July by a swimming pool, the black dress with little flowers and a white lace collar that I wore that day myself, the most grown-up I'd ever owned, shopping for that dress with my aunt, feeling immensely relieved when later that day a friend and I were allowed to go in for a swim.
I love the way this happens, the way making myself think of something seemingly ordinary opens a door, which opens another door, and suddenly I am ten again, holding one of my grandmother's water glasses, half full with sun-warmed fruit, barefoot in the dewy grass, nothing to do but pick berries.
On my grandparents expansive front lawn, my grandfather, who like my grandmother loved to plant and grow things, planted a semi-circle of blueberry bushes: five of them, if I am remembering correctly. Possibly six. I don't have a particular or profound memory of these bushes, but they are very evocative to me nonetheless, as I suspect they would be to my sister and cousins, probably my grandmother too.
It's funny: I can remember vividly which bush was where, although the bushes have been uprooted or left to wither over the past decade or so. Each had its own character, its own pros and cons and preferred style for picking. The first one, closest to the house, was small but bore well for its size; the berries got blue fast and grew in clusters. The second bush was perhaps the most lush. Always thick with berries, it was the most sought after if more than one person was harvesting. I remember arguments about who was "hogging it." The third was under the radar, relatively sparse, as was the fourth. The fifth was a different variety, wild I think. The berries were noticably smaller, sweet but harder to accumulate en masse.
For the period in summer that these bushes bore fruit, we picked regularly, individually and together. We made muffins, mostly, with the berries. My mother had acquired the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin recipe, and it will forever be the iconographic muffin for me: thick with berries, best eaten warm, incomplete without a crackly top of sugar.
When I think about the blueberry bushes, though, it is not just the bushes themselves, the berries, that come to mind. They are a conduit to so many other childhood memories, images: making paper on the stone patio outside my grandparents' sun porch, playing whiffle ball in the yard and using one of the bushes as second base, my sister and two of my cousins playing with stuffed bears at the foot of one after my grandfather's funeral, as people circulated among these bushes in strangely formal clothing for a hot morning in early July by a swimming pool, the black dress with little flowers and a white lace collar that I wore that day myself, the most grown-up I'd ever owned, shopping for that dress with my aunt, feeling immensely relieved when later that day a friend and I were allowed to go in for a swim.
I love the way this happens, the way making myself think of something seemingly ordinary opens a door, which opens another door, and suddenly I am ten again, holding one of my grandmother's water glasses, half full with sun-warmed fruit, barefoot in the dewy grass, nothing to do but pick berries.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Growing Things
So I was going to write about gardening, and springtime, and my childhood gardens, and the way my parents looked kneeling in the dirt, weeding and planting together when I was very small, and the smell and the feel of soil, the satisfaction of digging with your hands in it, so I wrote the title, and then realized I could barely keep my head up as I am so tired tonight.
So instead I will tell you a very brief story from earlier this evening, which--in a satisfying way--can keep my original title.
I was putting Lily to bed when she started to fake-whimper, and I rolled my eyes and said, "What is it. What's the problem."
"I've been having a very scary dream," she said, looking at me sideways to gauge if I was taking her seriously. I wasn't. As far as I can tell, Lily isn't scared of very much.
"Mmmm," I murmured. "About what?"
"I have it all the time, every seven minutes. It's about a bear, a very scary bear." I ignored the "seven minute" thing; she's trying to figure out time. The day before she'd told me she'd been at school for 57 hours. Instead, I tried to think of famous bears.
"Bears aren't scary," I said, finally arriving at two. "Think about Winnie the Pooh. Or Little Bear."
"This one is very, very scary," she said. "And in my dream he wants to cook a little girl and her mother." She was grinning a little in spite of herself. Okay. That's legitimately scary. But I have a keen nose for stalling techniques, as a former master of the art, and I had a strong hunch this dream had been conjured up on the spot.
"Here's my plan," I said. "When you have the dream, in your sleep, tell yourself: Lily, this is only a dream. I'm not awake, it's not real. It's just my imagination." She considered this.
"In my sleep, right?" I nodded vigorously.
"Yes. When you are fast asleep."
"Have you ever done this?"
"All the time," I fudged. I must have, right? Although I haven't had enough deep sleep for nightmares in a number of years. She agreed to try. I kissed her good-night and closed the door behind me and went to my computer. About ten minutes later I heard a voice from her bedroom.
"Mama!"
"Yes, Lily," I said, wearily.
"Thank you so much! I tried it, and guess what? It worked! It worked in my sleep! I'm fast asleep right now! Great, great idea, Mama."
Good-night, Lily. Thank you for being four. Thank you for being you.
So instead I will tell you a very brief story from earlier this evening, which--in a satisfying way--can keep my original title.
I was putting Lily to bed when she started to fake-whimper, and I rolled my eyes and said, "What is it. What's the problem."
"I've been having a very scary dream," she said, looking at me sideways to gauge if I was taking her seriously. I wasn't. As far as I can tell, Lily isn't scared of very much.
"Mmmm," I murmured. "About what?"
"I have it all the time, every seven minutes. It's about a bear, a very scary bear." I ignored the "seven minute" thing; she's trying to figure out time. The day before she'd told me she'd been at school for 57 hours. Instead, I tried to think of famous bears.
"Bears aren't scary," I said, finally arriving at two. "Think about Winnie the Pooh. Or Little Bear."
"This one is very, very scary," she said. "And in my dream he wants to cook a little girl and her mother." She was grinning a little in spite of herself. Okay. That's legitimately scary. But I have a keen nose for stalling techniques, as a former master of the art, and I had a strong hunch this dream had been conjured up on the spot.
"Here's my plan," I said. "When you have the dream, in your sleep, tell yourself: Lily, this is only a dream. I'm not awake, it's not real. It's just my imagination." She considered this.
"In my sleep, right?" I nodded vigorously.
"Yes. When you are fast asleep."
"Have you ever done this?"
"All the time," I fudged. I must have, right? Although I haven't had enough deep sleep for nightmares in a number of years. She agreed to try. I kissed her good-night and closed the door behind me and went to my computer. About ten minutes later I heard a voice from her bedroom.
"Mama!"
"Yes, Lily," I said, wearily.
"Thank you so much! I tried it, and guess what? It worked! It worked in my sleep! I'm fast asleep right now! Great, great idea, Mama."
Good-night, Lily. Thank you for being four. Thank you for being you.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
One Evening in April
I think I said in my very first post that I had never been able to keep a diary, and not for lack of trying. This is true. I used to receive those little pink padded ones with the tiny appealing locks and keys all the time because people knew I liked to write. I rarely made it past the first day. I found one once, in my twenties, I think, from about third grade. In another example of how one's second hand memories are on the sorry side, all I can remember was being surprised by the paltry nature of the handful of entries, one of which was about making cupcakes, the others all variations on either my mother making me do something I didn't want to do or my sister bothering me.
Not the stuff of the Great American Novel. But somehow, even as a second hand memory, I can see it is, in some elusive way, the stuff of life. Although I like to sum up periods of my life in ways that make it easy to categorize, compartmentalize, even idealize, the details of a day can be mind-numbingly dull when recorded, except, except when enough time has passed that it is exactly those details--how important and exciting cupcakes used to be, how angry I was when Alison copied me--that make me come anywhere near remembering what my life was actually like.
I say this because it has occurred to me, recently, that among other good things this blog is doing for me is providing me with a record not of what I am doing with my days but what I am thinking about, or wanting to write about, which are often for me the same thing. On a less positive note, I can already see that for me anyway, reading between the lines will provide me with a sharper record than I may want later on of the harried, wistful exhaustion of these days of parenting two young children while trying to write, but maybe that's not ultimately such a bad thing. A person's life, my life, is what it is. I have left plenty of blank space for illusions if I need them, more than enough that has gone unsaid.
So I thought in honor of my recognition, my perhaps subconscious desire to keep a record, I would just describe in brief the evening I just had so, in 50 years time, I won't remember my late 30s as a television sitcom with me covered in pureed root vegetables with unwashed hair in Old Navy track pants while Lily lies on the floor whining and Annika screeches in her high chair.
This evening, at the end of the work day, my friend, our friend Bryant came over to have dinner with me and the girls. Because he is allergic to our dogs, we had decided to go out, a decision complemented nicely by the temperature, which hovered around 70 degrees, even at dinnertime. Bryant is the kind of friend who, although he is allergic to our dogs, has often agreed to care for them while we are away, and when he cares for them, although it makes him sneeze violently, his eyes turn red and water, puts his hand in a plastic bag to pet them, partly because he genuinely loves animals but mostly because he knows that I will be worried that nobody is petting them. Needless to say, Lily loves him as much as I do; Annika is starting to get it too. For all intents and purposes, although it is not a term I am fond of unless Al Pacino is involved, he is their godfather. It is fitting somehow, because he teaches fifth grade at the Rodeph Sholom School here in Manhattan in spite of his rural Alabama Southern Baptist upbringing, to say he is the ultimate mensch.
Anyway, Bryant showed up, bearing a brown paper bag containing two expensive scented candles for some reason, a purchase he'd made for himself on the way, and we eventually got everybody sufficiently clad to head out the door. Lily was hopping with excitement because I had said she did not need to wear a jacket, that a sweater would suffice. She told every stranger we passed for the first two blocks that she was wearing "short sleeves, under the sweater." Annika, in deference to the beautiful weather, my state of exhaustion, fell peacefully asleep the moment we reached the restaurant. Bryant and I each had a quarto of wine; Lily had a Shirley Temple. We ate a salad with shredded celery root and toasted walnuts and thin slices of bresaola, baccala fritters with lemony aioli and a grilled pizza, like the ones from the best restaurant in Providence, where my sister went to college.
The pizza sauce was described on the menu as "spicy," and although Lily actually likes slightly spicy things if she doesn't hear them labelled as such, I was worried it might actually be too spicy, so I told Bryant I was worried about the--and I spelled it out--s-a-u-c-e. "What's sah-ukuh, Mama?" Lily said, and we agreed that there was only a short window left for spelling before she mastered the ability to verbally decode the silent E.
Bryant described a guy he'd met in his tennis league, and Lily asked what we were talking about after trying and failing with one of her current favorite lines, which is, "Please no talking about boring grown-up things." I told her we were talking about somebody that Uncle Bryant really liked, hoping maybe that she would ask why he liked a boy so I could indignantly and self-satisfiedly feign outrage at her narrow-mindedness and explain gently, wisely and lovingly, in age-appropriate fashion, that people can love anybody they want to, but she is both too young to care about this conversation and--thanks New York, for this--already so aware of this that we will actually never get to have this conversation, which is a good thing. Maybe someday I will be asked to write an after-school special about acceptance and I can give my speech then. Probably not, though. I can live with that.
And then Annika woke up, and Lily got fussy, and the sky got darker, and Bryant quietly sang camp songs to Lily, including one I'd never heard before called, "This Little Song Has Only Six Words," and after he'd sung it about a dozen times, I said, "Hey! That's actually seven words!" And Bryant looked at me like I was a little bit dim. And so, in fact, did Lily. And I took Annika out of her stroller and held her, and the mother and daughter at the next table, the only other people eating outside, said, "Oh! What a perfectly beautiful baby," and we all beamed at them, because it is true and because we all liked hearing it, in different ways.
And then it was time to go home, past bedtime, actually, and I let Lily climb into the baby stroller and wrap Annika's blanket around her, and I pushed her, and Bryant held Annika, and we walked back home up Seventh Avenue, Lily pretending to be asleep until each time we teased her into forgetting she was pretending she was asleep, such as by my saying, in an exagerrated way, "Well, if Lily's asleep, I'll have to give you all the ice cream to take home, Bryant."
And when we got back home Lily ate the three bites of ice cream she'd been promised, decided to wear her ladybug shirt as a "nightshirt," and put herself to bed so quickly I didn't even realize she'd done it until I went in her room and she was snuggled up with her Flat Duck, sound asleep. Bryant gave Annika back, he'd been holding her, collected his candles, and headed out into the night. I changed Annika, who beamed at me from the changing table, then fell instantly asleep as soon as I set her in the Pack-and-Play.
So some evenings are like this. Remember this: future self. Some nights, this night, was just like this.
Not the stuff of the Great American Novel. But somehow, even as a second hand memory, I can see it is, in some elusive way, the stuff of life. Although I like to sum up periods of my life in ways that make it easy to categorize, compartmentalize, even idealize, the details of a day can be mind-numbingly dull when recorded, except, except when enough time has passed that it is exactly those details--how important and exciting cupcakes used to be, how angry I was when Alison copied me--that make me come anywhere near remembering what my life was actually like.
I say this because it has occurred to me, recently, that among other good things this blog is doing for me is providing me with a record not of what I am doing with my days but what I am thinking about, or wanting to write about, which are often for me the same thing. On a less positive note, I can already see that for me anyway, reading between the lines will provide me with a sharper record than I may want later on of the harried, wistful exhaustion of these days of parenting two young children while trying to write, but maybe that's not ultimately such a bad thing. A person's life, my life, is what it is. I have left plenty of blank space for illusions if I need them, more than enough that has gone unsaid.
So I thought in honor of my recognition, my perhaps subconscious desire to keep a record, I would just describe in brief the evening I just had so, in 50 years time, I won't remember my late 30s as a television sitcom with me covered in pureed root vegetables with unwashed hair in Old Navy track pants while Lily lies on the floor whining and Annika screeches in her high chair.
This evening, at the end of the work day, my friend, our friend Bryant came over to have dinner with me and the girls. Because he is allergic to our dogs, we had decided to go out, a decision complemented nicely by the temperature, which hovered around 70 degrees, even at dinnertime. Bryant is the kind of friend who, although he is allergic to our dogs, has often agreed to care for them while we are away, and when he cares for them, although it makes him sneeze violently, his eyes turn red and water, puts his hand in a plastic bag to pet them, partly because he genuinely loves animals but mostly because he knows that I will be worried that nobody is petting them. Needless to say, Lily loves him as much as I do; Annika is starting to get it too. For all intents and purposes, although it is not a term I am fond of unless Al Pacino is involved, he is their godfather. It is fitting somehow, because he teaches fifth grade at the Rodeph Sholom School here in Manhattan in spite of his rural Alabama Southern Baptist upbringing, to say he is the ultimate mensch.
Anyway, Bryant showed up, bearing a brown paper bag containing two expensive scented candles for some reason, a purchase he'd made for himself on the way, and we eventually got everybody sufficiently clad to head out the door. Lily was hopping with excitement because I had said she did not need to wear a jacket, that a sweater would suffice. She told every stranger we passed for the first two blocks that she was wearing "short sleeves, under the sweater." Annika, in deference to the beautiful weather, my state of exhaustion, fell peacefully asleep the moment we reached the restaurant. Bryant and I each had a quarto of wine; Lily had a Shirley Temple. We ate a salad with shredded celery root and toasted walnuts and thin slices of bresaola, baccala fritters with lemony aioli and a grilled pizza, like the ones from the best restaurant in Providence, where my sister went to college.
The pizza sauce was described on the menu as "spicy," and although Lily actually likes slightly spicy things if she doesn't hear them labelled as such, I was worried it might actually be too spicy, so I told Bryant I was worried about the--and I spelled it out--s-a-u-c-e. "What's sah-ukuh, Mama?" Lily said, and we agreed that there was only a short window left for spelling before she mastered the ability to verbally decode the silent E.
Bryant described a guy he'd met in his tennis league, and Lily asked what we were talking about after trying and failing with one of her current favorite lines, which is, "Please no talking about boring grown-up things." I told her we were talking about somebody that Uncle Bryant really liked, hoping maybe that she would ask why he liked a boy so I could indignantly and self-satisfiedly feign outrage at her narrow-mindedness and explain gently, wisely and lovingly, in age-appropriate fashion, that people can love anybody they want to, but she is both too young to care about this conversation and--thanks New York, for this--already so aware of this that we will actually never get to have this conversation, which is a good thing. Maybe someday I will be asked to write an after-school special about acceptance and I can give my speech then. Probably not, though. I can live with that.
And then Annika woke up, and Lily got fussy, and the sky got darker, and Bryant quietly sang camp songs to Lily, including one I'd never heard before called, "This Little Song Has Only Six Words," and after he'd sung it about a dozen times, I said, "Hey! That's actually seven words!" And Bryant looked at me like I was a little bit dim. And so, in fact, did Lily. And I took Annika out of her stroller and held her, and the mother and daughter at the next table, the only other people eating outside, said, "Oh! What a perfectly beautiful baby," and we all beamed at them, because it is true and because we all liked hearing it, in different ways.
And then it was time to go home, past bedtime, actually, and I let Lily climb into the baby stroller and wrap Annika's blanket around her, and I pushed her, and Bryant held Annika, and we walked back home up Seventh Avenue, Lily pretending to be asleep until each time we teased her into forgetting she was pretending she was asleep, such as by my saying, in an exagerrated way, "Well, if Lily's asleep, I'll have to give you all the ice cream to take home, Bryant."
And when we got back home Lily ate the three bites of ice cream she'd been promised, decided to wear her ladybug shirt as a "nightshirt," and put herself to bed so quickly I didn't even realize she'd done it until I went in her room and she was snuggled up with her Flat Duck, sound asleep. Bryant gave Annika back, he'd been holding her, collected his candles, and headed out into the night. I changed Annika, who beamed at me from the changing table, then fell instantly asleep as soon as I set her in the Pack-and-Play.
So some evenings are like this. Remember this: future self. Some nights, this night, was just like this.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Two Ships
I was standing at the kitchen counter tonight, trying to decide if I needed something else to eat (and, 24 hours after polishing off the last Thin Mint and swearing off Girl Scouts forever, wishing I had just one more box in the freezer), when I remembered something I haven't thought about in years.
One summer day when I was a teenager, before I could drive, I was lazing around the house, the way you can do--I now realize--for a very small window, when I got a phone call. It was one of my favorite friends, the one who shared my sense of ironic detachment (or so I flattered us), love for protest music of the 60s, the notion that writing sonnets to each other and signing them with each other's crush du jour was an excellent way to spend a free period. This friend lived in the next town over, off the main road in both of our towns, which winds all the way across the United States and is called Route 20. We lived off it too.
"What are you doing?" she must have said.
"Nothing," I probably answered. (Pause for a moment while I strain to recall what this felt like: doing nothing. Nothing to do. Let's move on. I can't.)
Somehow we decided that it would be a good idea to get out our bikes and each start riding up Route 20 in the direction of the other one's house. (If you had an urban, or at least a more exotic childhood, you may be squinting, confused. Yes. Before you can drive, there's not that much else to do.) We agreed on a departure time shortly thereafter, and after we hung up I got ready, dragged my bike out of the garage and set off.
I rode for a while, until I reached our town's little commercial strip where the town's one and only gourmet food shop happened to reside. For some reason it didn't occur to me to think about my friend, pedaling away toward me. The idea, of course, was that at some point, approximately halfway bewteen our houses, we would meet. And then do what? I don't know. Sit by the side of the road and talk? Buy Fribbles at Friendlys? We hadn't gotten that far. I propped my bike up against a tree (no, no lock, not necessary) and went in to do a little window shopping. I may have even bought a little snack. At this point, I imagine I was in a good mood: a day that had stretched ahead interminably had been transformed into a day with a friend and a novel plan to boot. I made my way back to my bike, hopped on, kept riding.
I was so able to lose myself back then that even as I entered my friend's town, neared her house, it didn't seem strange that we had not yet convened. There were no cell phones, naive readers under 30. There was no possible way for us to connect, communicate. Except: Joel. In a scene that was not wholly uncommon during my adolescence in particular, a car slowed beside me as I rode. I looked over, and it was my dad's. My friend was in the car too. Apparently she had stuck to the plan, ridden all the way to my house, wondering if somehow we'd managed to pass each other on Route 20 without realizing it, and encountered my dad, who probably narrowly escaped having a massive coronary. All this while I had been pondering sea salt bagel chips versus a long red licorice whip at the unfortunately named Duck Soup.
Sadly, I think my friend, whose bike was by this point in my father's trunk, went home. I was probably disappointed.
But tonight, maybe 24 years later, this memory made me smile.
One summer day when I was a teenager, before I could drive, I was lazing around the house, the way you can do--I now realize--for a very small window, when I got a phone call. It was one of my favorite friends, the one who shared my sense of ironic detachment (or so I flattered us), love for protest music of the 60s, the notion that writing sonnets to each other and signing them with each other's crush du jour was an excellent way to spend a free period. This friend lived in the next town over, off the main road in both of our towns, which winds all the way across the United States and is called Route 20. We lived off it too.
"What are you doing?" she must have said.
"Nothing," I probably answered. (Pause for a moment while I strain to recall what this felt like: doing nothing. Nothing to do. Let's move on. I can't.)
Somehow we decided that it would be a good idea to get out our bikes and each start riding up Route 20 in the direction of the other one's house. (If you had an urban, or at least a more exotic childhood, you may be squinting, confused. Yes. Before you can drive, there's not that much else to do.) We agreed on a departure time shortly thereafter, and after we hung up I got ready, dragged my bike out of the garage and set off.
I rode for a while, until I reached our town's little commercial strip where the town's one and only gourmet food shop happened to reside. For some reason it didn't occur to me to think about my friend, pedaling away toward me. The idea, of course, was that at some point, approximately halfway bewteen our houses, we would meet. And then do what? I don't know. Sit by the side of the road and talk? Buy Fribbles at Friendlys? We hadn't gotten that far. I propped my bike up against a tree (no, no lock, not necessary) and went in to do a little window shopping. I may have even bought a little snack. At this point, I imagine I was in a good mood: a day that had stretched ahead interminably had been transformed into a day with a friend and a novel plan to boot. I made my way back to my bike, hopped on, kept riding.
I was so able to lose myself back then that even as I entered my friend's town, neared her house, it didn't seem strange that we had not yet convened. There were no cell phones, naive readers under 30. There was no possible way for us to connect, communicate. Except: Joel. In a scene that was not wholly uncommon during my adolescence in particular, a car slowed beside me as I rode. I looked over, and it was my dad's. My friend was in the car too. Apparently she had stuck to the plan, ridden all the way to my house, wondering if somehow we'd managed to pass each other on Route 20 without realizing it, and encountered my dad, who probably narrowly escaped having a massive coronary. All this while I had been pondering sea salt bagel chips versus a long red licorice whip at the unfortunately named Duck Soup.
Sadly, I think my friend, whose bike was by this point in my father's trunk, went home. I was probably disappointed.
But tonight, maybe 24 years later, this memory made me smile.
Whose Leathery Hands are These Attached to My Arms?
So it might be partly that I got a bit of a tan on vacation and keep contrasting the haggard, peeling face I see in the mirror with the unlined golden face I remember from the end of the summer before I started tenth grade, but I am feeling my age these days. I had a conversation tonight with a friend about the pros and cons of dying her greying hair. Yesterday I had a conversation with a different friend about how we should be using eye cream. Next thing you know I'm going to be wearing faded tapered jeans up past my rib cage and trading in my red boots for those shoes with comfort soles.
It's not that I'm vain. To be honest, I could use a little more vanity. I have completely surrendered to the idea that I will pretty much always be wearing something that is covered in dog hair. I gave Lily my hair brush for some sort of a veterinarian game. She broke off my one lipstick that was not alive in the '80s, and I haven't replaced it. I'm not sure if people are still doing yoga, but I've been telling myself I need to get back to it for almost five years. And on and on.
And I know I just wrote about how I'm not terrified of growing older anymore, and honest: I'm not. It's more like I'm wistful about my old self, the self who planned outfits for special occasions and highlighted her hair and knew what exercise trends were in vogue, even if she still couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to partake. I'm wistful a lot these days, and a number of people have reassured me that the wistfulness I am feeling for my former self is only a temporary state, that when Annika is, say, two, my former self will start to creep back in. She might even want to do yoga. Or brush her hair, anyway.
So in honor of my former self, and in deference to the inevitable passing of time, I think I'd like to turn my wistfulness on its head for a change and think about some things I DON'T miss about being young. (I know, I'm not old, exactly, but please. The expression "pushing forty" was invented for a reason.)
1) I don't miss homework. Working with high school students make me think all the time about how I used to wait and wait until it was so late my eyes burned and then, and only then, would I reluctantly attempt to find my biology textbook, determine what the assignment actually was, and lie on my bed, on my back, holding the book above my head while words like "mitochondria" swam across my line of vision until I fell asleep. Always. The night before the Big Test. And don't even get me started on the calculators with the sine and cosine and the other one. I don't miss those.
Interlude: I forgot about something else I was going to say about getting older that is unattractive, and that I'd like to curb immediately. This past seven months (yes, that does correlate with birth of second child, Nicole) I have developed a sort of Rhoda Morgenstern public persona with acquaintances made manifest when asked, for example, "Hey, Amy. How are you?" Instead of smiling and saying "Fine, thanks," these days I tend toward a dramatic eye roll, exaggerated shrug and a line like, "Jim, don't get me started," or "Pat, Tell me it gets easier." It's so annoying I can't even tell you. If you've witnessed me doing this, the world-weary, put-upon schtick that makes me sound like the granddaughter of one of the Zabar's lox slicers, I'm sorry. I'm stopping. I promise.
2) I don't miss spending so much time with people I don't like. I just thought of this one right now, but it's really true. In school, you are in close quarters, day in and day out, with some really loathsome individuals. They sit next to you in class, play on your soccer team, have their cubby next to yours, and bring you down a little with every encounter. In grown-up life you can surround yourself with people you love. The annoying ones still exist, of course, but you rarely have to be lab partners with them.
3) I don't miss caring so intensely about what I looked like. There was a lengthy period when I used either hot rollers or a curling iron on my hair. Every day. Enough said.
I think I'll stop now. I'm a little too tired to think of serious things I don't miss, although I know there are some. I think the point is that being young wasn't all it was cracked up to be either. There's a rawness, an open-wound quality to the caring so much of adolescence that I can just barely recall--enough so that I know I don't want to revisit it.
Now, even though I am unhappy with, if not embarrassed by what I have written here, I am wise enough to know now that tomorrow is another day. For a brief period in 1988 I wasn't sure the sun would rise again if the Laura Ashley dress I wanted to wear to the formal was not available in my size at the Chestnut Hill Mall.
Goodnight. I'm going to bed. I definitely need my beauty sleep.
It's not that I'm vain. To be honest, I could use a little more vanity. I have completely surrendered to the idea that I will pretty much always be wearing something that is covered in dog hair. I gave Lily my hair brush for some sort of a veterinarian game. She broke off my one lipstick that was not alive in the '80s, and I haven't replaced it. I'm not sure if people are still doing yoga, but I've been telling myself I need to get back to it for almost five years. And on and on.
And I know I just wrote about how I'm not terrified of growing older anymore, and honest: I'm not. It's more like I'm wistful about my old self, the self who planned outfits for special occasions and highlighted her hair and knew what exercise trends were in vogue, even if she still couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to partake. I'm wistful a lot these days, and a number of people have reassured me that the wistfulness I am feeling for my former self is only a temporary state, that when Annika is, say, two, my former self will start to creep back in. She might even want to do yoga. Or brush her hair, anyway.
So in honor of my former self, and in deference to the inevitable passing of time, I think I'd like to turn my wistfulness on its head for a change and think about some things I DON'T miss about being young. (I know, I'm not old, exactly, but please. The expression "pushing forty" was invented for a reason.)
1) I don't miss homework. Working with high school students make me think all the time about how I used to wait and wait until it was so late my eyes burned and then, and only then, would I reluctantly attempt to find my biology textbook, determine what the assignment actually was, and lie on my bed, on my back, holding the book above my head while words like "mitochondria" swam across my line of vision until I fell asleep. Always. The night before the Big Test. And don't even get me started on the calculators with the sine and cosine and the other one. I don't miss those.
Interlude: I forgot about something else I was going to say about getting older that is unattractive, and that I'd like to curb immediately. This past seven months (yes, that does correlate with birth of second child, Nicole) I have developed a sort of Rhoda Morgenstern public persona with acquaintances made manifest when asked, for example, "Hey, Amy. How are you?" Instead of smiling and saying "Fine, thanks," these days I tend toward a dramatic eye roll, exaggerated shrug and a line like, "Jim, don't get me started," or "Pat, Tell me it gets easier." It's so annoying I can't even tell you. If you've witnessed me doing this, the world-weary, put-upon schtick that makes me sound like the granddaughter of one of the Zabar's lox slicers, I'm sorry. I'm stopping. I promise.
2) I don't miss spending so much time with people I don't like. I just thought of this one right now, but it's really true. In school, you are in close quarters, day in and day out, with some really loathsome individuals. They sit next to you in class, play on your soccer team, have their cubby next to yours, and bring you down a little with every encounter. In grown-up life you can surround yourself with people you love. The annoying ones still exist, of course, but you rarely have to be lab partners with them.
3) I don't miss caring so intensely about what I looked like. There was a lengthy period when I used either hot rollers or a curling iron on my hair. Every day. Enough said.
I think I'll stop now. I'm a little too tired to think of serious things I don't miss, although I know there are some. I think the point is that being young wasn't all it was cracked up to be either. There's a rawness, an open-wound quality to the caring so much of adolescence that I can just barely recall--enough so that I know I don't want to revisit it.
Now, even though I am unhappy with, if not embarrassed by what I have written here, I am wise enough to know now that tomorrow is another day. For a brief period in 1988 I wasn't sure the sun would rise again if the Laura Ashley dress I wanted to wear to the formal was not available in my size at the Chestnut Hill Mall.
Goodnight. I'm going to bed. I definitely need my beauty sleep.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Not So Little Mysteries
Today Lily's babysitter, whose name is Alishia, left her cell phone here by mistake. I discovered this when suddenly loud pop music began playing, seemingly from the middle of the dining room, as I was making Lily dinner. After a few seconds, I realized what it was. I have never been able to figure out this programming feature and my own phone merely rings, but all of the twelve-year-olds I know can basically make their phones do their taxes by pressing mysterious codes; apparently Alishia has this skill as well. Or at least she can make it play music. And I know that seventh graders don't really pay taxes. But if they did, they could make their cell phones do the legwork, I swear it.
Anyway. Over the course of the evening Alishia's phone rang three, four, five more times, and at some point it occurred to me that maybe Alishia was trying to locate her missing phone, was calling it herself to see if someone picked up. I opened it up to see if she had been making the calls to her own number, which she hadn't been. But I saw something else, something I'd forgotten about.
You know how you can enter your name in your cell phone, so when you open it up, up pops your name? Or at least you can do this if you are in seventh grade; I had a seventh grader do mine. I was expecting to see the name "Alishia Philip" on Alishia's phone, but instead it said, "Nancy Philip." Suddenly I remembered something Alishia had once told me, almost in passing, although I wondered now if she had expected more of a reaction.
Alishia grew up on St. Lucia, one of eleven children. I know some about her childhood and adolescence, what she has told me, but she is somewhat impenetrable and doles out information sporadically. Sometimes I can tell she is torn; she knows I am interested and actually likes telling me stories but also knows it is an unusual feature of the typical childcare provider/parent dynamic and is wary, justifiably so, I suppose, not because of me but because of the way the world works. There is more to be said about this, much more, in fact, but it is not the subject at hand today.
The subject at hand is the way people reveal themselves inadvertently and--I've written this before--how much I love being surprised by the weirdness, the particularities of the revelations. Apparently, in a childhood that was not full of libraries and books, at some point Alishia managed to get her hands on a Nancy Drew book. She loved it, read it again and again, became a little obsessed with Nancy. There may have been more than one book over time; I can't remember. I wish I'd paid better attention when she was telling the story.
She so loved Nancy Drew that she changed her own name to Nancy, in her head at first, and then got some other people--siblings, cousins, schoolmates--to jump on board. For much of her childhood, a number of people who had known her since birth called her Nancy; what I love is that, although I have never heard anyone call her this, her sisters, any of her friends, it is still clearly how, sometimes anyway, she thinks about herself. Every time she opens her phone, it is the name that she sees. I love this. It makes me aware of how unknowable, how mysterious, how infinite Alishia, any person, actually is.
In that one detail, the name Nancy on the tiny screen of her phone, Alishia's entire being, her life history, her story, expanded again a thousandfold for me. And suddenly, after an off-kilter, out-of-sorts, anxiety-ridden kind of day, the world was again a place where there was much to be discovered.
Anyway. Over the course of the evening Alishia's phone rang three, four, five more times, and at some point it occurred to me that maybe Alishia was trying to locate her missing phone, was calling it herself to see if someone picked up. I opened it up to see if she had been making the calls to her own number, which she hadn't been. But I saw something else, something I'd forgotten about.
You know how you can enter your name in your cell phone, so when you open it up, up pops your name? Or at least you can do this if you are in seventh grade; I had a seventh grader do mine. I was expecting to see the name "Alishia Philip" on Alishia's phone, but instead it said, "Nancy Philip." Suddenly I remembered something Alishia had once told me, almost in passing, although I wondered now if she had expected more of a reaction.
Alishia grew up on St. Lucia, one of eleven children. I know some about her childhood and adolescence, what she has told me, but she is somewhat impenetrable and doles out information sporadically. Sometimes I can tell she is torn; she knows I am interested and actually likes telling me stories but also knows it is an unusual feature of the typical childcare provider/parent dynamic and is wary, justifiably so, I suppose, not because of me but because of the way the world works. There is more to be said about this, much more, in fact, but it is not the subject at hand today.
The subject at hand is the way people reveal themselves inadvertently and--I've written this before--how much I love being surprised by the weirdness, the particularities of the revelations. Apparently, in a childhood that was not full of libraries and books, at some point Alishia managed to get her hands on a Nancy Drew book. She loved it, read it again and again, became a little obsessed with Nancy. There may have been more than one book over time; I can't remember. I wish I'd paid better attention when she was telling the story.
She so loved Nancy Drew that she changed her own name to Nancy, in her head at first, and then got some other people--siblings, cousins, schoolmates--to jump on board. For much of her childhood, a number of people who had known her since birth called her Nancy; what I love is that, although I have never heard anyone call her this, her sisters, any of her friends, it is still clearly how, sometimes anyway, she thinks about herself. Every time she opens her phone, it is the name that she sees. I love this. It makes me aware of how unknowable, how mysterious, how infinite Alishia, any person, actually is.
In that one detail, the name Nancy on the tiny screen of her phone, Alishia's entire being, her life history, her story, expanded again a thousandfold for me. And suddenly, after an off-kilter, out-of-sorts, anxiety-ridden kind of day, the world was again a place where there was much to be discovered.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Darwin's Folly
So this morning I was driving into the city from Connecticut with both girls to attend a birthday party at the carousel in Central Park. After a somewhat excruciating exchange about evolution, which I will elaborate on further down, Lily fell into (blessed) silence for a few minutes until we went through the toll booth on the Henry Hudson Parkway. She has always been very interested in the Hudson River and almost always starts talking about it or asking questions about it on this drive. Today she said, "That's New Jersey over there, on the other side, right?"
"Right," I answered, turning up the radio just slightly. She had been talking nonstop for fifty minutes already. She knew it was New Jersey on the other side.
"New Jersey," she repeated. "Hmm. Do they speak English over there?"
For some reason this struck me as hilarious.
Now. Onto evolution. I am beginning to wonder if I have not been fair to our nation's glut of creationists. I am wondering if perhaps they turned from evolution after several aborted attempts to explain evolution to a four-year-old. "God made it, all of it, yes, even the dinosaurs," is certainly an easier explanation.
As was I, back in the day, and as are so many of her peers, Lily is really, really into dinosaurs. She likes to know the names of them, she is fascinated by the concept of extinction, and at least once a week, a propos of nothing, will come up with an essentially unanswerable, for me anyway, question about them. Or at least a really bizarre theory or observation.
At the height of her monologue this morning, on and on about how if she had been alive when the dinosaurs were she wouldn't have been afraid of them and how if there had been sidewalks when the dinosaurs were alive they would have left footprints in the wet cement the way dogs sometimes do, she suddenly interrupted herself. "Hey, Mama? When did the first person come alive, the very first one?" I was busy trying to find some song I even vaguely recognized on the radio, and I didn't hear the question the first time.
"Louder, please," I said, giving up and turning it off. I wasn't even recognizing the genres. She repeated the question, and I sighed. That's what I'd thought she'd said.
These are challenging moments in parenthood. One can take the high road, and attempt an actual, somewhat comprehensible explanation, which some of the parents I know do every time, or one can give a brief and conversation-ending response, sometimes deliberately incomprehensible, or change the subject dramatically, ideally to something like ice cream or slides. Lately, I have been trying to take the high road with Lily, which I have done off and on from the beginning, of course, but want to commit to now full force based on my constant nagging fears of her being shortchanged by my divided attention.
"You know monkeys?" I began, idiotically, I realized as I was saying it. "Apes, and chimpanzees, and gorillas?"
"Yes," she said, from the way, way back where her car seat is. I could see her in the rear view mirror, nodding her head enthusiastically. "And bears!"
"No, not bears." I said. "Well, kind of bears, at some point, but not really. Just think about monkeys." I went on for a while, introducing the idea of four legs to two, talking about hairy, furry bodies, and the benefits of opposable thumbs. At some point I wandered too far in the direction of cells. Eventually I wound down with a weird Ayn Randian testimony to humankind's ability to weld steel, build cities. "So that's it, sort of," I ended, with faux heartiness, feeling exhausted and slightly disoriented. I looked in the rear view mirror again. She was looking out her window, gazing out at the Hudson River. She'd asked a few questions. With the exception of her misperception that this had happened overnight, due to an age appropriate inability to fathom great leaps in time, I felt that she had actually understood quite a bit, to the extent that what I had said actually had made sense.
"Mama?" she asked. I braced myself. "Can I ever go to New Jersey?"
"Right," I answered, turning up the radio just slightly. She had been talking nonstop for fifty minutes already. She knew it was New Jersey on the other side.
"New Jersey," she repeated. "Hmm. Do they speak English over there?"
For some reason this struck me as hilarious.
Now. Onto evolution. I am beginning to wonder if I have not been fair to our nation's glut of creationists. I am wondering if perhaps they turned from evolution after several aborted attempts to explain evolution to a four-year-old. "God made it, all of it, yes, even the dinosaurs," is certainly an easier explanation.
As was I, back in the day, and as are so many of her peers, Lily is really, really into dinosaurs. She likes to know the names of them, she is fascinated by the concept of extinction, and at least once a week, a propos of nothing, will come up with an essentially unanswerable, for me anyway, question about them. Or at least a really bizarre theory or observation.
At the height of her monologue this morning, on and on about how if she had been alive when the dinosaurs were she wouldn't have been afraid of them and how if there had been sidewalks when the dinosaurs were alive they would have left footprints in the wet cement the way dogs sometimes do, she suddenly interrupted herself. "Hey, Mama? When did the first person come alive, the very first one?" I was busy trying to find some song I even vaguely recognized on the radio, and I didn't hear the question the first time.
"Louder, please," I said, giving up and turning it off. I wasn't even recognizing the genres. She repeated the question, and I sighed. That's what I'd thought she'd said.
These are challenging moments in parenthood. One can take the high road, and attempt an actual, somewhat comprehensible explanation, which some of the parents I know do every time, or one can give a brief and conversation-ending response, sometimes deliberately incomprehensible, or change the subject dramatically, ideally to something like ice cream or slides. Lately, I have been trying to take the high road with Lily, which I have done off and on from the beginning, of course, but want to commit to now full force based on my constant nagging fears of her being shortchanged by my divided attention.
"You know monkeys?" I began, idiotically, I realized as I was saying it. "Apes, and chimpanzees, and gorillas?"
"Yes," she said, from the way, way back where her car seat is. I could see her in the rear view mirror, nodding her head enthusiastically. "And bears!"
"No, not bears." I said. "Well, kind of bears, at some point, but not really. Just think about monkeys." I went on for a while, introducing the idea of four legs to two, talking about hairy, furry bodies, and the benefits of opposable thumbs. At some point I wandered too far in the direction of cells. Eventually I wound down with a weird Ayn Randian testimony to humankind's ability to weld steel, build cities. "So that's it, sort of," I ended, with faux heartiness, feeling exhausted and slightly disoriented. I looked in the rear view mirror again. She was looking out her window, gazing out at the Hudson River. She'd asked a few questions. With the exception of her misperception that this had happened overnight, due to an age appropriate inability to fathom great leaps in time, I felt that she had actually understood quite a bit, to the extent that what I had said actually had made sense.
"Mama?" she asked. I braced myself. "Can I ever go to New Jersey?"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)