Two Quotes and An Awful Lot of Cheese

"A joy shared is a joy doubled," wrote Goethe, and in my experience this is never more true than when the joy is being shared with a four-year-old. Today, to break up a mythical expanse of time, I took Lily and Annika to the Essex Street Market in the afternoon on the subway, Lily holding my hand, Annika in the Baby Bjorn. The Essex Street Market is a relatively new indoor market on the Lower East Side that I have been meaning to check out since it opened. Lily and I looked it up online, and when she saw that there were two cheese stalls and a chocolatier, she was sold. Annika had no choice in the matter, but we figured she could be easily bribed to comply.

The trip down was relatively effortless, if hard on my back, and the market itself was a perfect small-scale excursion. There were Latino groceries with bins of coconuts, stripped cactus paddles and long, hard cords of yuca. Both cheese stalls were excellent, if tiny, and I knew the proprietor of one and had a tangential relationship to the other, so we were given lots of free samples: a love I have imparted to Lily by virtue of experience if she doesn't come by it naturally. We bought two, one from each purveyor: a rich, sharp, runny cheese called Winnemere, and a firm, complex, tangy cheese called Brebis Pardou from the other. I had heard of these cheeses, both of which are very hard to come by, but had never tried either. To my great delight, they were Lily's favorites at each stall, and both women selling were impressed. "She has excellent taste," said one, as Lily nabbed a forbidden second sample of salami, figuring I would be too pleased to intervene.

After we rounded off our cheese purchases with a bag of handmade butter toffee and a bunch of miniature bananas for Annika, we decided to walk around the neighborhood for a little while. Uncharacteristically, I told Lily she could pick which streets to turn on; I cannot remember--and suspect she could not--the last time we had wandered around with noplace to be, no reason for our being there. Perhaps we never have.

When we got home, it was time for Annika's nap, and we put her in her crib and set up a cheese plate. We sat side by side on the stools at the butcher block in the kitchen, eating cheese and talking for about a half an hour. I must confess that we ate almost all the cheese. "I think it's going to be dinner soon," Lily said at one point, with a worried look at me, and I cringed, inwardly. Did I have to be such a stickler about snacks that an afternoon cheesefest made her nervous?

Much, although not all, of our conversation centered around the cheese: its texture, mouthfeel, change in flavor as it warmed, our preference for one or the other, and so on. Several things occurred to me as we sat and ate and talked. One was that I felt incredibly lucky to have a daughter who shares my love for and near worship of cheese. Another was that the afternoon had reminded me of a William Blake quote my mother has always loved. I'd never thought about it much before, and I'm not sure what he meant when he said it, but to me it captures what I should strive for when spending time with my children. Or more accurately, it captures what four-year-olds do without even trying. Here it is, and if you are a parent maybe it can help temper your exasperation, too:

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.