Sunday, August 31, 2008

Late August: The Tomato.

Sliced with salt, caprese salad, gazpacho, pa amb tomàquet, bruschetta, BLTs, pizza, sauce, soup, panzanella, roasted with olive oil and thyme, ratatouille, au gratin with zucchini, salsa, stirred into pasta, and--best of all--eaten right off the vine while standing in the middle of the garden under the midday sun.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Breaking Through

Annika, who is the sweetest baby in the universe, does something that makes me feel like my head is about to explode in the manner of old cartoons--a bundle of dynamite strapped to my hat. When she wants something--another tomato, to be picked up, to propel herself headfirst onto the floor from the kitchen counter--she emits a high-pitched shriek that could (may have?) shatter glass.

It is crystal clear that Annika is shrieking because she cannot talk yet. In other words, she is using the shrieks to communicate. Although I have been trying not to reward the shrieks with attention, and have been working on modeling language for her to use to get what she wants, she is not yet 1, and it will be a while before she can actually say, "Mama, could you please peel another clementine for me?"

In the meantime, she will shriek. And I will try to find some kind of meditation technique to keep my blood pressure from rising to a dangerous level each time she does it. And I will keep thinking about how much her shrieking--and the fact that while I can sometimes suss out what she wants, so painfully often I cannot--reminds me of something Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "We live amid surfaces and the true art of life is to skate well on them." Does this mean that Emerson believed at some point--as we acquire language, leave childhood behind us--we surrender to the idea that we will never, truly, make ourselves understood?

I reject this notion.

Friday, August 29, 2008

To Wash...Or Not to Wash

I have made an executive decision that in light of the fact that it is Labor Day weekend, and that I have been working hard and will soon be working harder, I will take it easy over the next few days on sevenhundredfiftywords. In other words, don't count; you'll come up short.

Tonight, exhausted, I was lying on the couch watching an old Seinfeld rerun, an episode I'd somehow never seen. I noticed that Jerry was talking on an old-school rotary phone--not cordless, not digital--what year could this have been? Anyway, on this episode, Jerry and George were at a laundromat. Suddenly, I had a flashback to a party the night before my graduation and sitting on a washing machine in the little laundry room out at the Townhouses, off-campus apartments where I lived for my last two years of college.

Although I remembered being in the laundry room--a free-standing structure in the center of the Townhouses--on the night of the party, I was quite sure, lying here on my couch seventeen years later, that I had never once been in there any other time. Then, I let my memory search further. I could not remember ever doing laundry on campus once I moved out of the dorms, not once. In two years. I did remember lugging a heavy canvas bag full of dirty laundry onto a bus on the way home for a vacation, along with Nicole, who had her own massive bag of dirty laundry (my parents must have been thrilled), but how could I have existed for two years without so much as washing a single sock?

I am actually going to ask a few of my former roommates and friends what they remember about my clothes-washing habits, or lack thereof, during this two year span. I am sufficiently puzzled to withstand the possibly upsetting responses.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Counted

Well, this was the ninth Democratic Convention I have watched; the first, in 1976, which I saw spots of because my parents were watching it, was on a black-and-white TV. The last seven I watched in earnest.

There are so many reasons why people care about politics, but in my case it is because my parents did--do, in different ways--and because they raised us to be engaged. From very early on I knew that my mother had marched with Martin Luther King. I knew that as a young girl on a trip to the Deep South to visit her aunt and uncle she had deliberately sipped water from a "Colored" water fountain, enraging her bigoted uncle. Her entire career has been in public education, and she enacted change as a community leader in countless ways. My father's bookshelves were filled with books on politics; because he read them, I did too, and carried a three-inch thick hardcover edition of Ted Sorenson's Kennedy to school in my backpack for a couple of weeks in fourth grade until I had finished it. In his home office hung an enormous poster featuring a photo of Richard Nixon and the words: Would you buy a used car from this man?

My mother's politics were grassroots and personal, my father's rooted in a love of history and a fascination with the process and with government in general. But there was no doubt that they both believed it was important to be aware, be informed, be involved. I remember being taken to the voting booths one November and trembling behind the curtain as I watched the lever pulled. My parents, and all of my relatives, in fact, always voted, on a town, state and national level, and my grandmother, who was born before women had the right to vote granted them by the nineteenth amendment, waits to be picked up now to be driven to the voting booths, as she can no longer drive herself. She can be coy about her candidates, but she is unequivocal on the need to vote for them.

Watching tonight, I remembered something I haven't thought about in a long time: Sitting on my narrow standard issue mattress on my issued bedframe, propped up on pillows, a bag of potato chips by my side, a three-ring binder on my lap, my absentee ballot sitting on top. My roommates were out; I was alone. As I filled in the information, I wept a little. It felt like the most important thing I had ever done. It felt like being a grown-up. The candidate I voted for was the governor of my home state. I was soon to be nineteen.

I walked the ballot to the student post office where I had to Federal Express it in. As usual, I was late. But I wasn't too late. I knew that my ballot would arrive in time to be counted. And I knew that I would never miss an election for the rest of my life.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Back Tomorrow, as...

No real computer access today.

But very proud to be a Democrat.

"I'm Just Telling It Like It Is"

Tonight I fell into a CNN vortex, wooed by the convention, and have only just emerged intact. My mind is reeling from the hypnotic gleam of Carville's bald head, the blinding orange pantsuit, and this new notion I have that Anderson Cooper is, actually, carved from marble. So very briefly, all this politicking makes me remember that I used to be someone who ran for things. In fact, I am sort of surprised that CNN did not ask me to blog live from Denver, as a three-time former room representative from Nashoba Brooks School for Girls, who was 1) once thrown out of a lunchtime student government meeting for fighting with my sister (also a room representative) and 2) almost impeached in an unprecedented "Fire the Reps" campaign participated in by one of my closest friends. I must go to sleep now to have energy for tomorrow's return to the vortex, and Thursday's too, but will close by revealing that I once made a campaign speech entirely in the voice of Howard Cosell.

Monday, August 25, 2008

To Be

This past weekend Lily was making a To-Do List, a habit she has picked up from Ben. These lists are hilarious--both sets, actually--and I should be saving them as documents of their shared ambition and perception of a weekend as about eighteen days long. I happened to notice an item on Lily's most recent list that caught my attention: Ressle with dogs. "Ressle" is "wrestle," for those of you out of the habit of deciphering semi-phonetic spelling, and I loved that she had added this item, in spite of the fact that it is nearly impossible for her to avoid wrestling with the dogs, intentionally and inadvertently.

It made me remember, when asked for my inevitable childhood story that day, of a game I used to play with our childhood dog, Grapes. We had a large, square garden in the center of our lawn, and sometimes, when Grapes and I were in the mood, I would play a sort of modified game of tag with him around its outskirts. I would bend at the knees in a dog-like play stance and then take off in one direction or the other; Grapes would follow. Suddenly, with no warning, I would pivot and run in the opposite direction; he would sort himself out and chase me that way. The funny thing was that he would never run through the garden, even if I got sufficiently ahead of him so as to be on the other side. Somehow, although there was obviously no rule book, no terms of the game, he understood the rules.

But the point here is not Grapes' intelligence, or our relationship, or the parallel dog/girl relationships. Again, what struck me about Lily's list was the redundancy of the dog wrestling item; what I am interested in is the fact that I had--and Lily has--the time and space to run around in a yard with a dog at all. Lily has developed her dog wrestling games, and there are infinite variations, on her own. Grapes and I were able to devise our version of tag because we had hours of each day available to do nothing but run around. And in both cases, parents--adults of any kind--had nothing whatsoever to do with the games.

I so often find that my best advice to myself as a parent is to back off. Lily--and Annika, already--discovers so much more when I do so, when I resist the temptation to intervene, to explain, to elaborate, even to comment. I owe my parents so much, I see now, for the gift of the time and space in which to create my world as a child.

Lily's To-Do Lists are not indicative of an encroaching, modern, oppressive, goal-oriented society; rather they reflect her honest, heartfelt, healthy desire to be like, to form a bond with, her dad. But we must be careful that they remain so, or--preferably soon, and for the next decade or more--fade away altogether. I am ever more convinced, watching my own children grow, that To-Do should be To-Be.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Relearning to Learn

For some time now I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the concept of learning how to do something. Now that Lily is, actually, learning how to do so many things (Annika is, too, but in a nonverbal way, of course, which means she can't explain how it feels), learning has become a part of my daily life, although more as an observer than a participant. I have been taking Lily to swimming lessons all summer, and watching her learn how to swim. I have been sitting by her side as she has learned to write and read. And today, she insisted on taking the training wheels off her bike. "I want to learn to really ride it," she declared.

It is the hunger, the eagerness, the excitement of learning that I see in her and crave. To my tremendous joy, there is no fear of failure or fear of any kind associated with learning something new for her. Occasionally, there is frustration, as there should be. But it has not yet proven much of an impetus.

It is the sheer determination, as well, that I miss. Watching her today, balancing on her seat and pedaling, eyes ahead, chin set, as Ben ran along beside her, holding on, I couldn't help but remember my own precarious perch: the bike was blue, my grandfather had set aside an afternoon, and again and again I coasted and fell. One time, I rode right into the reddish-brown fence that divided the side yard from the lawn around the swimming pool. The funny thing is: I don't remember when I learned, or if it even was that day. It is the learning, the trying, the struggling, the refusal to give up that I remember, and I believe there is a lesson in that.

Lily did not learn how to ride a bike today, although she is close. It may be next weekend, or the weekend after that. But as I watch her wheel the bike out of the garage, arrange her foot on the lead pedal, settle herself onto her seat in the weeks to come, I will also watch her stumble, fall onto the grass, under the bike, scrape her legs and turn her ankles. And I will be fine with this. And when she does start riding on her own--experience that moment when she realizes nobody is holding on (at which point, she will fall)--I will be fine with this, too, with one caveat. I want her to always remember, as I must, that the falls are okay too.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Getting It Right

“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” --G. K. Chesterton.

Remembered reading this recently; I totally agree. With it in mind, I bring you nothing more--or less--than a brief description of the perfect summer lunch.

From the garden: one long, shiny zucchini, four heirloom tomatoes (Brandywine, Purple Krim), several handfuls basil, one head pink garlic, one perfect pear. From the farm up the street: one dozen just-laid, free-range, orange-yolked eggs, butter. From my pantry: salt, pepper, olive oil, hunk of real Parmesan cheese.

The meal: a simple zucchini and basil frittata, inspired by Marcella Hazan, made in a seasoned cast-iron skillet, with eggs, squash, garlic, oil, butter, seasoning, Parmesan, herb, and a tomato salad, with wedges of tomato warm from the sun, salt, oil, more basil. For dessert: pear.

Consumed: Outdoors, midday, with appreciative immediate family ranging in age from almost one to thirty-eight. Meal enhanced, if possible, by flawless weather, hilarious and impressive and surprising participation on part of one-year-old in impromptu chair dancing and round of "If You're Happy and You Know It," and the fact that although I didn't know it until today, I have been waiting all my life to say to a four-year old: Hey, can you run out to the herb garden and grab me some bunches of basil?

Friday, August 22, 2008

Places I Remember

The first in a sporadic series, I envision...

This evening, when I was putting Lily to bed on the late side, she said, "I know it's too late for a book, but can I have--"

"A story about when I was a little girl," I finished for her. She'd had new blood all day--a friend of mine had been the object of the inquisition for an hour-long car ride out of Manhattan, and somehow I thought I'd been given a free pass. No such luck. I looked around the room, a bit desperately. I was tired, too. My eyes settled on a little leather pouch full of marbles she'd been given, and which I'd stowed on a bookshelf to keep Annika from snacking on them.

Suddenly, I was eight years old in my grandfather's shop, the front part that had been the garage, where a chipped coffee can--Maxwell House--full of marbles was stored on a shelf against one wall. The Shop. Have I written about the Shop here? I don't think so. The best poem I have ever written was about the Shop, which loomed so large for so many years and then quite literally decayed and subsequently, not so literally, faded away. It still exists--a falling-down white structure on my grandmother's property at the top of her driveway--but I really need to channel all my powers of concentration and memory to recall it in its heyday: the vibrancy, the buzz of activity, voices and machinery, the smells of oil and the thick industrial soap gel in the never-finished bathroom, the tiny metal shavings that stuck to the bottoms of my summer-toughened feet.

My grandfather--and his son, and my uncle's sons--was a machinist, and the Shop was where they worked when my grandfather was still alive. The house was the women's territory: my grandmother at the stove, my mother and aunts laughing over crackers and cheese, a passel of children around the table, orange juice and gingerale "cocktails," the low drawer with the crayons and coloring books. The Shop was the men: my white-haired, blue-eyed grandfather, who was somehow small yet the strongest man I knew--I always thought of him like Popeye, who made him laugh, my tall, intense uncle, who put up with no nonsense but showed unforgettable flashes of kindness, my cousins, whom I loved like brothers.

I always loved the Shop: its chests of tiny drawers filled with tiny metal whorls and rods, the constant humming and whirring of the machines, which seemed alive to me--huge and incomprehensible but never frightening, its constant sense of purpose and activity. Even at night, on the few times when I was sent to retrieve something there or went on my own for some reason, it quietly buzzed, lying in wait, never completely at rest. Occasionally I was allowed to "work," to help, although I see now that largely I was useless. The one job I remember doing more than once, besides sweeping, was making threaded rods. Even then, I liked the routine of it, its finite nature; press, whir, remove, done. No ambiguity, enough risk and danger, completion, satisfaction. And the sense of being a part of something: a part of this, of their world, to be able to move between the two--home and work--with the bridge of the driveway. This I remember, along with the coffee can of marbles, my grandfather's marbles, the feel of the metal shavings underneath my feet, the smell of the soap, my grandfather's voice, his shock of white, white hair, the sound of the dinner bell, the way it felt to close the door behind me and know what lay behind it.

How's that, Lily? I remember.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Thank You Note

Apologies for some recent gloomy, cryptic, pointless, faux philosophical entries which I would call ramblings if they weren't so brief. I will try to be less self-indulgent, a little more focused and alert. So moving on.

Late this afternoon, the three of us--me, Lily and Annika--were making our way down Seventh Avenue to meet some friends at a playground. It was a glorious afternoon: sunny and warm but not hot, and the air felt clean, and passersby were smiling at each other, and people were eating at outdoor cafes, and I had an iced coffee, and Annika was relaxed and contemplative in her stroller, and Lily was quite literally bounding joyfully down the street.

In fact, I was so lost in my own thoughts that it took me a while to realize quite how joyfully. I snapped to when she tugged my arm and said, decibel high, "Mama? Can you please listen to me sing this song?" and then without waiting for a response from me belted out a mostly accurate version of the "Spoonful of Sugar" song from Mary Poppins as though she were Liza Minelli in Vegas.

Although in another frame of mind I might have tried to shush her, her exuberance was contagious, and the equally joyful responses she got from everybody we walked by pushed all such thoughts out of my head. When she was done, we walked a little more in a companionable silence until I realized she was moving in a strange way, lifting her knees high and sort of pitching forward, then rolling back holding her arms out at her sides. "I'm a bike, Mama!" she said, as I pushed prosaically beside her.

"That's great," I said. "Do you wish you were riding your real bike?" This, because I had promised her we'd bring her real bike into the city, and I had forgotten, as well as, apparently, my general prosaicness just can't help making its buzzkill presence felt.

"No, Mama. I'm not riding a bike. I am a bike." Oh. I watched a little more closely. Sure enough, as I really looked, I could see that she was, indeed, being a bike, her legs the turning wheels, her arms the handlebars, stiff at her sides.

Shortly thereafter, we reached the playground, and as soon as I sat on a bench she was off, a flash of blue, with her friends, to the other side of the space, without looking back. I could hear her peals of laughter, her organizing voice, clear across the expanse. And I found myself thinking, as I sat and followed her voice, so strong and clear and confident: Someday I will tell her thank you for this, for being able to jolt me back to the self I want to be by sheer virtue of her personality, her lack of self-consciousness, her faith in herself and in me. So often, and I am sure many, many times to come, but for now I mean today, this afternoon, on the stretch of Seventh Avenue from 16th Street to Laguardia Place. Thank you, Lily, for being so essentially you, and in being you, bringing me back to myself.

Something to Think About

I've had a number of conversations this week in which the subject has come up of how intensely people are themselves, sometimes--how on occasion, for an infinite number of reasons, people become almost caricatures, or heightened versions, of themselves.

I see this in action all the time, in people I know well, and others I don't know so well, and sometimes even in myself. It's always a little disconcerting, to witness the boiled-down essence of someone. It can be entertaining or frightening. Like an intensely reduced sauce, it can be exquisite or overbearing; it can be intolerable. But I have to admit, it is more interesting, revelatory, to see people in this state than it is to see them at an even keel, in the middle ground.

It also makes me think of this tendency of mine to forget that I am going to do whatever I do, and say whatever I say, and be whoever I am, as me--that as a parent, a friend, a daughter, a spouse, a teacher, a writer, I am still me first of all and more than anything else, and that I will parent as me, be a friend as me, and on and on ad infinitum. This is both obvious and reassuring. It is also hard to grasp and terrifying. I often want to separate or isolate parts of myself in these different roles in different contexts, and I can't.

It strikes me that the best thing to do, the only hope of reconciling myself with this idea of the pervasiveness of personality is to embrace it, and to work with it instead of fighting it, which I do too often in my work. It's not that I write in a voice that isn't mine--actually, I have a very hard time doing that. It's that I have too hard a time shutting out the notion of what I should be doing, and for whom, and why, when I know on some level what I should be doing is writing as me, about what I need to write about, regardless of anything or anyone else.

So my pledge tonight: to accept that my personality reduced to its essence is not everyone's cup of tea, and to be okay with that, and to write from it, when it is right to do so, and to learn what I can from the essences of everyone else. We shall see...

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Chip Snippet

I doubt I'll ever use this anywhere, and I'm really forcing myself to write right now, which is good, I still think, but I was just putting away a bag of chips in the kitchen and thought of something I haven't thought about since I was in college.

I have always had an embarrassing weakness for the fake potato chip. Think Munchos, Pringles, any of those products made from reconstituted shredded potato bits. There was a brand of these that was mildly successful in the early 90s--I can't even remember the name. I was fond of them when they first came out, and quite frequently my father would include a bag in the amazing care packages he sent me throughout the years I was in school.

One school vacation, when I had driven back to Massachusetts by myself, I pulled in the driveway and noticed that bags of these chips had been strung up from the trees lining the driveway, were hanging from the branches in honor of my arrival home.

My father was responsible, of course; I cannot imagine my mother--or anybody else I know on the planet--thinking this would be a festive way to greet a loved one, or executing the idea in broad daylight.

How weird, I remember thinking, smiling broadly. How wonderful. Even then I knew that it wasn't about the chips.

Someone responded to my eulogy posting by writing that I should tell the people I love why I love them while we are all still alive. I have been making a point not to respond directly to the (tremendously appreciated) comments I receive, as I don't want to be writing to or for anyone in particular, here, but poster: I try. And thanks to you, I will try even harder.

So here's my point: Nothing, nothing, compares to being loved like that.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Daydream Believer

I was talking to a young person today, just out of school, and in what I know is becoming a recurring theme felt even older than the use of the expression "young person" seems to indicate.

And somehow, hours after our conversation, which was about her plans for the immediate future--that first big plunge--I was walking from the living room into the kitchen and it was eighteen years ago, and I was twenty-one, in Amsterdam, at a little round table in the sunny window of a cafe with my friend Dana, with whom I was traveling that summer: Eurail pass, backpacks, the whole shebang.

We had paper in front of us, or a journal opened up to a blank page--these were the days of journals with sketches and photographs, menus and meaningful receipts--and we were designing our future bookstore. It was going to have a cafe in it, of course, but a much better cafe than the one we were sitting in, with homemade pastries and excellent coffee, which I at the time did not drink. Coffee in general, that is: neither good nor bad. But I was still young enough to think it was glamorous, and vaguely literary, and not just what you needed to get you to noon.

At that point, although Dana had certainly worked more than I had in every capacity, neither one of us had worked in a real bookstore, or a cafe, and although we both loved to read and write more than anything--it was one of the many underpinnings of our friendship--I can't really remember if we were serious about this idea, this bookstore/cafe, or if we knew at the time it was just wheels spinning, idle, pleasant daydreaming in a sunny, foreign, yet strangely universal cafe.

I guess what I am wondering is if I was naive then, or am jaded now. I'd like to be able to approach my work, however, with that combination of starry-eyed limitless planning and determination (We will really do this, someday. We will.). I'd like to feel young enough that the bookstore/cafe could seem like a viable retirement option way on down the road, and old enough to know what I want in the moment and to be able to work for it.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Baby Steps

So Annika is walking, really walking, in that she spent the vast majority of the weekend upright and seemed to use crawling as only a default mode of transportation. She took her first steps a little over a month ago, but what was most interesting to me about the process was the way the learning took such a giant leap, seemingly overnight, this Saturday, with no apparent provocation. Since those first few faltering steps, in July, almost to the day at the same point in life Lily took hers, there were days on end when she took no steps, and seemed disinterested when encouraged to do so. There were other days when she seemed to want to practice, stepped out into the abyss from the edge of the couch, chortling proudly until the inevitable thump on the floor, bottom first. And then, Saturday morning, she took a step away from the little table in the middle of the room and just kept walking. She walked to one couch, then turned and walked out into the center of the room. Suddenly she was able to crouch down and pick up an object, return to a standing position, and walk off again. She even managed a little step, dividing one room from the next.

This has happened with Lily's reading, too. For what seemed like forever, she would sound out words laboriously, even if she had sounded out the same word a sentence ago, or on the same line. I pointed this out a couple of times when she asked me how to read something: Look, I said, it's the same as this word you just sounded out. Somehow, it wasn't clicking. And I noticed recently that she doesn't do this anymore, that many of those sight words she'd been sounding out for so long are second nature to her now, but also that once she has sounded out a new word, she recognizes it when she sees it again.

How does this happen? Is it simply the passing of time? I don't think so. I think we learn so well when we are young. I think our brains are working so hard, so industriously, so profoundly, all of the time, that we aren't even aware of it, in ourselves or in those we love and watch and observe and care for: our children. And then, when a baby is suddenly a toddler, walking across a room to fetch a favorite toy, we think: How did that happen? How can she be standing? How can she know that toy? Or want it? How can she get across a room on foot when just yesterday she was a tiny mewling creature immobile on the middle of my bed? How can I not have noticed that this was all happening until now?

As an adult, I am constantly aware of how sluggish my brain is sometimes, how lazy. I have worn tracks in my patterns of thinking so deep I wonder if it would even be possible to pull myself out of them, to try to get back a little of that whirring, electrical magic whereby things seem to happen overnight, although of course, the work of a lifetime has been happening behind the scenes. Maybe this will be one of the unsung pleasures of parenthood for me: witnessing the capacity for change and being inspired by it in practical, challenging ways. I hope so.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Strange Little Eulogy Confession for a Cool Saturday Eve

If I know you well, and have known you for a long time, it is entirely likely that at some point I have sketched out a eulogy to read at your funeral. I recognize that at the very least this is morbid, but what can I do? I have been doing this since I was a child.

My grandfather died when I was thirteen, and I wrote a poem that the minister who conducted the funeral service read aloud as part of the service, as I was too overwrought and self-conscious to do so myself. But there had been no question, in my mind and I suspect in the minds of other family members, that I would write something. And although my grandfather's death was sudden and unexpected, I remember all too well that when I sat down to put my thoughts on paper, I already knew what I wanted to say.

Sometimes I find myself doing this almost absent-mindedly. I will be sitting having lunch with my parents, sister, grandmother and daughters and will realize that I am structuring the talk in my head: a funny anecdote with which to begin, an inroad to the essence of the personality, a way to make people weep with joyful recognition, the words that will make me feel I have done the deceased the justice he or she deserves. I have done it with every member of my family, most of my friends, and all of my pets.

Sometimes when I realize I am doing this I make myself stop, with a shiver, a chill. For it is ominous, disconcerting, an overt recognition, acknowledgment, of death. And more, it seems like hubris: like I am assuming somehow that the subject of my eulogy will die before I will, or worse, like my thoughts themselves are a harbinger of death. And hubris, too, in that I am assuming those who know me well--some of whom are not related to me, and may have very specific ideas about how they would like their funerals to be run that feature me seated quietly in a back pew--have me in mind as keynote speaker of their own demise. I would like to say, as regards this confession, that I really do believe this quirk of my thought process has more to do with my own desire to make sense of people's place in the world than it does with any desire to take over your services upon passing, whatever form they may assume.

The great unspoken here, in my history of composing these secret eulogies and confessing it here, is my fear, and perhaps subconscious preoccupation with my own place in the world, how I will be remembered, and captured in words and memory, upon the occasion of my own death. I feel uncomfortable even writing that here, but it must be said: If you are someone who fears death, and I most certainly am, then your mind worries over the concept in some way over the course of a lifetime. Mine seems to have settled on this odd fashion.

I am almost tempted to share some of my eulogy thoughts with you here, but I won't. I think the saving grace of this weird habit of the mind is that the thoughts themselves are loving, and cherished, and private, for now, as those I love live and thrive and simply are, and I am, and when the time comes, if it seems right, rest easy that I will have spent some thought thinking about what to say on your behalf. I do not take your presence here, or mine, for granted.

Friday, August 15, 2008

(Very) Brief Meditation on the Essential Nature of Work

I just spent a quite productive number of hours, after putting the girls to bed, on work. I won't bore you with the details of what I was working on, but I will say that it was practical as opposed to creative, concrete as opposed to open-ended. And when I finished the last task I had set for myself, I was a bit surprised to find that although the work itself was only moderately interesting, and I had felt while I was doing it that I would much rather be working on a number of personal projects, I felt a real sense of pleasure and satisfaction. And I could not help but remember the last line of Candide, which I first read in high school; even then, I felt a jolt of recognition, an alignment of ideology. The line is:

“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden."

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Lost Things

Here is a partial, list-in-progress of things I have lost, going back as far as I can remember:

My favorite doll, Bess
Soft Blanket
My dark denim jacket
Three retainers
My turquoise dangly earrings
The blanket my grandmother knit for Lily (actually, someone else lost this, but it is lost to me)
My favorite blue cashmere sweater
My passport, at a train station in France
My passport, somewhere in my apartment
My glasses, which had been discontinued when I went to replace them
Soft Blanket
My first red clogs
A black dress from the Barney's outlet with batwing sleeves and a flattering fit
A necklace my grandmother gave me that had been given to her by my grandfather
A bracelet my mother gave me that she had bought on her one big childhood trip
A piece of fur I cut to remind me of my childhood cat
My father's stamp collection
The car, many times
My neighbors' keys, while I was cat-sitting their cat
My father's keys, in the bottom of Walden Pond, in the middle, where it's very deep, while I was cutting class
A wallet, which I eventually got back
Three wallets, which I never saw again
A suede jacket with leather trim that was my best friend's in high school
My thesis reports from graduate school
My college thesis
A letter received by fax that I'd wanted to keep
A Steiff stuffed horse that my grandfather had named Flicka for me
My Riverside Shakespeare
Some really fantastic green sweatpants

I could go on, and may at some point, but I will stop now because the list at that serves its purpose for me right now. I am one of those people who likes dividing the world into two groups, just for fun, but I think it's safe to say that there are, actually, two groups of people in the world: those who lose things, and those who don't. I also think it's safe to say that I am in the former.

I have gotten better, much, much better. I used to lose things all the time, nearly every day. In fact, for years, it was a joke in my family and among my peers that I never knew where anything was--that if you gave something to me, I would lose it within hours. Now, I make a conscious effort, but it is in my blood: I lose things still.

The group of those who lose things has sub-categories. One of these is: People who lose meaningless things and don't really care or ever think about these things they've lost again. I am not in this sub-category. I remember almost every single thing I have ever lost, what it looked like, where I was when I lost it or realized it was gone, and why I will never fully recover from its absence. In other words, once lost, the things I've lost sort of haunt me, appearing on occasion as mirages in the most unlikely places, as though to taunt me.

And my losing now occurs largely on a smaller scale, which is less drastic but almost more irritating. For example, once Caroline and I lost a car in a parking garage in Hawaii. After hours, we found it again, but it happened once, and made for a good story, as well as a lesson in writing down your parking spot in garages the size of Oahu. But one night last week, I stopped by a neighbor's to drop off some mail and in the space of ten minutes lost my keys, my baseball cap, my own mail, my bag and Annika, in their apartment. Okay, I didn't actually lose Annika, but it took me a few extra minutes to find her, behind a bathroom door.

Where am I going with THIS? I'm not sure yet. But I can't get a poem by one of my favorite poets out of my head, and I think it's trying to tell me something. Here it is, and I will keep you posted:

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Science

As I have mentioned, Lily is constantly demanding "stories from when you were a little girl, Mama." At this point, I am sometimes tempted to say, "Well, one time when I was ten I had a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup for lunch." Seriously, I'm spent. In my work, I am also always trying to force myself to remember things: situations, conversations, details. All this remembering leads to a feeling that I am dwelling in the past, which depending on my mood is either a pleasant complement or sober contrast to the intense immediacies of my life.

It also means that I am in a near-constant state of elevated remembering. Just now, as I was wondering what to write about, my eye stopped on a collection of stones I keep on my desk: six small ones in the muted colors of the rainbow and one grey smooth one. For some reason, my mind leaped to a scene of me in my high school Cosmology class, taught by a groovy teacher who once touched the sleeve of the vintage cashmere sweater I was wearing and said, "Intense blue. Nice tone." And thinking of this made me remember another sweater, another class, with this same teacher, who also taught me Biology: a blue-and-black checked one that belonged to my friend Erika--this was an era of wearing other people's clothing. I had a terrible cold, and my nose would not stop running, but I was seated in the middle of the room, and I felt embarrassed or awkward about getting up and going to find a Kleenex, so I kept wiping my nose surreptitiously on the sweater's thick, rough woolen sleeve.

And I remember the boy in my class who had decorated his white high top sneakers with magic markers, words and symbols, and the singular feeling of sitting at a desk in front of a blue book and test and knowing before I read a single word that I would not be able to truly answer most of the questions. There was a girl in the class who came to my house once, to sleep over, as part of a day student/boarding student pairing program, and my parents bought us matching heavy shirts in the style worn by hunters that had a brief moment in the mid-eighties and have never returned. I remember standing outside the clothing store at the mall, the upscale mall, and thinking even then that it was strange that my parents had bought us both shirts, and wondering if they felt sorry that her parents had sent her to boarding school.

And just now, writing this, I remember sitting in a stream of sunlight at one of the little lab tables for two in the science room wearing a navy blue jacket I had recently found at my grandparents' house that had belonged to my grandfather. It had an Abercrombie and Fitch label in it, from when the store featured elegant outdoorsy clothes for grown-ups, long before my time, and which I knew my father had once given to my recently deceased grandfather. I loved this jacket, have it still somewhere. It has a hood and a silky lining and big, deep pockets, and I had to roll the sleeves up twice so they would not hang way below my fingertips. I loved it because it felt so true to my then very self-conscious developing sense of style but also because it had been my grandfather's, and I liked the idea of me wearing it too.

Sometimes I feel these floods of memories in an almost upsetting way, even when the memories themselves, as they so often are, are pleasant. I cannot really control them, and it can be overwhelming. I have never been good at clearing my mind. It's funny; I see Lily doing this already, even more accurately than I can. We will be walking down the street and she will say, for example, "Mama? Do you remember that day when it was Henry's birthday, and I was sitting on the floor buckling my shoe, and the phone rang, and it was Henry's mother, and she asked if we could come early to help her set up the food, and we had to get dressed really fast, and you couldn't find the black hairbrush?" This was nearly two years ago, now, and it is not a memory of any particular significance; in fact I can say with some assurance that this moment would never again have occurred to me if not for her recollection, triggered by who knows what, for what purpose I cannot imagine.

Except I kind of can. Storing these memories, of seemingly or actually insignificant moments, the sunlight on the graphite table, the rip in the silk lining of the turned-up sleeve, the glossy brown hair of the boy with the decorated sneakers, the light pressure of the teacher's hand on my arm: in a way, this is what life is, an assemblage of all of these infinitesimal moments, a multi-dimensional composition of all that has happened to us, refracted through time and space and experience. Most of the time I am grateful for my memories, however mundane, and their ability to push past the present and flood it out entirely. I guess, in a way, they are proof.

One More Story

When I was in graduate school, I made a friend named Emilie who had a cat named Chicken. Like me, Emilie was from Massachusetts; unlike me, she had a car. I think we really became friends on the rides she gave me back and forth, whenever we went home for holidays, or just a visit. As I have written before, there is nothing like a road trip to determine whether or not you and somebody else are compatible. And Emilie is one of those friends who continually offers up more reasons to like her. One of these was made manifest on our first drive "home," when I showed up at the designated meeting spot with Rory neatly tucked into her cat box. Once we were in the car, I looked around. Chicken had no cat box, that I could see. Chicken was free-range.

Now I had done this myself--driven with Rory loose in the car, sitting on my lap, roaming around as she pleased. But I had always assumed others would find it strange, unsanitary due to copious amounts of fur and possible accidents or even dangerous. Not Emilie. So an extremely grateful Rory was released, and for the most part, on that first drive and those that followed, Rory and Chicken proved as simpatico as their people.

Until one ride, when we were on the highway, driving fast on a crowded turnpike, Rory and Chicken decided it was time for their first real fight, way in the back seat of Emilie's station wagon. There were yowls and cries, hissing and more yowling, and we were initially taken aback, then a little bit concerned, then legitimately worried that someone was maybe going to lose an ear. Somehow, and I have no idea who started it, we were suddenly tossing candy back at the whirling cat fight, the angry cats themselves. M and M's, maybe? Jellybeans? Maybe it had just been Easter. I think so.

Anyway. Our aim was weak, our intent more to startle, but the few flying pellets that actually made contact with cat, as well as the sight of tiny objects being launched over their heads, proved sufficient distraction. The cats settled down, temporarily at least. I can't remember a subsequent episode.

It turns out that Chicken is still alive. I am glad of this, for Emilie, who is coming home herself, again. But thinking of Rory and Chicken sitting proudly on our laps, looking out the windows with their paws against the tops of the door frames, makes me feel wistful for another time and place, a time and place when Rory was younger, and I was, and there was nothing but road ahead and candy in the car and music on the radio and conversations that could take you all the way to Massachusetts. And back again.

Thank you, Emilie, for reminding me of this. It was all I could think about as I drove up the Merritt Parkway yesterday afternoon, but last night, when I was writing, this--like so many other memories, I am sure--slipped away. It makes me happy to remember Rory in that car.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Goodnight, Good Girl

About sixteen years ago, a few months after I graduated from college, I acquired a cat. I say "acquired" because I had not exactly been in the market for a cat. Rather, my mother had called to tell me about a teacher at her school whose cats had given birth to three litters of kittens at around the same time. Apparently there was one last kitten they couldn't find a home for, the runt of one of the litters.

I remember going down to this woman's basement, linoleum on the floors, dim lighting, and seeing the tiny black and white kitten with what I later realized was a very unusual face. I had brought a box with a folded blanket inside, but in my mother's car the kitten launched like a rocket ship out of the box and careened around the backseat like a bumblebee trapped in a jar.

Once she was home, at our little two bedroom apartment in Central Square, she began asserting her dominance immediately. One swipe--claws bared--at Johnson's nose, and he was on the floor in submission, despite the hard-to-ignore fact that he was about sixty times her size. After a month, they were crafty partners in crime. We finally caught them in action: Rory up high on a kitchen cabinet batting down snacks to Johnson below. In her first few weeks, she shredded a thick plaid flannel shirt (it was 1992, okay?) of Ben's when he tried to give her a bath, proving to her and me that he needed some lessons in the ways of cats. That bath was her first and her last.

She liked to curl up in small containers, a basket, a bowl, in a little cat ball, her striking face peering out at anyone who got close enough. She had white eyebrows, and her yellow eyes were rimmed all around with black, as though she were Cleopatra in kohl. Both ears were black, but the tip of one was white, and a black marking that took up most of her white face looked like a question mark. After a dozen comments about her unusual markings, I named her Rorschach, after the famous ink blot tests, to be called Rory.

One morning I woke up and pushed open the bedroom door to find two shearling mittens on the threshold. I put them back in the basket downstairs that held our winter things, but the next morning they were just outside the door again. Our indoor kitten had "killed" them and deposited them there for a gift, the way my childhood cat, an outdoor huntress in her youth, had always left us birds and moles. Although I kept putting them back in the basket, she kept gifting them to us, over and over, until spring came and the basket was put away for the season. Some would call this instinct, but I say love.

Rory followed me to New York in a roundabout sort of a way, to the teeth-gritting tolerance of my roommate. Like most cats, Rory was highly selective in her tastes, and when she did not like someone, she made it known expediently and effectively. It occurs to me now that she was quite talented at sussing out her own fans and naysayers; in Caitlin's case she made a sneaky beeline for her dresser drawers any time they were so much as a wedge open, lounging in full furry glory amidst neatly stacked clothing, in spite of the fact she knew she had been banned from the room.

When I lived alone for a year after graduate school, Rory was my most loyal companion. She greeted me at the door every evening, winding around my legs, and slept on my pillow, wrapped cozily around my head. When I moved in with Nicole, she came too, expressing her dislike for the also disdainful Nicole by scratching her handily across the face a few times. "She knows you don't like her?" I offered weakly, in Rory's defense. When that didn't work I was forced to remind Nicole that as a college student she had once been surprised when her mother told her, in my presence, that her childhood cat had died...four months before.

And although Ben is allergic to cats, he had grown to love Rory, and she moved with us, too, to one rented apartment, then the next. The summer I was pregnant with Lily, she grew weak and refused food and water for days on end. The vet took x-rays, ran tests ad infinitum, and finally told us she had cancer of the messerole and would die within weeks. I will put her to sleep now, she said, or you can take her home and bring her back the moment you believe her to be in pain. I could not bear the thought of her being in pain, but she looked up at me, and licked my hand. She was purring. I brought her home. The vet's office was across the street. I could get there quickly if I needed to. The next day she polished off breakfast and never looked back.

When Johnson died, that summer I was pregnant, on the morning of the Fourth of July, Rory was bereft. She walked around in a daze, sniffing at his places and things. Then, for the next few months, she attempted to take his place, for us--for our benefit--of this I have no doubt. When we sat on the couch watching television, she assumed his spot between us, making sure she was touching us both. When we moved his dog bed down to the basement, she sat in the spot it had lain for a full afternoon.

The three of us, Ben, Rory and I, moved into our current building on 16th Street on the night I went into labor with Lily. Sadie, who had been picked up in North Carolina two months before, came too. Like Johnson, one swat was all it had taken. Until this morning, even, Sadie viewed Rory with a certain mischievous worship. I will always regret having no video footage of their hilarious boxing matches. They would quite literally face off in the middle of a room, circle each other, until Sadie lovingly nosed Rory in the side, launching the festivities.

Although Rory had not been thrilled by Lily's arrival--there was some territorial marking in carriages and on clothing, a nip here and there when pushed--the arrivals of Scout, and then Annika, unnerved her irrevocably. When I was pregnant she set out to destroy all baby-related items in a variety of upsetting ways. I was determined not to be one of those people who tosses the pet with the bathwater upon arrival of the baby, and for months I hustled around covering her tracks so nobody would notice how destructive she had become. She was not as strong as she used to be, on top of her mental distress. She had one enormous kidney stone, then another. By the time Annika was a few months old she was angry and incontinent. She had once weighed as much as 12 pounds, but she had become simultaneously insatiable and skinny. At five pounds, the vet gave me a look as he prescribed an antibiotic. "If this doesn't work..." he said, leaving the sentence dangling.

People kept telling me I needed to "take action," by which I knew they meant "put her to sleep." This is a very odd euphemism, I have always found. It is not used in reference to the euthanasia of humans, which is largely illegal. Because we sanction it in animals, we need it to sound softer, I suppose? I wracked my brain for solutions and finally proposed she relocate to Connecticut, where she would spend weekends with us, and nights during the week when Ben was there, and our friend--and Rory's--David could stop by after work and check in.

This worked well for a while. Although she was clearly lonely, she gained a little weight and perked up measurably when we walked in the door. David was good to her--talked to her in a soft voice, kept her water dish full, gave her spoonfuls of canned food when he arrived and sat with her for a while for companionship. And then recently, early in the summer, a family member staying at the house mid-week called to say she had had some kind of a seizure, that she was walking funny, lilting to one side. It happened again, but when we arrived out at the house she was fine again, a little subdued perhaps, and not quite as steady on her feet, but certainly nothing to get alarmed about.

Then, every weekend, she seemed a little bit worse. A little less steady on her feet, a little skinnier. She was having accidents everywhere, and again I tried to stay ahead of anyone noticing, and I never minded doing so, but I was worried. I knew she hated being alone all week, in spite of David's visits. I knew she hated the indignity of the accidents, the fact that she, such a meticulous creature by nature, could not keep her own fur clean.

On Sunday morning, Ben and Lily went downstairs, and she was on the kitchen floor, immobile. Somehow she managed to drag herself a short distance to the triangle behind the door, where she lay, breathing with much labor and audible rattling, when I was summoned from bed. I lay beside her on the cool tile floor, my arm around her limp body, my hand under her wet face. She had drooled, a lot, as though she couldn't control the flow of saliva at all, and I didn't want her head to be lying in it. Lily came and sat with me, too, bringing her special blanket for Rory, crying herself in fear and confusion; I'm not sure she'd ever seen us cry before, that she could remember.

It seemed like a stroke to me. Her back end, in particular, seemed not to be functioning, and as I wiped up a puddle under her tail, I felt she was dying, and although I did not want to admit it to myself, with a tremendous wave of sorrow came a streak of relief. I did not want to have to decide whether she would live or die. This way, I could hold her. I could always know she was not alone when it happened. This, I could bear.

An hour later, she lifted her head and looked at me, around the kitchen. It was Sunday. The vet in Connecticut was closed, but there is a twenty-four hour animal hospital near us in the city, and as gently as i could I lifted her damp, nearly weightless body in my hands and placed her in her hated cat box, for what I thought would be one last ride. When we arrived at the apartment, Lily and carefully unscrewed the top of the box, one screw at a time, so I could lift it off with the least disturbance to her body.


When I lifted the top, she stood, gingerly, as Lily and I watched open-mouthed, and walked directly to the kitchen, where her food had always been kept. I gave her high-quality tuna in oil on a china plate. I borrowed litter from the neighbors and spread it in a pan. I had brought nothing for her from the house; frankly, I was skeptical that she'd survive the hour drive. For the rest of the day, and this morning, I focused on the good. She was walking, mostly. I ignored the fact that her back legs would occasionally give out from under her, causing her to sink gently to the floor on one side. She was affectionate, following me around in the old way, purring as she sat on my lap, having her head and her back stroked. I ignored the jutting bumps of her spinal disks, the thick mats of of fur on her back. She used the litter box once; I ignored the five, six times she did not, tucking a few paper towels in my waistband to catch errant leaks. When I saw her squatting on the couch, I scooped her up and ran to the litter box. But when I placed her in it, her back legs gave way. I could not ignore the defeat I imagined I saw in her face, was feeling myself.

I bargained with myself all morning. I'll wait until Wednesday, then take stock, I decided. Then, as long as she's not in pain, I will wait until the end of the week and bring her back to the vet. She had come back so many times before, from even a certain death proclamation. Why should I think this was different?

Then, as Lily emerged from her bedroom, and I headed into the kitchen with my coffee cup, she suddenly flung her body into the wall. A sound emerged from her that was not just uncatlike but otherwordly, a wail from some place I did not know and could not imagine. Go back to you room, Lily, I commanded, trying not to sound hysterical, and she did, but as I watched helplessly for at least a full minute, Rory's body jerked violently as she spun in drunken loops around the entryway, the sounds emanating every few seconds.

When she stopped, her legs were splayed behind her. She could not move her body, but she lifted her head and looked at me. I went to her with the cordless telephone, stroked her bony back as I dialed the vet. Sure enough, in indomitable style, she was up again ten minutes later, weakly limping from room to room, but I knew now that I needed to take her to the vet. I think I knew more than that.

I don't really want to write much about the rest, and not even because I am so tired I can't see the screen clearly in front of me, and have cried so much today that I burst blood vessels in both of my eyes. There are two types of people in this world: the people who think all this fuss over a cat is a little bit silly, and the people who know all too well how I feel right now. Although I have never before had to make the decision to euthanize a beloved pet myself, I have lost beloved pets before, watched them die, even, and the dying itself is fairly anticlimactic.

Suffice it to say I arrived at the vet's office in essentially pajamas and my "Bush's Last Day" baseball cap, unwashed hair pulled back in a ponytail, eyes already red, reeking of cat urine and tuna fish and covered in clumps of fur. I used a full box of tissues, was treated very kindly by the vet and his assistant over the course of several hours as I tried to think my way out of making a decision. I asked technical medical questions, I held Rory close and whispered to her; I set her down and watched her walk, then freeze in what was likely a mini seizure, then sink to the ground, softly, soundlessly.

Her face looked exactly the same as it always had. There, the fur was not stained or greasy, but shiny and plush. Her eyes were clear and bright. I held her close and stroked her fur from head to tail, shaking the loose fur onto the ground, as I always did. She settled into me, trustingly. When the vet gave her the injection with the sedative, she flinched and then relaxed. They left me alone, and she threw up all over me, twice. I grabbed a towel and placed in between her body and my T-shirt, praying she wasn't sedated yet so her last conscious thought would not be of feeling sick. When the vet came back, he asked me to place her on the table. I held her as he gave her the second shot.

And then we were alone again, and I held my hand on her head as I lay my own head on her body, listening to her heart beat, feeling her chest rise and fall, lifting my head and watching the breath rumble from her chest further down. The vet came in with his stethoscope. A few minutes more, he said. When he was gone I grabbed a pair of scissors from his desk and snipped a little piece of black fur and a little piece of white fur, wrapping them in a Kleenex and stuffing it into my bag. I shook the scissors clean of fur so they would not notice what I had done.

And then. And then he said it was over, and left me alone again with her, and I kissed each paw and the top of her little black head and smoothed her eyes closed. And I walked out to the desk, where the kind assistant did not blink an eye at the sight of me, and waved me away, saying, we will take care of it now. And I picked up the cat box, with a padded piece of sheepskin in the bottom, and Lily's now soiled special pink blanket on top of that, and I walked back out to the car.

And tonight, for the first time in my adult life, I will go to sleep without a cat, without my cat, whose fortunes, whose very existence was so dependent on the whorls of my life, and I will go to sleep not knowing that I "did the right thing," as people keep telling me, but that I did something, and that I didn't do it mindlessly or foolishly or rashly.

People always say: I have a pet, but we don't "have" animals. We are theirs as much as they are ours, and we carry their lives and their deaths in our hands. I don't know if I will ever fully come to terms with this, or the decision I made today. But I do believe in the concept of a soul, as the essence of a living creature, and I believe that animals have them too. And today, on this eleventh day of August, sixteen years after acquiring a cat, I see how much reverence that soul, this relationship, this responsibility, deserves.

Thank you, Rory, for always being my good girl. I loved you, love you still, but never as well as you loved me.

Very Sick Kitty

My cat of sixteen years had a stroke last night. I am trying to decide what to do and can't think about anything else. I know it's a cop-out, but I sort of don't care. Will try to write about it tomorrow if I can.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Saturday Night in Connecticut

This evening Lily was struggling to open the screen door onto the front porch when her father asked her why she needed to get out that way.

"I just want to say goodnight to the sun," she said.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Brick Factory

Have I written here about the brick factory? Is it a good sign that I have written so many entries that I can't remember anymore what I've written about?

I don't think I've covered this, but in line with my recent thoughts, personal and professional, about the ways in which childhood has changed, I think I will.

The house I grew up in, for the most part, is right on a huge pond, part of which is in the backyard. Where there are ponds, there are swamps, and in the front yard, bordering the field owned by the Wayside Inn, was a swamp, a real one, with skunk cabbage and cat nine tails and mucky mud and flat stones that could be hopped on if one was inclined to fancy one's self in a jungle, escaping from crocodiles, say.

When we were young, on summer mornings that were fine, we would get up, eat something, and run out into the day. If either of us so much as hinted at boredom, my mother would barely look up from what she was doing--schoolwork, gardening, making 500 tiny cream puffs for a wedding--to utter the words: Go outside. And so we went.

And among the other ways we passed our summer days, was the brick factory, an enterprise borne of ingenuity and environment alike, although whose ingenuity--mine, Alison's or our neighbor friend's--I cannot recall. The swamp held a certain allure, partly because it was, well, a swamp. It seemed like somewhere we shouldn't play; I remember thinking even at eight or nine that I would not say I was "playing in the swamp" if asked by an acquaintance at the grocery store. But up close, the swamp held many charms, from the aforementioned skunk cabbage, whose leaves could be ripped in fine shreds like string cheese, to the cat nine tails, who could be incorporated into any number of craft projects, to the large flat rocks, that were customarily used for jumping.

One day, though, one of us, playing in the muck, formed a brick of mud and set it, perhaps inadvertently, on a rock under direct sun. A little while later, the sun had baked the brick hard; it could be picked up, passed around, built with. We were hooked. How it became a "factory" I also cannot say, but I have observed many times since how children, when left to their own devices, have such communal instincts. There were three of us, we wanted to make bricks, and so we did it together.

This I remember: the feel of the slick yet slightly rubbery mud in my small hands, the satisfying smack of hand on mud, the gratifying placement of the bricks in neat rows on the rocks, and the stacking of the baked bricks in a cool spot off to one side, safe from trampling feet.

It will not surprise many of you, I believe, to learn that we never actually used the bricks for building. When we were called inside for a meal or some other irritation, we ran in reluctantly and then back out again as fast as we could manage, leaving the lighter, outside door swinging in our wake. I can still see the sun setting, which is late in high summer in Massachusetts, as we kept up our industry, kept scooping, forming, patting, placing, stacking, shifting roles every so often for a change of view.

And I see, now, that it is so essential, this brick-building time, and the brick building itself, whatever form it takes. But mostly the time.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Triggers

I love how the tiniest thing--a comment, an object--can trigger a fully formed forgotten memory or even spark a big idea. This happened to me this afternoon, and I managed to get in a few hours of writing after the girls went to sleep, but it is still too new to post here. But I did check my email after writing and received a note from my cousin, who was just back from Martha's Vineyard, repository of so many of my summer memories, in which she mentioned the words "Illumination Night."

Illumination Night is an annual event on the island. The residents of a particular part of the town of Oak Bluffs in which the houses were all built in the style of gingerbread cottages around an enormous tabernacle, festoon their homes with thousands of lit Chinese lanterns, creating a magical world for just one night: a little island in and of itself, a glowing center surrounded by darkness, and water. There is music, and laughter, and singing, and a band in the tabernacle, and people sitting on their porches, two or three generations on most, smiling and waving at the passersby, choosing their favorite lanterns and admiring the lacy trim on the roofs and window boxes. There are teenagers unhinged on summer, and small children cut loose and ringed with green neon necklaces and bracelets, the lightstick version of which featured prominently in the night my cousin reminded me about.

We must have been in our early-twenties. We were not children, not teenagers, but not quite fully formed adults yet either, in the way our lives were still so centered on our families of origin--there were no families, yet, of our own making, no husbands, no houses, and I was staying with my parents, and she had come to visit. I had not been to Illumination Night in years, not since I was a child, and I don't remember who suggested we go, but nobody else had any interest, and so we found ourselves alone, together, driving down the winding street in the dark, brights on all the way to the main drag, which took us into Oak Bluffs.

We couldn't find a parking spot. It was packed, more crowded than I remembered from past years, and the cars were parked all the way back to the Main Street and the dock in every direction. Finally, we settled for a spot way out and began the walk toward the tabernacle, with a surprising number of other people who had been forced out to these outer rings. The crowd thickened as we neared, and although we didn't discuss it, there was a palpable level of excitement, a lift in mood. We both noticed all the lightsticks: jewelry on the smaller children, and just the sticks themselves, in people's hands, casting an ethereal glow on faces already lit by candlelight.

We wanted some. For some reason, although we were way too old, too old perhaps to be on vacation with my parents, too old to be at Illumination Night for the actual sight of it, not for any social purpose, too old to covet lightsticks, we wanted them desperately, both of us, in that funny way a need occasionally hits you and a companion at exactly the same moment, and of course we could not find them.

Every stand was sold out, every purveyor exhausted. As we walked, our desire grew, and suddenly we were on a mission: we had to find lightsticks. It was essential we find them; we needed them, somehow, to complete the evening, to make our evening's drive, our parking fiasco, worth our troubles.

I almost called my cousin just now because the truth is, I can't remember if we found them. I remember the intensity of wanting them, the shared focus on finding them, a conversation that struck us both as hilarious about various illicit ways we could obtain them from the multitudes of small children in possession, but I don't remember ever getting one, snapping it firmly across the middle, watching it take on that underwater greenish yellow glow. What I do remember is that we lost the car. When it was time to go home, we walked back in the general direction of our parking spot, but it was so far from the center of events that we got disoriented, lost our way, found ourselves in a sea of people lit by lightsticks, walking in circles for what seemed like a very long time.

When we finally located the car, the glow had lifted. It was leaving the party too late. We drove home through the black night, brights on, windows down, the sound of the ocean in our ears. When I think of this night now, I think of us as on a cusp of something else, wordlessly agreeing to partake in a childhood tradition, by which I mean going at all, and then channeling our energy into this odd, purposeless mission. And failing, and getting lost, and then--at last--in the darkness, surrounded by the sea, near the light and laughter but not quite of it anymore--finding our way home.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Reentry

It's amazing how easy it is not to write. It's easier than not going to the gym, not doing homework, not doing the laundry, not answering the telephone: all of which I am particularly good at, by the way, but none of which cause me as much emotional distress as not doing the writing. I've been so good, so good, and then for the last three days I was so, so bad. Yes, Annika was sick. Yes, I was running on fumes. But I think it's obvious to my houseplants at this point that being a mother of two is a stressful, time-consuming undertaking for me in the best of circumstances, a state in which I do not find myself at present, and yet for the most part I have been able to write, forced myself to write, kept writing.

And just now. I cleaned the apartment. I made brownies and stuffed zucchini from the new Saveur. I ate four small plums. I watched a bad episode of the Iron Chef. I did a little paperwork. All this knowing that tomorrow would be another day much like today and that I would not have the proverbial "room of one's own" for more than a couple of hours, and that I was not too tired, and that it was not too late, and that if there were one thing in the world that would actually make me feel better right now for a whole host of reasons it would be to write.

But I put it off, and kept putting it off, even as I thought about the projects I should be working on, and what I wanted to be writing about, and took off the old polish on my toes and painted them dark red, very, very carefully and slowly, and washed the pots and wooden spoons that can't go in the dishwasher by hand instead of leaving them in the sink, and I scrubbed down the tray of Annika's highchair with a dishcloth, making sure I hit all the little crevices, and now it is late, and I am tired, and the girls will be awake in, oh, about six hours give or take, and all I can manage is this.

Let's call it a reentry. A refusal to give in to the dark side. It was way too easy last night, when Annika was cool and smiling again, to give myself another day, another excuse, another pass. It is very easy not to write. I am tired of easy. It's time to get back to work.

Sleepless on 16th Street

Baby on the mend; tomorrow I return.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Note

Sick, sick baby. I'll be back.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Still Life, With Plum

Last night of prescribed writing about parenting. Good; it's beginning to feel a bit like taking medicine. I have been doing it so naturally, so often; I think the main lesson learned is to be a little gentler with myself and not quite so controlling of my subject matter.

I said I would write about my cab ride, and so I will. It is illustrative of a truth I am trying to catch hold of these days, which is that the very rough moments are exactly that: moments. But as the rough moments are occurring, when I am riding atop a tidal wave of bad behavior, or preverbal frustration, it is impossible to remember this. Which is why I keep reminding myself of the fact in calmer waters. I am hoping it will one of these days sink in.

So I needed to get back home after a lovely morning out, and after a brief flirtation with the notion of the F train, which stops at the end of my street, I surrendered to a New Yorker's mundane luxury: the taxi. As a child of the suburbs, where the build-up to the acquisition of the driver's license reaches ludicrous heights, I played along with my peers, although I didn't really share the excitement. Somehow I knew that once I had the little plastic ticket to freedom, there would be, from where I was at the time, nowhere to go. And sure enough, I spent my one licensed year before leaving for college doing what suburban kids do, probably still in this age of the $5.00 gallon of gas: driving around. When I got to New York and realized that for dollars in the single digits I could be chauffeured around the city like a queen, I was hooked.

I like the subway, too, for the same primary reason: I don't have to drive. But with a cranky 4-year-old, exhausted, hungry baby and a stroller, the cab won out on this occasion. The trip started out fine. The cab, easily hailed, pulled to stop at my feet. (Will I ever get over feeling like this is a little bit magical? I want to go. Here is my car!) The stroller folded with the tap of my foot into its neat little package and was deposited in the trunk. Keep in mind I am holding the baby while hailing, folding, depositing and loading: holding her under one arm like a football.

We get in. Lily buckles her seatbelt. I put on mine. Baby coos at driver. Lily takes bite of nectarine, baby starts to scream. Lily finishes last few bites of nectarine, baby continues to wail, we realize that baby wants nectarine, but there are no more. I take pit and hide in ashtray on door; baby acquires inhuman strength in desire to get to, and pry open ashtray to get pit. She fails. I remember I have one small plum. Baby cannot eat plum as is baby, and has two tiny teeth, so I take tiny bites off plum, remove from my own mouth, and feed to baby, who suddenly seems as though she has not been fed in last three months. In about 10 seconds, plum is gone. Pit is hidden in ashtray with larger cousin pit, and baby again starts screaming. I have bits of plum on my shirt and in my hair. Baby is covered with red plum juice. Baby accidentally smacks in Lily in face while flailing around to get to ashtray. Lily starts wailing too. cab driver turns up radio.

As I am sitting in the back of the cab, sticky with plum juice, which is staining items of clothing on all three of us, listening to my two children screaming, the steamy air oppressive inside the cab, which appears to have no air conditioning, the baby thrashing around miserably on my lap, Lily accusing me of letting Annika "hurt my body, which is not allowed at school," my head starting to pound, trapped in the back seat, literally strapped in to my fate, stuck in traffic that has no visible end ahead, I am able to leave my head for a few seconds somehow, to step outside the experience and observe me as an outsider would, an outsider excepting the cab driver, whose strategy is to pretend that we don't exist by regular increases of radio volume.

This is a terrible moment, I observe as the outsider. There is nothing you can do right now.

It was a zen moment, then. I gave in to the awful wailing, the thrashing, the stickiness, the waves of loathing emanating from the frontseat, my own misery.

This will not last forever, I repeated, as we sat dripping in the humidity. But it kept lasting, and in desperation, I told the cab driver in a virtual scream to be heard above his radio that I had recently learned that the sound of a baby crying is used as a means of torture in prison camps. They pipe it into cells, I explained, and he neither acknowledged I was speaking, nor lowered the volume of his radio.

But just then the traffic cleared, and the driver sped up, and in a blink of an eye we were home, and I tucked the baby under my arm, and took the stroller out of the trunk, and ushered Lily up to the curb, and said thank you to the driver, who gave me the merest hint of a nod, and stood on the sidewalk in front of our building, and exhaled.

And now, a day and a half later, it already feels like it happened to somebody else. A moment, Not a good one. But a moment just the same.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Time Travel

I have one or two more days of limiting my subject matter to parenting, depending on if you factor in the day I skipped without explaining or confessing. A mixed bag, I would say. I didn't feel guilty writing about parenting, as I declared that I would in advance, but being the kind of person who feels a little let down in a restaurant after ordering due to the termination of the decision-making factor, I also felt a little constrained and irritated by the confines of my pledge. I guess that's point of an experiment: to see what happens.

Tomorrow, to make up for my skipped day, I will write about the five minutes I spent in a cab today that felt like an hour, as I'd planned to now. But right now I find myself compelled in another direction.

Today I started reading A Wrinkle in Time for the first time in many years with a child who'd never read it before. He'd started reading it without me, and is a little on the young side for the book, so was understandably a little confused. We plunged in, and for a few moments the boy, an inordinately polite little guy, sat beside me as I fell in full force, forgetting about him, the room I was sitting in, the Upper West Side on a muggy summer afternoon in 2008. I was about eleven, in the hammock in our front yard, under a crab apple tree that dropped blossoms for weeks on end like soggy snowflakes, holding the book above my head in a kind of a trance.

My favorite childhood books so often had plucky girl heroines, but Meg was different from Anne or all the Betsys or Jo or any of the others. In fact, the strongest memory I have of reading this book is of how different it was altogether from anything else I had read: not exactly science fiction, which was not my genre, and not exactly a thriller or mystery, also not my genres, and not exactly a coming of age. It was somehow all of these and none of these, and when I snapped out of my reading fog and remembered my patient student, I asked him, "So what did you think of it, what you read?" and he looked a little nervous to tell me and then, finally, said in a small voice, "I thought it was strange."

"Do you like it?" I asked, genuinely curious. He nodded, quite vigorously.

"I don't understand a lot of it, but I do like it," he said. I nodded too. "Strange" seemed just about right. So we got online--when I would have called my uncle, a mathematician of sorts--to read about tesseracts, and as I stumbled a little trying to explain the four-dimensional cube within a cube, the boy interrupted me, unusual for him, and said, "But isn't the fourth dimension time?" I must have beamed at him because he looked taken aback.

"Exactly," I said. "I think you're ready to keep reading."

And as I walked back home to my own two girls, who have so many heroines to discover, including brilliant, defiant Meg Murry, I felt actually a thrill of anticipation on his behalf, as well as a little wistful on mine. A wrinkle in time, indeed.