Silence

Think of this as a little Quaker meeting...

History-making

Well, I just finished watching Barack Obama's half-hour presentation on network television, and I'm still feeling a little bit of a shiver down my spine. It's not that I feel I learned anything new about him or that he said anything that took me by surprise. It's not that I thought it was him at his most eloquent or that I was more moved than usual (which I always am) by the families included in the various segments. I've been thinking about it for a little while now, and I think it's that for the first time it really seemed real.

As a child, I used to pore over my father's extensive collection of political books, many of which were about John F. and/or Bobby Kennedy. I understood that a large part of their appeal was the promise they offered of hope--of a world in which everybody mattered, young people, African American people, Jews, Catholics--a world, and a country, that was inclusive not exclusive, with a common goal of bettering people's lives.

Regardless what you think of the Kennedys' actual legacy, it is hard to deny that John's presidency ignited the world's imagination, and that Bobby's words and campaign ignited a generation--my parents' generation--along with his compatriot, Martin Luther King. Throughout my childhood, adolescence, twenties and thirties, I have often wondered what it would be like to feel that collective sense of possibility, the sense of being on the brink of something big.

As a Clinton fan, admirer of both Clintons, I felt inspired by Bill's election and Hillary's campaign, but I never felt that chill, that recognition that history was being made and that I was going to be alive to be a part of it. Now, I do. It is difficult to express at the end of what has been for me in many ways the most challenging year of my life how it feels to be the mother of two young girls who will be shaped forever by the first president either will ever remember and by what I now truly believe he will strive to do for this country. It's not that difficult, I guess. It feels a lot like awe.

I was born the year man landed on the moon. I missed that one. I have lived through wars and natural and man-made disasters. I have lived through the racial atrocities of the Boston busing crisis, the second and third waves of the feminist movement, the worst terrorist attack in recorded history, and many lesser but still monumental social trends and world events. But watching a man like this, this man, get elected President of the United States will be the most historically significant experience of my life thus far.

I still feel that shiver. I think it might last for the next six days.

The Gambler

About forty minutes ago, as I was sitting here at my desk, I heard the door to Lily's room crack open ever so slightly. I turned and saw her face peeking out at me. "Mama?" she said.

"Yes," I said, in a less friendly fashion. These days my desire for the girls to fall asleep when I walk out of their bedroom borders on desperation. I am constantly calculating how many hours and minutes I will have to do the things I need to do once they are both snoring lightly behind closed doors.

"I was having a dream (a waking dream, apparently) about a fox, and I got scared." This has become a recurrent theme--you may have noticed. Lily has a "dream" about something she is not scared of and tries to buy some time by emerging to elaborate on it in creative albeit excruciating detail.

"But foxes are not scary," I say. "Think of a reddish-colored combination of a cat and a dog," I continue, reading an email as I speak. "With a pointy little face."

"That's an interesting idea," she considers, "But in my dream the fox is scary. He is chasing me, and, and--" she is stalled, can't think of where to go next. She is remembering, perhaps, that I am not so sympathetic to fake chase scenes.

"I want you to go back into your bed, close your eyes, make the fox appear, and make friends with him," I say, knowing there is no way this will fly. I am too tired, my need is too great, too obvious. There are going to be stern words issued on the part of the larger (in size if not in generosity of time and spirit) of us. Lily yawns, then smiles.

"That's a great idea, Mama," she says. "I don't have any friends who are foxes."

Luck of the draw, sometimes.

Trip off the Toast (Sorry, Couldn't Resist)

This morning I was spreading peanut butter on a piece of toast for Lily and a blob of peanut butter at one end of the toast started to ooze off onto the plate. Lily, who was watching me, laughed. "It's like the peanut butter's taking a little trip off the edge of the toast," she said.

I relay this not as an illustrative "how cute" anecdote but because it made me realize how differently children see the world. I am almost done with my rereading of The Phantom Tollbooth, which has put me in a heightened state of mind as regards a child's point of view. Although Miles, the protagonist, is a sort of blank everykid, he is unquestionably a child. As such, he meets each new and fantastical experience with acceptance, opening an envelope to "see" a sound, for example, or naming a meal so it will appear in front of him. Part of the magic of this book is Miles' open attitude. His journey, after all, is to save the kingdom, and he takes it on with zero fanfare, no expectation of praise or reward.

Part of the magic of being a parent is these little windows into one's own past. I remember before Lily was born wondering how she could possibly "believe in" such inanities as the tooth fairy. And then she was born, and our six-year-old neighbor lost a tooth, and Lily explained all about the tiny magical creature who had left actual money under her young neighbor's pillow. And instead of thinking, "How gullible," I thought about the notes our tooth fairy used to leave, with pen-and-ink drawings of herself, always signed, "Suzy." A name, not coincidentally, that my mother had always liked. And I liked that our tooth fairy had a name, that she was ours and ours alone.

I like the fact that where I see a little mess to be repaired, Lily sees an excursion. I like the fact that like Miles, she meets inanity head-on with matter-of-factness. I like the fact that all day today I tried to see the world from the perspective of the peanut butter. Sometimes it's okay to edge right over the toast.

The Curse of the Sexy Hobo

I feel like a bit of a killjoy when I confess that I have never been a big fan of Halloween. This is strange in one sense because I do very much enjoy candy. For some reason, although it makes no sense, I prefer mini candy bars in almost every variety to their full size counterparts, which I rarely buy. Growing up, we didn't eat a lot of candy, at least sanctioned candy, so I looked forward to the loot I pulled in as I got older and was allowed to trick-or-treat with friends who lived in more developed neighborhoods. However, come March, much of the candy I had coveted, sorted and hoarded was still in my bedroom, little nuggets of evidence that often the wishing is more pleasurable than the achieved.

The sticking point of Halloween for me is the costumes. As a kid I would on occasion get into the costume thing. My mother generally made our costumes, or we made our own, less successfully, but I remember being a pumpkin once, and Peter Pan, and a crayon with a pointy hat. But even in the best costumes I felt self-conscious dressed up, not free and uninhibited, as is the intention of the enterprise.

Far worse, though, were the Halloween festivities I had to endure as an adult. College Halloween parties are largely an opportunity for certain girls to dress in skimpy outfits they secretly want to wear all the time. Kitty cat was a top choice: black tights, leotard, tail, ears, whiskers drawn on with eyeliner. I am not the dressing up as a kitty cat type. I am also not the dressing up as Charlie's Angels type, or as Madonna type, or as any costume requiring the donning of fishnet stockings type. If knowing yourself is a sign of wisdom, then at least when it comes to Halloween costumes, I am a veritable sage.

To my chagrin, well into my twenties, people thought it was a good idea to dress up like idiots--sexy idiots in the case of the women, either macho or effeminate extremes in the case of the men--and attend Halloween parties, which were just like regular parties except for that I felt like a fool in my costume all night. I remember riding up to one party in an elevator with a bunch of acquaintances and saying into an unfortunate, unanticipated silence, "Has it ever occurred to anybody that Halloween is a holiday invented for actual children?"

Now, as the mother of two small children, I am experiencing yet another unexpected turn of events. Halloween, as it turns out, is a great holiday for parents. It involves helping assemble the costumes, which I rather enjoy as long as I don't have to wear one myself, the choosing, purchasing and eating of countless miniature candy bars, and being privy to the unadulterated joy of those you love in a state of sheer delight.

So far, neither of my offspring seem to have inherited my Scrooge-like dislike of Halloween. I will allow them ignorance of my stance for the time-being. At least until one of them appears in my living room dressed as the modern day equivalent of a Solid Gold dancer.

Remembering

Sometimes I wish I could remember some of the things I don't remember, if that makes any sense. Much in the same way certain images are imprinted forever in my brain because they are in photo albums or hanging on a wall in my parents' house, certain memories occur to me regularly because I keep remembering them, and then--like tires settling in the old tread marks--they just keep finding their way back into place.

This is frustrating because many of these memories do not feel particularly significant to me and because I fear they are filling space that could otherwise be occupied by new and more helpful or revelatory ones. For example, I can recreate an entire scene that took place at my first grade best friend's house during the early stages of a sleepover when two teams engaged in a "You Light Up My Life" sing-off. The day after the party, when we were waiting for my father to pick me up, my friend's father said, "Little pitchers have big ears," in reference to something we girls had overheard, and I remember thinking it through without asking to have it explained and figuring it out and being pleased that I understood the expression.

Wait! I was about to recount some other uninteresting memories to prove my point about the capriciousness of memory, but for some reason the "little pitchers" memory triggered a chain reaction of memories having to do with this old best friend. Suddenly I remember that she had one of those little gadgets you could use to print out strips of sticker plastic with raised letter words punched in, and that I read most of Judy Blume's Forever in her parents' bedroom closet, and that she was one of the first people to have an Atari and that I learned how to play Donkey Kong (terribly) in her carpeted basement rec room, and that almost everyone used to have rec rooms (what are they now? wine cellars? or more recently, homeless shelters?), and that at the school we went to for kindergarten we could walk up the street to the house she lived in before the sleepover house by ourselves after school and that her mother made grilled cheese sandwiches with American cheese, which is still one of my top three kinds of sandwich maybe because I used to eat them at her kitchen table.

And even more--I can't stop, am remembering the details too fast to write them. She had bunk beds, and I once wet the bed at her house in kindergarten, which is young for sleepovers, no?, and tried to cover up the evidence, and at the second house she lived in when we were kids she had a swimming pool and she once had a pool party and I befriended a girl I had always thought was stuck-up but it turned out, I remember explaining to my mother from the backseat of the car on the way home, that actually she had thought I was stuck-up, which was why we had never before spoken, and that we were maybe destined to be great friends (I never saw her again; she moved that summer).

And finally, I remember the dress I wore to this friend's bat mitzvah. It was black and kind of silky-feeling with tiny colored flowers and a white cotton lace collar and a thin sash that tied in the back and was not Laura Ashley like most of my dresses at that age but was another popular brand that started with a "P" (I think) and was also more sophisticated than most of my other dresses because I had bought it with my aunt and not my mother. We had bought it for me to wear to my grandfather's funeral, and my aunt had taken me because I had nothing quite right, and my mother was otherwise occupied with funeral details, and I remember standing in the store with my aunt, who I felt to be much more like-minded when it came to fashion than my mother, and holding up this dress on its hanger with a question in my eyes, and feeling guilty by how pleased I was to be getting it when I had been so devastated by my grandfather's death that I had secretly pledged never to be happy again.

It strikes me that after all, that turned out to be a string of insignificant memories, all but the last bit, because I had sort of forgotten that feeling after my grandfather died of forgetting that I could not be happy every once in a while at first, when something nice happened, and then--gradually--realizing that nice things would keep happening and that it was okay to be happy and that it didn't mean I loved my grandfather any less than I knew that I did. And this, I think, was a very good thing to have learned at thirteen.

No Excuses, Again

Looooong week. But I'll be back. Tomorrow.

Chocolate and Cheese

I'm feeling like my blog has become so earnest and prissy of late. Smug and self-righteous and majorly unfunny. I'm having a hard time with it, to be honest, although some good manages to slip through sometimes almost by accident. I'm also not focusing on work projects as I should be, although to be fair to myself it's because I'm actually working much more, and at the end of a day, when I find myself sitting here, I'm pretty well spent. I'm not sure how to get out of my slump, but I want you to know that I'm trying.

As a rebuke to myself, and a palate cleanser of sorts for the blog, I am going to confess my major parenting hypocrisy now. I am a food hypocrite of gargantuan proportions.

On my behalf, I will start by saying that Lily and Annika are two of the most well-fed children I know. I like to shop for food, and I like to cook, and one of the few decisions I made before Lily was born was that any children of mine would be exposed to as many foods as possible from as early as possible and that we would never distinguish between "kid food" and food in our home. For the most part, this--unlike most other uninformed, premature decisions I have made--has worked beautifully.

Before I slide too far back into the land of self-congratulation, I would like to add that I have the worst eating habits of anyone I know, and if I were to confess to you what I actually consume most days you would possibly be sick to your stomach; you would certainly feel shock and dismay.

I will give you a sampling of what I'm talking about, an amuse-bouche, if you will. Today, I had three large cups of coffee with half-and-half and sugar, two pieces of toast, four brownies, and a wedge of cheese the size of my fist. I also had a cheeseburger and fries from the new uptown Shake Shack at 3:45 in the afternoon which, I don't think I need to underscore, is not actually the time of a meal. I assure you, if you're not from New York, that if you were to walk right by the new uptown Shake Shack at 3:45 and there was NO LINE that you, too, would dash in for a quick cheeseburger and fries even if you weren't in the slightest bit hungry just on the principle of the thing. No? Well, fine. I knew there was something I never liked about you.

But I digress. The point is that on an ordinary day, my diet consists primarily of salt, fat and caffeine, even as my girls eat roasted Brussels sprouts and salmon, sauteed spinach and raspberries, greenmarket plums, Greek yogurt, and multigrain bread with smears of homemade jam. If I had a dime for every time I have been dishonest about the empty bag of Cheetos I am stuffing in the bottom of the trash can, the candy corn hidden in my purse, the number of chocolate truffles in the very top shelf of the freezer, I'd be able to buy a second refrigerator, which I could hide in, well, I don't know, the closet, stocked to the brim with cheese, candy and fried chicken from Dirty Bird, which Lily prefers to eat with the fried coating off. Why? Because that's all she knows to like--I have eaten the coating off of hers since before she was too young to know it was desirable, and it worked: Now she prefers it au natural. All the more crispy grease bits for me.

I could go on ad infinitum in this vein. In fact, I once wrote an essay about my eating habits in graduate school that one of my favorite professors called a "frightening, revolting, awe-inspiring tour de force," but as I said, I'm not feeling it 100% these days, so I'll stop at this for now.

And I will go to bed. Breakfast will come all too quickly. Cantaloupe and soft-boiled free-range eggs for Lily. Coffee and butter and chocolate for me.

A Happy Rock

For the past five weeks I have been teaching a "gardening class" at Lily's school for eight 4-year-olds--including Lily--every Wednesday afternoon. Each Wednesday evening I am exhausted, but it is the very best kind of exhausted; it feels earned.

Sometimes I wonder if I have steered away from teaching in a formal capacity because it has always been so thoroughly and gloriously my mother's domain. When I force myself to look the situation in the face, however, it is amazing how often and in how many ways I have managed to sneak it into my life. Nowadays, I look forward to my gardening class all week. Even when I am working on something else I am thinking about it in the back of my mind: I walk through the world each day with an eye toward it, how I can impart something essential about growing to these eight little sponges, how I can best be receptive to their questions and ideas.

Teaching this class also gives me an opportunity to practice on a larger scale than I can at home the philosophies of Lily's school and its head and founder, which I believe in passionately and which are so familiar to me from the way I was raised. I was drawn to this school, in fact, because it felt so familiar, and the idea of starting Lily's education in a place like my mother's school seemed almost too good to be true.

So I approach my class with a not unpleasant feeling of responsibility: to the children in the class, most of all, but also to the school, its amazing staff, my mother, myself. There are certain things I do, will always do, half-heartedly but never this; if there was a central theme to my childhood it was that teaching is the ultimate good, requiring, if it is to be done at all, the very best you have.

It's funny: here, in this setting that is mine and Lily's, really, and not my mother's, I am finding my own footing in the classroom. I have taught children this age before. For four years I worked in my college's laboratory nursery school; I led summer programs for children this age; I have worked with older children individually and in small groups for over fifteen years. But this feels different. Something has shifted, and I'm not sure what.

It could be that I am teaching a class for the first time as a parent. I see children now through different eyes, with more--I guess--respect and awe. And these children deserve it, mine included. They are filled with respect and awe themselves, and it is catching. I've caught it bad.

We have been planting something every week, but first it was fall, and now it feels like early winter, and we are in New York, not Georgia. It's cold and only getting colder. So we plant indoor plants, and bulbs outdoors, and cacti, and the children make gorgeous "gardens of the imagination" from paper and pine cones and paint, and we talk about how things grow as we plant every week, but I could tell: They wanted to see. They needed proof. So we planted fast-growing grass seed in a terrarium, and when we came back to school after the weekend, it was filled with green grass, "real grass! really real grass!" and I have never before felt so happy to see a patch of grass as when I saw their faces see the grass, heard them telling other children about the sprinkling of the seeds, and the watering of the soil, and the need for sunlight and air and water, but not too much, not too much.

And today, because the children kept saying the grass was like a park, can it be a park? and I said, Why not? It can be a park if you want it to, they made it "Chelsea Park," and they made people and dogs and birds and a basketball player that looks like a tree, and trees that look like trees and a swingset out of wooden sticks and masking tape and a giant orange sun, and then, as I was about to say it was clean-up time, a little girl brought me a big green roundish shape with a smiley face on it. What is it? another child asked her, and she put it in my hands.

It's a happy rock, she said. Indeed.

She put it in the soil with the rest of the parts of the park, and a magic-markered sign with eight children's names on it, and bumblebees and butterflies and a cat on it, and when I left today, I looked back in, at this amazing perfect park on its little patch of urban grass in glass and thought to myself that this was one day that would end with me feeling not so much as an iota of regret.

Why Oh Why a Therapy Dog?

When I was growing up, a surefire way NOT to get something was to argue that "everybody else had it." My mother was not swayed by tales of peer pressure; in fact, when we expressed a name brand preference or a desire for something trendy she always seemed a little disappointed, as though we had failed her in some small yet significant way. And it is true that our things were often different from other kids' things: our sweaters handknit, our art supplies the real ones for adults, not the colorful kid kits we drooled over at our friends' houses, our school bags embossed with flowers or ladybugs, never the superhero characters my mother claimed not to recognize.

Which is why I found it strange one day when I discovered that she had purchased a winter jacket, I think, I can't quite remember the item specifically, from a name brand store she generally eschewed. Is it for us? I asked. For me? It was not. We had winter jackets. With some prodding, I learned that the jacket, as well as many other items of clothing, books, games, and toys, were for a family in her school that needed them.

It turned out, I gleaned from a number of reliable sources, that my mother had been supplying families in need for years in this way, anonymously, and based on her own intimate knowledge of the family's needs. She made children warm, kept children fed, and personally outfitted a number of bedrooms with books--my mother believes children need books. Lots of them. But the name brand jacket. Why that in particular? Because, she explained, nobody should have to feel on the outside all of the time.

So much of what both of my parents said to me has stuck with me. But even more than their words are their actions. It is one of my father's rules of living to judge people based not--ever, really--on what they say but on what they do, have done. He has always found action to be a far better indicator of purpose and intent. And if truth be told, I agree with him. I know a lot of people who can say impressive things eloquently but only a handful who do great things and never talk about them.

I will make sure that Lily and Annika know that their grandmother, Sands, is the kind of person who ensures that the most needy kid in a school has the coolest jacket in town. I want them to be this kind of person too. But I can't help push them in that direction by telling them stories. This is why Sadie is going back to dog school tomorrow for session number two. Not for Sadie but for Lily and Annika, who will go out with her--with me, too, of course--into the world. I am feeling optimistic about this brave new world. I want my girls to know that it's never too early to put your money where your mouth is. I owe my parents nothing less than this.

Tollbooth Returns

One of the many reasons I love L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series is because it introduced to me the concept of a "kindred spirit," which has actually informed the way I see the world and the people in it. A kindred spirit is not a best friend, necessarily, or a soul mate; in fact, a kindred spirit is not by definition someone extraordinarily close or connected to you. And a person can have more than one. Sometimes, oftentimes, the people you love most are simply not kindred spirits, although you may always secretly wish they were, but the defining characteristic of a kindred spirit is the quality that either is or is not at the outset: It cannot be manufactured or eased into later on.

I have found that I meet kindred spirits in one arena or another, people who are not and will not become my closest friends for a variety of reasons but who share with me in some way a kindred spirithood. Recently, thanks to a woman I have known for years, never known well, but with whom I sensed this kindred spirithood the very first time we met, I have broken out of my comfort zones and co-founded a book group devoted solely to, and made up of aficionados of, children's literature, affectionately called kid lit.

This is an odd thing for a group of men and women ranging from their late thirties to mid-forties to do. I recognize this, and I also know that most people--even some kindred spirits of mine--would have no interest in belonging to such a group. However, a small faction of kindred spirits, people who are all too familiar with the concept of a kindred spirit thanks to their own familiarity with Anne-with-an-e and her cohorts, feels the same way about this group that I do now: that one of the best parts of their childhood has been welcomed into their adulthood by and with people who totally understand.

Our first book was Anne, appropriately, and to be able to have a serious conversation about such a formative book for me was satisfying, to say the least. I have read Anne, and other Montgomery books, in recent years many times, so the reading of it was not a fresh experience for me. But now we are reading The Phantom Tollbooth, and I feel like I just ran into my ten-year-old self on the street. The recognition and the wave of intimacy are so intense when I open this book that today, on the subway, I kept looking up to see if anyone was noticing the way I felt, if my feelings were somehow making themselves manifest on my face.

But no. I was just another woman reading on the subway. Nobody seemed to notice I was reading a "children's book," although the very best children's books are so superior to most of the adult books available these days that I wish the genre didn't require defining. As I did when I was a child, I kept folding over corners of the bottom pages whenever I found a passage I wished to reread. Here is one, that I think is the best advice on writing I have come across in quite some time. I wish all writers would post this at their desks. Books would be the better for it. As follows:

"...today people use as many words as they can and think themselves very wise for doing so. For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often far worse to use too many."

This is not the best thing about The Phantom Tollbooth. It would not even make the top hundred. Have you read it? Have you read it in the last thirty years? Might be time to think about that dog with the clock for a body all over again.

Thirty-One Ways to Look at a Blog

Third rule of Blog Club? Don't use blog as a billboard.

Unless somebody you love makes something absolutely amazing, and you kind of have to. Please go to: http://www.frontrunnersthefilm.com/ and buy tickets immediately.

Over twenty years ago this filmmaker shot footage of me playing "Heart and Soul" on her parents' piano and me and her cousin acting goofy on the frozen pond in her backyard. Now, she makes this. Do I sound surprised? I'm not even the slightest. Just very, very proud.

Do I even write anymore?, you may be asking yourself. Yes, but not tonight.

Blog Club

Rule number one about Blog Club: Do not make promises for future entries.

Dog therapy. Hmm. Now I'm thinking The Phantom Tollbooth, the dying garden, the connections I have with the children in my gardening class, opting out for the right reasons, signing up for the right and the wrong ones, cheese, passions, late fall roses, personality, the poem about the little silver shavings I wrote in college, art and friendship and the art of friendship, prescience, politics, and yes, it must be said, still a little bit about fried chicken.

No more promises. (I want to say I'll write a real one tomorrow, and I'm sorry, but that would also break rule number two. So I won't.)

Lord of the Dogs, A Beginning

It's super late, and I am still not quite feeling like myself, so I will start, which is better than not starting. Or at least that is what I am telling myself these days.

Last night we went from Lily's Class Night, which entails all of the parents going to the school in the evening and having the teacher explain what is going on in the classroom, to another class night of sorts: Sadie's first training session to become a therapy dog.

There were some parallels, of course. The chairs were uncomfortable. The teacher was determined to hold our attention. There was no food for the grown-ups. But for the most part, dog school, which is what Lily is calling this new project, is not much like kid school at all.

In preschool, at least those like Lily's progressive version--which is increasingly the national model--classrooms are inclusive and accepting. All students are equal, and all varieties of temperament, ability, and attention span are accepted and embraced. When I look around Lily's classroom when the kids are there, I see happy faces and involvement, some kids drawing pictures, others building with blocks. When somebody cries, he is not thrown out of the room. When somebody eats too much at snacktime, she is not banished to the hallway. Dog school, on the other hand, can be brutal.

Teaser

Still headache-y so will tantalize you with tomorrow's subject matter: Sadie's first therapy dog class. Tantalized? No? Keep an open mind.

In My Head

I was so busy today that I didn't eat, and when I got to my six o'clock meeting, my head was pounding. I figured I was hungry, so I rummaged around for some food but couldn't come up with anything. Instead, I drank water and sat through the meeting, occasionally forcing myself to chime in but focusing mostly on the building pain in my head that for some reason didn't feel altogether familiar. Yet.

My migraines sneak up on me, still, although I have been getting them for a decade or so, and they are hormonal, making their appearances theoretically predictable. I almost always take too long assessing the pain: Is this a headache, an ordinary headache, caused by hunger or caffeine withdrawal or sinuses or stress or will it require the pill? The pill is serious business. It widens the constricted blood vessels in my head and has never yet failed to stop a migraine from fully forming, but it comes with a warning list I only read once--once was more than enough--and I avoid taking it unless I absolutely have to.

But sometimes I have to. I just knocked on wood before I wrote this, but overall, I think I have been lucky when it comes to health and pain. I have had my fair share of treatable ailments, and the scare of Lily's birth, and some very manageable autoimmune conditions, but nothing that comes close to the experiences of some of my most beloved friends and family, who have battled chronic bouts of debilitating joint pain, cancer, Type I diabetes--the list goes on and on if I force myself to make it.

I also have, I think, a pretty decent pain tolerance. I have always had headaches, and have always take aspirin for them, which is why I was blindsided by the first one I couldn't get up and push through. Before I had my medication, I was rendered unmovable, and mute. I needed my eyes to be barricaded with material so thick the light could not pass through; I could not sip water, sit up or move the muscles in my face. I could not sleep. So I would lie in darkness, wincing at every crack of the floorboards, willing myself to get through one minute so as to agonize through the next.

When I catch the migraine early enough, when I reach that moment when I know that the medication will be required, I swallow the pill, find a place to lie down, and wait. This is what I did tonight, with a black pillow a friend made me for expressly this purpose over my eyes, and truth be told, although I am sitting here typing now, and I have been up and about for the last few hours, during which I had several phone conversations, cleaned the kitchen, did the dishes, and watched the news, I can feel it still: the migraine, shrunken but not completely defeated.

If I focus on it, I can feel the distinctive concentric circles of pain behind the front of my skull, behind my eyes, spreading and then beginning again at a point of pain in the middle of my head. I will go to sleep when the last circle fades away, when I feel clammy and disoriented, exhausted and relieved.

In Limbo On So Many Fronts So I Give You...

A Brief Annika Update.

Annika has three new teeth on the top, making for a grand total of five, counting the two well-established ones on the bottom. This makes her a demon with an apple.

She also will, if you get down on the floor and hold out your arms, run into said arms and give you a full body hug. I have never met a one-year-old who is so all over the hugs. And the enthusiastic kisses. And when the spirit moves her she will just run up to you and throw her arms around your legs and hug you that way, too.

She's a most delicious baby.

Stacked Stones

My mother, whose birthday it is tomorrow, has a certain centered quality, a kind of self-containment that I can never adequately describe. At its worst, it renders her implacable, but most of the time it makes her indescribably capable and calm, the person you'd want by your side in a crisis of any proportion, a stabilizing force for people like me, who tend toward anxiety and chaos.

I realized today, while spending a few golden hours at the beach with my family, that I have always assumed she was born with this quality, which she shares with her brother more than anyone else. While I still think this is true, I am now thinking of all the ways she cultivates this way of being. I realized this because inspired by her birthday, and my desire to give her something I knew she would value, I followed her lead on the beach.

For all of my life, and surely longer than that, my mother has loved the ocean and beaches--islands, especially--more than just about anything else. An isolated beach is an ideal setting for my mother's brand of tuning out and turning inward, and although my sister and I both inherited large doses of my father's more manic neuroses, as well as his more extroverted personality, she has passed this love on to both of us.

Part of her relationship to beaches has been through shells and shelling, but more recently she has turned to stones. About ten years ago, she gave us all little Asian wooden boxes which, when opened, contained about six smooth, flat beach stones that could be stacked in a pile about four inches high, the largest on the bottom, the smallest about the size of a penny stretched oblong.

What are these? we all asked, until we began stacking them, the stones themselves soft and comforting under our fingertips, the act of stacking somehow soothing and satisfying at the same time. This summer, she began collecting stones again for these little collections, tiny Zen projects, and as I finished my lobster roll up on the sand today, I could see her sifting through piles, searching for more.

So instead of reading the book I'd brought, which is what I have done on every other occasion when my mother has been searching for shells or stones in the past, I rolled up my jeans and headed down to the water's edge myself, in search of some stones for her.

I had promised Lily I would help her find "rainbow stones," six same-sized stones in hues of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, which I did, relatively quickly. With that out of the way, I began hunting for the long, flat stones my mother is favoring these days, but on a slightly larger scale. The stones under my feet and in my hands, running through my fingers as I sifted, in my clenched hands as I walked, took prominence over the task at hand. Although I didn't lose sight of my goal--to find a tower of my own to give my mother--the finding of these six stones in particular did not seem urgent. I somehow knew I would find them; I somehow stopped searching so hard.

I don't know this intuitively, this need to stop searching with urgency. In fact, to slow like this and see only the stones in my line of vision is counter intuitive to me. I gave my mother her stones after dinner, wrapped in tinfoil, along with six rainbow stones too. I don't know what she made of my giving her a gift she'd invented, that she'd already given to me. I don't know if she knows that I'm trying, one smooth stone at a time.

The Chicken Came First, Definitely.

I have been circling around a number of serious, introspective possible subjects today, including what we are and are not willing to excuse in the people we love, the notion of community service as an antidote to self-involvement or a downturn of some kind, the unexpected lessons learned while playing checkers with Lily, Annika's preternaturally joyful personality and its ability to change the mood of a household, but I seem to have sunken into a sort of a food stupor, after a day spent making an elaborate Portuguese version of a cassoulet and then the eating of said dish, and instead I find my thoughts turning--perversely--to fried chicken.

I cannot say this of any other food, but I do remember the first time I ate fried chicken. I was seven, and my parents had taken us to Disney World. Or rather to Orlando, where we made side trips to Busch Gardens, an orange grove and a little restaurant recommended by friends of my parents that had red-and-white checkered tablecloths and a special of the house.

That first fried chicken leg left a more indelible impression on me than Mickey and Minnie, the It's a Small World ride and even the heated swimming pool at the unimaginably campy Polynesian hotel, which at the time seemed the epitome of glamour and luxury. I had never tasted anything so luscious and savory and crispy and succulent in my life.

And since that first piece of fried chicken, over thirty years ago now, I have sought perfection in this arena all over the country, and in other countries, too, when it is to be found. It is the one item I cannot ignore on a menu; it is the one dish I have never made quite to my own satisfaction after repeated attempts.

To be clear, I enjoy even mediocre fried chicken and fried chicken's woebegone step-siblings: the nugget, tender and strip. I will eat chain restaurant fried chicken, have sampled various frozen versions and delight in ethnic, nontraditional Southern varieties, such as Korean and Vietnamese.

A few years ago, I read an article in a food publication announcing that two Southern chefs would be opening a small storefront fried chicken spot TWO BLOCKS from my apartment. I stalked the place for days when it was late to open, calling and disguising my voice once, when I was afraid one of the owners might recognize me and take for a fried chicken freak, which, I guess, I kind of am.

Since the opening of the fried chicken joint, which also makes nice, tart lemonade, a decent if unorthodox macaroni and cheese and several lovely roasted vegetable sides, I have become a frequent diner. I have indoctrinated Lily into the ways of fried chicken, and when we play "This Little Piggie" with Annika's toes, we say, "This little piggie went to the fried chicken place," instead of, "This little piggie ate roast beef," a sure sign of a lack of respect for meter in nursery rhymes if not full-fledged fried chicken insanity.

Anyway. I am stuffed full of pork shoulder and kale and white beans and grilled olive oil toasts right now, and I am not quite sure why writing this didn't make me feel vaguely, or even certifiably ill. But it did not. It did make me think of when next week I might be able to fit in a pit-stop at the fried chicken place.

Sometimes It's Not the Journey, It Really Is the Destination

I am writing this from a house in the woods near the ocean on an island, which is, in my book, about the best possible place for a house to be. It is ten o'clock, I think, and for the first time in--and I don't approximate--sixteen hours that I have felt at all relaxed.

This is because although I fight it, deny it, strive for defiance of the fact: It is a waking nightmare to take a real trip with two small children. The trip itself, after the getting there part, can be quite nice, although it's a far cry from the old days of what I now think of, wistfully, as wanton self-indulgence. But the getting there--about ten minutes into it, every time, I find myself thinking: Is there anyway to get out of this gracefully?

Six a.m. the shrieking began--Annika, in her crib, asking in the most effective way she knows how, to get out. And like a village or any kind of idiot, I hadn't packed. I usually do it in advance, and it's still bad, don't get me wrong, but not this bad. The next three hours entailed the cleaning (minor) and dressing of everyone, the feeding of three of the four of us (guess who left hungry; hint: she's typing right now), the packing of thirty-seven bags in which every possible wardrobe situation had to be hit by the four-year-old, the packing for the doll, which took--and I'm not kidding--longer than the packing for the rest of us, and if you are thinking to yourself that I was being self-indulgent and could have curtailed this, believe me, I had to walk out of the room counting silently to ten and tell Ben that I was on the verge of hurling Bess (aforementioned doll) out the window into a garbage truck idling below.

There was more, involving missing bottle valves, the lack of canned dog food or milk, necessitating a last-minute, inexplicably forty-five minute run to the corner store, more whining and shrieking and crying and swearing, and then finally, we were actually in the car and on the way.

To Connecticut, where we had to unload the car and move everything into the van, the only vehicle capable of transporting my parents, sister, grandmother and us around the island (and I should say semi-capable, as I still--after thirty plus years of complaining--am the one crouched on the floor between the seats where all of the dog hair and crushed Cheerios live). And get a few more essentials for Bess, who is definitely going to boarding school, and change diapers, pick tomatoes, whine and shriek some more, the usual.

By the time we got to the ferry, at 4:45, my father, whom I was surprised to find still living, as he had been hoping we would arrive when he likes to--four hours before the boat leaves--and spends every instant leading up to the sound of the departure horn on the brink of a cardiac arrest, was standing by his car. Which of course had to be unloaded into ours, including all twenty of my mother's enormous coolers, because there is, of course, no Costco on this island and god forbid we should have to (in a whispered tone) pay full price for our weekend's groceries.

This left my customary nook between the seats nonexistent, so I got to perch on the comfortable plastic edge of Annika's infant car seat, doubled over at the waist because I was too close to the ceiling to sit up straight, causing my mother, a.k.a. She Who Buys Exclusively in Bulk, to speculate, "I wonder if this seating arrangement is illegal?"

Hmmm.

I could go on, and for once I actually want to, but I will stop. The house is quiet and peaceful and dark. Everybody else is asleep. I think I can hear the sound of the ocean through the woods and darkness.

Earlier today on the phone, at the height of the frenzy, I asked my mother (whose pre-made pasta dish was delicious and very much appreciated, I grudgingly admit): Is this really worth it?

I ask it every time. And the answer is always the same.

I'm very glad to be here.

Member of the Tribe

Wait, wait! I didn't fall asleep watching the debate--only the post-game wrap-up, which I wanted to see but wasn't really necessary, as the victor emerged so clearly and early on that I cannot imagine even a Fox commentator taking a contrary stance to mine. Although I'm sure they did, and that's fine. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

I wasn't going to write about the election tonight, or really at all here, but I find myself drawn to the subject like a moth to a flame. Which is a bad cliche to use because in it, the moth burns up and dies, when--I am increasingly confident--the moth in this case is going to be fluttering all the way to an inaugural ball at the White House. (I am speaking metaphorically, Dad. I'm not actually going to be invited to the inaugural ball.)

Today, for a variety of reasons, I found myself thinking about a concept I have written about before: that of the tribe. Of the many tribes I feel so grateful to belong to, the tribe of my high school is one of my favorites. Twenty years after graduating from this school, I still am in touch with so many of my classmates--and my classmates are in touch with so many of each other--that I wonder if it is a phenomenon that exists outside the world of regular high schools altogether. Certainly none of my other friends maintain such close ties with or feel such love for and pride in the school they attended between the ages of fourteen and eighteen-years-old.

One of the reasons I was reminded of my love for this tribe today--and my friends from my high school are of all ages; some were not there when I was; others are twenty years my senior--was by the amazing number of contributions my fellow graduates are making to the Democratic campaign of Barack Obama. Thanks to their updates, I know people who have been busy canvassing and registering voters in states all over country, organizing fundraisers, writing articles in national publications, making political art, and doing all they can in active ways to ensure that this country take a dramatic turn in an opposite direction from where it's been headed.

I don't think this is a coincidence. I think my high school attracts students who do actually believe they can change the world, and then sets out to show them how in the best possible ways: by finding their passions and making them work for the greater good of society. Even at fourteen most of my classmates were politically aware, engaged with the world outside the school and committed to causes as far-reaching as anti-apartheid, environmental awareness (not nearly as big in general in the eighties), civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal protection agencies, the needs of the elderly, and much, much more.

I am starting to sound like a glossy brochure, so I will stop. I guess all I really wanted to say was that I am a very proud member of this tribe, inspired by its members and committed to remaining true to its values and shared sense of purpose. Thanks, guys.

Politics

"My friends..."

I must confess: I just fell asleep watching debate coverage. I'll try to be extra good tomorrow.

Something I Have Come to Appreciate Thanks to Lily

When I first moved to New York about fourteen years ago I lived up near Columbia University, on 119th Street, to be precise, which meant that my "regular" subway line was the 1/9. At the time, and maybe still, for all I know, there was a group of acapella subway singers who used to do fifties songs on the 1/9 trains at all hours of the day and night, and I think I remember the first time I heard them. I thought they were pretty good. I have a soft spot for the doo wop stuff thanks to my dad, and the guys had decent voices, and the songs they sung had actually been arranged with decent harmonies.

And then, I lived on 119th Street for two more years and heard the same version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" about 487 times, and when I so much as sensed the presence of one of these men on the platform I would sit down and wait for the next train instead of getting on with them. I came to feel this way about virtually all subway performers: best to be avoided if humanly possible.

Until the last few years when I started noticing Lily's reaction to music of any kind in the subway station or on the train: absolute rapture. If there is a way for her to get close to the performance, she will. Even the most tentative flautist is stared at wide-eyed, with awe and admiration. "Can I have some money, Mama?" she will whisper, before putting a folded dollar in the hat, or guitar case, or paper bag, with nothing less than reverence. Sometimes, she will beg me to stay and listen longer, even as our train is pulling in, and I have to say no, we must get on or we'll be late to wherever it is we are going.

Today, we were coming back from Brooklyn when a Peruvian trio came into our car, armed with an accordion, a tambourine and some kind of smallish string instrument. Their music was loud and lively, and an older couple, tourists with fanny packs and guide books, at the other end of the car began dancing a little, and I had an impulse to say something funny about them to Lily, as though she were my peer and not a four-year-old kid. But when I looked at her face, that impulse fled, and in fact, when I looked back at the couple I saw them for what they actually were: a really happy sixty-something pair on vacation, appreciating the spontaneity of the city, the fact that there is live music everywhere here if you choose to hear it, that anytime is the right time to dance a little if the spirit moves you.

And Lily. She didn't even ask, just held out her hand. I gave her a dollar, and when the train stopped at the next station she got up and walked the few steps to the man holding the outstretched hat and dropped it in as I watched. "Thank you," she whispered, a loud whisper, loud enough so that I heard it, and the people sitting across from me heard it, and we all smiled as the man bowed deeply to her, and she returned to my side.

The men started to play again as they walked by us, and pushed through to the next car, and beside me, Lily sighed, rapturously.

"Mama? That was beautiful music." Although I can't say I've ever had much of a taste for the accordion, I think she was right.

All Things Come Back to Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose words I so often turn to, wrote that "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius." Although I have read certain of Emerson's essays so many times I know much of them by heart, and wrote my college thesis on Emerson's essays, and quote him more frequently than certain of my friends would like, I never really questioned this one much, and now I am thinking it over at last. I can't believe I am saying this--although it has happened before. On this, I am afraid, Ralph Waldo and I must ultimately disagree.

I know what he is saying because on one level, in one way, I agree with him. He means that without the courage of your convictions even in the face of all adversity, with the insecurities and self-doubts and constant questioning most of us engage in on a regular basis, you are not going to be the next Einstein; you are not going to make wild leaps of faith and imagination that will revolutionize the way the world works because you refuse to let go of them. I like this idea, and I like the fact that some people who were condemned and cursed or ignored for their crazy-sounding ideas, or art, or politics did prove to be geniuses in due time because they knew, in an unequivocal way, that what they thought was true.

But the problem is that as I get older, and my world expands, I meet people regularly who believe in their own private heart that what is true for them is true for all of us, and they are mistaken. And the older I get, the less sympathy I have for tolerance of ideas I find downright dangerous or hateful, and the more inclined I am to decide that life is to short to suffer fools gladly, or even willingly, when really, most of the people I love and respect don't believe dangerous or hateful things and don't believe that what they feel to be true is necessarily true for the rest of us.

Perhaps it is true of small and friendly writing blogs, as for dinner parties, that religion and politics should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. But it's a little late for that. If you've been reading, you have a decent idea where I stand. So let me just give you a brief example. I know that there are people who believe that abortion is murder. They believe it so passionately and deeply and wholeheartedly that they know it to be true--they think there should be strict laws against it, they think having one should be punishable by law. Does that make a person who believes this a genius? That is a rhetorical question.

In my opinion, the idea of making that decision for somebody else, of telling a girl, a child, who has been violently raped, that she must bear a child that would be the product of that rape, is evil. I believe this passionately and deeply and wholeheartedly and know it to be true. I abhor the idea of laws existing that would force that child to have a baby, and I will fight with all my might to ensure that that never happens in the world I live in, the world in which I am raising my girls. Does that make me a genius? No. See what I mean?

Again, I know what Emerson meant. But there is a fine line sometimes between genius and insanity, or even blind ignorance. I believe that Hitler thought what he was doing was the best thing for the world, for "all men," at least the ones he was allowing to survive. I am thinking of this tonight partly because of politics, of course, but also because of a friend of mine, a person I love and greatly admire, who has recently been condemned by someone he loves for something he believes because of what the other person believes just as strongly. There is no genius at play involved, just bigotry and ignorance. And fear.

I will end with another morsel of Emersonia, one that holds up for me still, under scrutiny and seems--now that I think about it--to contradict the opening quote. Emerson wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."

I like to think this is about keeping an open heart and an open mind, about having the courage of your convictions and the sense to sense when the convictions need to be changed.

Neighborhood, Finally

Late this afternoon, after a most satisfying day registering voters in Pennsylvania with a friend, I decided to take an exhausted Lily to the greenmarket, as neither she nor I wanted to sit around while Annika napped. As we pushed through the door in the lobby, we saw our friends from the sixth floor--a father and his two boys, boys Lily loves--just outside. The dad and the oldest boy were playing chess; the younger boy was drawing on the sidewalk with thick pieces of colored chalk. Lily looked up at me, longingly, as the dad said, "Can Lily stay here with us while you go to the market?" She actually jumped a foot off the ground in excitement. I told them all that when they were headed inside, if I wasn't back yet, that Lily could be dropped off at our apartment, as Ben was home, working, while Annika slept.

When I came back up the street about an hour later, our friends from the second floor--a mother and her three children, one of whom is a newborn--had joined the crew. The kids were having so much fun they didn't notice my arrival. They had drawn a series of hopscotch boards. They had drawn "safety spots" for tag, which they were playing with such enthusiasm that even the most crotchety passersby smiled. The older two kids corralled the younger ones away from the street if they ventured too close. The bossier kids protested if someone lingered too long in a "safe spot," slowing the game. Periodically, someone would stop mid-run just to hug someone else. Seriously.

The four adults--we had been joined by one's visiting step-mother--stood by the side of the building and chatted, about politics, restaurants, recipes, the stock market, jogging, a little of this and a little of that, as we watched the kids play. At one point the dad said, "I wish we had a camera. I wonder if they'll remember this in thirty years."

They will. I still remember how wistful I felt whenever we would drive away from my cousins' house, watching out the car window as all the kids on the street gathered by somebody's mailbox to play twilight Kick the Can. Even more vividly I remember the times I slept over and was invited to join. I loved every instant of it--the sound of voices calling over lawns as the sky darkened ever so slowly and the fireflies danced in the raspberry bushes--but I was never of it, myself, only a visiting guest.

But Lily has this--these friends who she doesn't see every day, every week, who don't go to her school, aren't exactly the same age as she is or as each other, have their own busy lives during the week. And every once in a while, more than that, actually, but in moments that happen organically--on the sidewalk, on the roof deck, in one of our apartments after a chance meeting in the elevator--there is this vibrant, noisy, joyful, chaotic gathering of these children who know each other homes and families, favorite toys and infant siblings, and no camera is necessary to record the sight or the sound. Feeling completely at home in this scene is a gift I am so glad Lily has been given, not by me but by the circumstances of our lives.

Because we didn't have one, though, a camera, I will record the moment I would like to remember: the five oldest children, ages four to seven, running in a semblance of a line, chasing the youngest one, mine, who stopped then to be caught--the point of every game of chase--head thrown back, hair wild, eyes bright, laughing so hard she was crying.

Double Vision

One of the strangest things about life is that so often what should feel strange instead feels utterly natural, inevitable, even, oftentimes as the realization that it should feel strange is occurring. Wow. That's quite a jungle tour of a sentence. You'd almost think my day had started at 6 with bananas being smashed into my hair and that I had traveled to Chinatown by subway with three other adults and three children under 4 and a stroller to eat crab and pork soup dumplings and that in between so many other things happened that I would use up my whole seven hundred and fifty words just to begin to describe them.

In other words, I had a jam-packed day, which I like, most of the time, but there were very few quiet and reflective moments in it, which I think I need more of. One such moment came during what I will call the third chunk of the day, around lunchtime, after I'd left Nicole with Lily and Eva at a restaurant to go and pick up Annika, who had just woken up from her nap. As I pushed the stroller toward the restaurant on my way back to where they were already eating, I could see them from a block away or more, as they were eating outside. And I thought to myself: There is Nicole, sitting at a sidewalk cafe eating lunch with our TWO CHILDREN, who look quite a bit like miniature versions of us, and act quite a bit like junior versions of us, enough so that it seemed to me, in this moment--once I squinted Nicole out of the picture--that I was watching us sitting and eating lunch in New York, which of course doesn't make sense because we didn't know each other as children, and when we used to come to New York in college, to go to a museum and Canal Jeans and maybe Bloomingdales and a Chinese restaurant where a glass of wine was free, we never ate at a sidewalk cafe, at least not that I can remember.

But actually it seemed more like they were distinct from us (which of course they are, although it doesn't usually feel that way yet) and entirely feasible that at some point thirty odd years down the road they could very well be seated at a sidewalk cafe eating lunch together with children of their own, talking about how much more relaxing it is to have lunch without one's children, or even (more likely) about us, and how we used to take them out together in New York when they were little and how one day a woman behind us in line at a store looked at them and said, "Best friends?" and we sort of smiled at her--she was an odd seeming woman--and I thought to myself, well, we'll see.

But the really strange part of what I was seeing as I looked at them, the part that didn't feel strange although I thought that it should, was that we had these children at all, after all the years we had of making cookie dough just to eat the batter, lying on our backs on the floor listening to music, walking on fences, singing in harmony--of being the children, or rather the young adults, and then the not so young adults, without them, and how it was--as goes the cliche--almost impossible to imagine not having them, and just as impossible to imagine that they would not be sitting together at a table on the sidewalk sharing a cup with a straw and pizza with basil leaves on it and that Nicole would be sitting watching them, or rather looking out at something on 14th Street as they leaned into each other, hysterically laughing, and that I would be walking toward them, smiling, pushing this other one in a stroller.

Fake Sick

I will resist the temptation to share my thoughts about the debate with you, partly because I have been engaged in a one-way dialogue with the television set for the last two hours and partly because, well, that's not the point of the blog. (I know, I know, it's my blog, I need to give myself more freedom, I should write whatever I feel like--but I don't want this to be a diary blog. I just don't.) But in a funny way, what I will write about is, for me, not wholly unrelated.

Today, I got a call from Lily's school. Which is not unusual, in that it happens pretty much every day for some reason or another, but today I was told that Lily was feeling sick, that they thought she had an ear infection, and that I needed to come and pick her up. I admit: I was suspicious. Lily is (knock on wood) so very rarely sick, and when she is, it is always obvious. She had been fine that morning, not so much as a sniffle. Plus, I had been getting a funny vibe from her. Although she loves school so much she wishes she could go on weekends, she had made a few comments referring to the large amounts of time we had spent together over the summer, which I had halfway taken off, due to a transition in our childcare and sheer exhaustion from the previous work year.

When I peeked in her classroom, with Annika strapped on my chest, I saw her playing in a corner. It was "rest time," during which none of the children actually rest but are forced to remain quiet and calm in the darkened classroom. As soon as she saw me she ran over and threw her arms around me and Annika. I knelt beside her to feel her forehead, and she whispered into my ear, "I actually feel a little better now."

"That's great," I said. "We'll just go home and call Dr. Kaufman. See if she wants us to come in."

"I actually feel ALL the way better," Lily said quickly. "Like I don't even need to go home."

A ha. Gotcha. I knew it. But why? The jealousy over the baby has really dissipated, almost to the point of nonexistence. She loves going to the doctor too; it wasn't that. I gave her a hug, told her the babysitter would pick her up at the usual time, and that I would see her after work. She was already off, waving good-bye over her shoulder.

When I got home, however, she was curled up in a chair, reading, and she didn't jump up to greet me like she always does. I went over to her, ignoring for the moment that Annika had managed to carry the bathroom trash can out to the living room and was sifting through its contents. I asked her if she wanted to come into the kitchen with me and help me make dinner. She shrugged and then nodded. I picked her up and carried her in.

"Mama?" she said, as I opened the fridge. "Why do you have to work?"

We'd actually skirted around this issue before, but she had never asked me so directly, from a place of such genuine interest and need. Feeling blindsided, I floundered around. In the right places, but it was still certifiably floundering. I talked about how lucky I was to have some work that I loved, and that all of the work that I do, and that daddy does, is because in our family we believe it is important for both parents to contribute to pay for the things that we need. I explained that although I love picking her up from school, I cannot do it every day, and I told her about the wide variety of jobs that most of the mothers of the kids in her class have. I told her that I knew that someday she would have work that she loved that would help her support herself and her own family, whatever shape that may take, and that I would always encourage her to work hard for the things that she wanted.

She asked a lot of questions. She was listening hard. But by the time I was finished, her body had relaxed, and she was smiling again. I had a feeling she wouldn't try to trick me into pick-up anymore.

"I like writing with you, when you're writing," she said. "And I love when you teach my class." I felt relieved.

"Thank you, Lily," I said. "That makes me feel really good."

"But I will still always wish you could pick me up." I nodded. And I understood. And what's more, I felt optimistic that someday, further on down the road, she would too.

Undivided, Trying

As a person under the age of eighty living in New York City within walking distance of some of the best restaurants in the world, I fear I have tonight hit a new low: the 5:15 dinner reservation. I realize this sort of thing is very popular in much of Florida, and Atlantic City, and certainly in the golfing cities of America's Southwest and, it must be said, with my parents, but as a certifiable night owl and a passionate lover of eating dinner out, it has never been on the menu for me.

And I have guests--epicure guests--who love wine and food and restaurants, too. But the restaurant we wanted to eat at, for nostalgia's sake and because we all love it, had one reservation on the one night we could all go out, and it was tonight at 5:15. As we walked in, I said to the hostess as we followed her to our table, "We're thinking of this as a very late lunch." She sort of smiled, but behind the smile was an edge: an edge that said, very clearly, don't even think about trying to sip drinks slowly until 8 o'clock so you can eat at a reasonable hour like people who aren't senior citizens.

I will say that in spite of the lack of an early bird special, we had a fantastic time. The wine was from a region in Italy we'd stayed in together. The food was excellent, and our ordering harmonious, meaning that I was allowed to control most of the decision-making, to such an extent I was even able to gracefully acquiesce on an appetizer I would not have chosen. It had stopped raining by the time we were ready to leave, which felt like 10 but was really 7:30, and as a bonus, we were going to come home and find all three of our collective children in bed, asleep, avoiding any and all potential bedtime fuss.

Jet-lag, 3-year-old Eva's, thwarted this plan, however, and when she came out of the bedroom to see her parents, Lily, who had been sleeping, woke up to see me standing in the doorway. I told her I'd lie down with her for a few minutes, and so I did, on the trundle bed, abandoned by Eva, as Annika stood up in her crib looking down on us, saying one of her three best words--"Hiiii"--over and over again. And as we lay there together, Lily put her arm across my chest, and I put my hand over her small hand, absent-mindedly, willing myself to stay awake. My mind started in on the usual laundry lists: what I had to do later in the evening, what I had to do tomorrow, what I had to do over the weekend, where I would get my broken-down boots resoled and how much it would cost, and--finally--Annika quieted down and Lily, I thought, was asleep.

I opened my eyes,thought about how best to get up without disturbing her, when she whispered to me. "Mama? I like the way it feels with your hand on mine." I almost missed it. And for what? The turning wheels of low-grade anxiety, the stupid soleless boots.

"Me too," I whispered back. And closed my eyes again.