Lily is Six

Fortieth birthday came and went with little fanfare; in truth, but for the constant questions as to what my "big plans" were, it seemed like a blip on the radar screen. But tonight, although I was up until nearly 4 the night before, I am not so sure I am going to be able to sleep--all I can think about is this night six years ago, nearly to the minute, when Lily was born, and everything changed irrevocably.

I now cannot help but thinking of my life as "before" and "after," meaning that an almost impenetrable ravine exists between the part of my life before I had children and every instant since. Do I think this is too dramatically stating the case? Not for me, and not, I think for many people I know. It is hard for me, sometimes, to recall the "before" parts now in any way that doesn't seem like a dream. But this night, December 19th, 2003, the dividing line, as it were, I know will remain real, concrete, alive, for as long as I live.

It is true that I don't remember it seamlessly. Certain parts are blurry--I can access faces of loved ones popping in and out, the race down the corridor, the way my mother looked at one moment as the doctor was speaking to me, the Indian accent of the anesthesiologist, and so on. But other parts, scenes, are so visceral that my eyes well up if I so much as conjure them into re-existence: the moment my eyes met Lily's for the first time, for example, the tiny, soft yellow outfit my grandmother had knit for her to come home in, and the strangeness of trying to get it on her tiny limbs in the hospital room the frigid morning we brought her home.

I was just having a conversation with a friend about how in a way, there are no right choices, or wrong choices: there are only choices, and we make them, and then we take it from there. It's the unknown, the "after the choice," if you will, that defines us, and the way we respond to what we can't or don't choose: what happens to us, as we plough ahead, perhaps thinking we actually have more choices than we do.

I am such a skeptic, such a pragmatist. I have always, since very early childhood, been one of those people who believes you make your own luck, that the notion of fate or destiny is a bit of a fool's gold--shiny and appealing but worthless in the end. But somehow, although it defies logic, and my very core, I also believe on some level that Lily and I chose each other, and I felt that way six years ago, when I lay on a narrow gurney late in the night before we almost lost each other, and looked into those eyes and in that looking, that lock of connection, for the first time in my entire life lost sight of everything else in the world.

Forty, Day One

My graduate school thesis, which led to the writing of two books I wish I hadn't written, was a collection of essays written during the year I was twenty-five, which somehow seems like it happened about seventy-five years ago. I remember one line from the introduction of this thesis, or at least part of it, that described twenty-five as "the year I decided to document." This is not entirely true, however it is true that I did, actually document that year almost inadvertently, due to the requirement of writing the thesis. I can decide, purposefully, to document forty, and maybe because I have had an extra glass of wine tonight, I think that I will. So here I go. Night one. I have the venue. I have a goal. Let's see what happens from now until forty-one.

Work In Progress

Ugh. Last time was so bad I think I scared myself off. Remind me never to write a bad second novel if I ever actually publish a first one; I"m not sure I can tolerate the self-loathing. But now, now--I begin again, feeling like a Democratic president trying valiantly to pass a health care bill or get Israel and Palestine to sit down to a nice brisket, or falafel, and just talk it out. Actually, I feel a lot better than that, for no good reason. Have I mentioned I'm about to turn forty? Yes. And although I'm not exactly doing back flips on mattresses like the cast of Glee (a reference only 1% of you, if you still exist, will actually get), I'm not dreading it in quite the way I expected to.

I will admit that back in the day, those days when I could drink more than a glass-and-a-half of wine without falling asleep mid-conversation, those days when I occasionally went for a run, those days when I knew--and not in a purely nostalgic way--that movies were also shown in real theaters on big screens with surround sound, I used to think forty sounded impossibly old. And then everyone else around me either was forty or almost there, like me, and it suddenly seemed still kind of like the beginning of things--the beginning of the middle of things, anyway, and I didn't mind the thought so much, not the way I had hysterically met the age of ten: that fateful move to two-digit numbers.

I think it must be said, and if you are reading this it is pretty likely you have at the very least met me and more likely know me well, that thirty-nine has been, in so many ways, one of the more challenging years of my life. Although the particulars of everyone's thirty-nine are unique, I suspect that when viewed through a long lens, perhaps from the sager (oh, I hold out hope) vantage point of fifty, mine will seem part and parcel of what happens to many of us at around this age, or rather stage in life, when suddenly the opening credits are firmly behind us, the characters have for the most part been established, and the plot is in motion, for better or worse. What then? we say, or I do. What now?

But this isn't what I thought it would be like, I sometimes find myself whimpering to myself (not in a crazy out-of-body way but in a pathetic, feeling-sorry-for-myself way), and I'm not even really sure what "it" is, although I guess in a vague way it means my entire existence. And it's not that the particulars of my thirty-nine are even that distinctive or necessarily bad--in fact many of them, such as my children, are in so many ways even better than I ever could have imagined, but that is such a simplistic thing to say when of course their sheer existence is a piece of what I mean: my life, the whole, messy, disobedient, unraveling but only within the confines, hilarious, exhausting, frustrating, incomprehensible, slippery, elusive, did I say messy?, whole of it.

What did I think it would be like? I'm not sure I ever thought much about it, although in fifth grade my best friend and I had an elaborate vision of our adult lives that involved pink taffeta dresses and Mercedes sedans, which I think says vastly more about our upper middle class suburban surroundings and the very early eighties than it does about my vision for my life.

I guess I am thinking now, right now, in this instant, as I sit at my computer at almost midnight on the Monday before I turn forty, on an evening before I will get up at 6:30 with my two little girls to give them breakfast (ponytails made while seated on stools at the counter, please finish your milk, Annika turning on the same CD over and over to hear the "Mama song," where's the backpack? where's the permission slip? downstairs with my splashing cup of coffee to put Lily on the bus), that what needs to happen for me to meet forty with any sense of equanimity, is for me to tell myself, and to believe it, that the story is not yet written, that what matters is to keep writing it, that often the best writing happens when you don't know just exactly what you are going to say.

So here I go, with forty in mind. Let me keep writing. I must.

Baby Steps

It's always the second act that gives one pause, a pause that all too often becomes a grinding to a full-on halt. This is my way of acknowledging that yet again I took an unexplained, probably unearned, certainly uninteresting break from this, my essential outlet and yet my bete noire too. And that yesterday, in honor of my father, my most vigilant reader, I returned, like the fog, on "little cat feet," and that tonight I find myself, as I have so many times over the last however many nights, sitting at my desk thinking: Why am I doing this again? What on earth could I possibly have to say?

I just took a long break and pretended for a while I was not going to make myself keep writing, but all along I knew that I would. I always know when I am going to do something and when I am not, which seems to be a useless gift, as so often the things I know I am going to do are wholly unimportant, and the things I know I am not going to do are the things that must get done. And besides, we all know that at heart, I do believe I have a lot to say, and will keep saying it, even if I occasionally wander off into a void for a period, a void filled with small child obligations, vaccinations against already mutated viruses and some really atrocious TV.

One reason I started this blog was to have a place where I would be able to work through pieces intended for publication, and I have been stalling quite impressively, and I am quite a staller on my worst days, on writing so much as a line. So I think I will start here, and perhaps work it through in this capacity, as the bad TV is not proving conducive to productivity.

What I am working on, in my head, anyway, is a sort of a manifesto, inspired, in part, by Orwell's brilliant "Why I Write;" it will be called: Why I Read. I am both in love with my as yet nonexistent manifesto (always a bad sign) and overwhelmed by it, even in concept. I have been asked to write a piece for which this essay would suit, so it is, therefore, one of those things I must do, but as explained above, that fact alone is a speck of dust trapped in a light shaft: nothing, or very little more.

Pondering why I read, I guess would be, in the words of the immortal Maria, "a very good place to start." Except there is no pondering, really; I have mostly thought this through. I read because there have been more moments in my life consumed by reading than by any other thing, and because so many of these moments have made me aware, either consciously or subconsciously (which I realize later), that there is a reason for my existence on this earth--to read the words I am reading in that moment, and in the other moments, too.

Although it is neither the first nor the best example that comes to mind, I remember reading these lines from Orwell's essay entitled "Reflections on Gandhi." Such an innocuous little throw-away of a title; such a knife plunged into the clueless heart of what people had thought before Orwell raised the knife. He wrote: No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. Not the most devastating or reprinted line in the essay, but the one that, when I read it, stopped my breath in my chest, made me then read almost everything else the man had ever written.

It is the last part, the part about sainthood, that makes me want to raise that knife skyward, letting the blood flow off it and around my feet. Had faint praise ever damned so much as when Orwell referred to Gandhi's "clean smell?" Gandhi, to get back to the "Why I Write" essay, wrote because of his political beliefs, but his political beliefs were his muscles and organs and bones; they were him, boiled down to who he actually was. I read because it makes me know Orwell, and I read because it makes me know almost everything I know, including how to live, and think. Reading is the only way I know to connect myself to every mind that ever wrote, every idea that has ever been written, every picture that has ever been painted, and more: to all the thoughts that haven't yet been written down in words. I read because to read is everything.

See? Working it through. Bear with me!

Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby...

Tomorrow, on November 24th, my father will turn 67. A few weeks down the road, my birthday will arrive in the wake of his for the 40th time. But in honor of my dad, a man who keeps the greeting card industry in business but rarely receives any birthday recognition of his own, I would like to revisit a different birthday: his of 27 years ago.

When my father turned 40, my mother threw him a surprise party with a 1950s theme. There was a live band playing all of my father's favorite songs, and hours upon hours of dancing, and everybody got all dressed up. My dad, who had arrived in his regular clothes, was given the proverbial white sport coat and, I believe, a pink carnation by way of transformation. I remember my parents' friends in matching leather motorcycle jackets, my aunts in poodle skirts, cousins in sweater sets and rolled up jeans and my own outfit: a turquoise taffeta circle skirt and a white cotton blouse tied at the waist, a black velvet ribbon in my high ponytail. I was twelve, but thirteen was just around the bend, and I felt very glamorous to be at an adult party with dancing and live music and so many grown-ups, grown-ups who seem to me in my mind's eye like sophisticated creatures from another planet, eons older than I am now, will ever be.

How is it possible that all of those grown-ups were only forty years old? If I close my eyes I can see my father calling requests out to the band, doing the Twist in the middle of the dance floor, his hair still mostly black, the room surrounded by his friends and loved ones. The event itself was a perfect incarnation of my dad, a man who doesn't actually seem much older now than he did then, who still can twist as though American Bandstand were filming, would still cut a dashing figure in a white sport coat and who has raised two daughters with perfectly imperfect unconditional love that has given them a foundation on which all else is built and without which nothing much would stand.

The funny thing is that I felt that way at twelve. I remember leaning against a wall with a cup of soda, admiring the way my skirt glinted under the lights, and then watching my father dancing with my mother to a "slow dance," the kind I still, at nearly thirteen, avoided whenever I could. "They look so young," I really do remember thinking, swishing my skirt to make the taffeta rustle, watching the couples swaying to the mellow sounds of the music I had been taught to love by my dad.

If we are lucky, life is long and complicated. We celebrate and commemorate, we suffer and agonize, we triumph and fail, we persevere. I don't mind turning forty. In spite of all those corny greeting cards, it doesn't really seem that old; it never did. And as I always tell my grandmother, who will soon be 94, growing old seems, if not a walk in the park each day, certainly preferable to the alternative.

I think of my father's 40th birthday not just because my own is impending but because in so many ways he cannot see, my father is still that same man dancing, the last man on the dance floor for the love of the music, the man the band stays late for just because they like him, the man who again and again makes me feel like I am loved, and appreciated, and admired, and loved.

Happy birthday, Dad. This one--and all of them, really--is for you. Thank you for teaching me that every day is a possibility. I love you. And don't forget, ever, ever: This is the first day of the rest of your life.

Sisters

This morning when the alarm went off I forced myself to get out of bed and made my way to the girls' room to make sure Lily was up and getting ready for school. The light was on, I noticed, and as I neared I heard giggling. When I pushed open the door, Lily and Annika were both in Annika's crib surrounded by books. "I'm reading to Annika," Lily said, when she saw me standing there, watching them. "You're both in the crib," I noted, Mistress of the Obvious. Annika laughed uproariously at this.

"Two Lilys!" she said, pointing to herself and then to the actual Lily. "Two Lilys in crib!" I wonder if Lily will always loom so large to her little sister, be the sun around which all else orbits, so much so that her name, in some contexts, seems to have become synonymous with "girl."

On Mary's Death

I'm not as young as I once was--have I mentioned I'm turning 40 this year? no? if I can ever get back on my treadmill and write like I'm supposed to be doing, I will. But I'm still a good deal younger than most serious fans of Peter, Paul and Mary, a trio who recorded some of the most wistful, melancholy ballads I have come across, along with some of the most authentically earnest, persuasive protest songs of all time.

I grew up on Peter, Paul and Mary, one of the few groups my parents both loved. Peter, Paul and Mary rocked enough for my dad but were folksy and lyrical enough for my mom. And my sister and I loved every song that they sung. I think the songs you hear as a child, that you see your parents loving, are formative. My affection for Rod Stewart (thanks, Dad) and Cat Stevens (you, too, Mom) falls into this category. But my love for Peter, Paul and Mary transcends my childhood memories in that the songs I grew up loving, knew by heart, are the same songs--really the primary songs--I sing to my own girls now.

This is in part because I know all of the words, which I cannot say of so many other songs that I love. But it is also because the songs themselves have such a universal, ageless quality. I have to confess that there is no--zero--music written expressly for children that I can tolerate, with the occasional exception of the Free to Be, You and Me soundtrack, and that is definitely thanks to nostalgia. But "Puff the Magic Dragon" is another story altogether. The first time Lily really listened to the lyrics as I sang it, as I have been doing since the very night of her birth, she started to sob. "It's so sad," she said, and I felt both pride and a jolt of preemptive anxiety for this child of mine, so like another little girl whose fear of leaving childhood behind kicked in much earlier than it should have.

And the other songs I loved, love still: "Lemon Tree," also sad, "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Blowing in the Wind," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"--for a solid year the only song that would make tiny Lily stop crying, then Annika, too. It took me a while to realize that this one is, as a small friend of mine would say, "unappropriate." But I guess they all are, if you shy away from death, separation, loss, in your kid music.

Not all, though. Not all. Not the protest songs. My childhood friend Kate, whom I loved instantly upon first meeting but even more so when I learned that Peter, the actual Peter, was her godfather, and I used to jog around the high school track, wash our cars, drive to the movies, singing "If I Had a Hammer" at the top of our lungs. When we marched for a woman's right to choose on the mall in DC four years in a row, we sang it then, arms linked, understanding on some level that the words had prepared us for our actions.

Peter, Paul and Mary was a great introduction to popular music; I am grateful to my parents for instilling a love for it in me. And I have seen many Peter, Paul and Mary concerts since that first one, one here in New York with an especially sympatico friend (you can't just invite any twenty-something to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert) at Carnegie Hall. I made fun of us for being there, mocked myself for my uncoolness. But we both sang along to each song. Knew every word.

A few weeks ago I was stuck in traffic with the girls, a situation in which I can occasionally be prevailed on to sing. "The plane song, Mama," Annika said, and Lily concurred. "Jet plane, Mama," she said, and I sang, sang the chorus again and again at the end until they'd both drifted off into sleep. I hope Mary knew that there were those of us out there passing it on to the next generation. I think she probably did.

Time, and Time Again

On Sunday Lily learned how to ride a bike--"I just kept coasting and finding my balance and suddenly I could do it!"--and today she went to her first day of kindergarten, although as it was for precisely one half of an hour I'm not sure we all felt like it was really the First Day, if you know what I mean. In short, time is racing.

Didn't I just write about this? I'm in this groove, and I guess I'm not going anywhere for a bit. Time works like this: this is something I did not know when I was younger and am only fully realizing now. Like reading, and bike riding, for Lily--suddenly days, weeks, years of anticipating, experience, practice, desire--condense unexpectedly into instant reward. And then for days, weeks, years, something else seemingly utterly unattainable, time stretching out into infinity.

Today, we swam together, Lily and I, and I knew what she was thinking; she said it once, actually. "Swimming is next," I think she said, with shining eyes, thinking it would be magic, like the bike riding must have seemed: Now I cannot, but now I can! And I, old and consumed by the passing, and stopping, and racing of time, smiled slightly, suspecting that today would not, in fact, be the day Lily swam on her own--thinking fate likes to even things out--but I held her lightly in the water, walked back farther away for her to come to me, just in case.

I don't want to blink my eyes and have her not need my hand under her back as she floats. Floating, if done correctly, freezes time.

To Read, Perchance to Sleep

Have I ever told you about The Wilensky News? Or Wilensky's Words? The (very original) titles of my childhood self-published newspaper and my high school newspaper column, respectively. I find myself thinking about them today as I marvel at the infinite number of ways we humans find to make ourselves heard.

In a way, it's easier for someone like me, a person who from as early as I can remember felt an impulse to write: to put my thoughts down on paper so that others could read them. And then, as I made writing first my hobby, then the focus of my studies and then the center of my professional life, the outlets for expressing myself, for connecting my ideas with other people, readers, grew.

And many, many people, some who get paid for it, others who don't, have found a way to connect their thoughts and ideas by way of the written word, to other people. But what of the people who can't or don't? There are millions of them out there, too. I have heard it said by jaded publishing professionals that everyone wants to write a book, but in my experience this is wildly untrue. Most people I know do not have this impulse, this desire, this need, and so I find myself wondering why those of who do, do, and how those of us who don't fulfill this need or if in fact they just don't have it in quite the same way.

I can always tell when I'm rusty: I skirt around ideas, never quite honing in on the center. I am not a good stream-of-consciousness writer; I ramble, falter and remain oblique. This time, I'm not even sure why this is what I am thinking about. I do feel fortunate that I have a way to say what I want to say when I need to say it, be it here, or in another format. I guess maybe I am wondering what other people do or what happens when the thoughts hit a wall?

I don't know how many words that is, although I am going to try to be stricter with myself about the 750, partly because I want to be stricter with myself in general, partly because I do think it's good to have goals. But I am going to stop regardless and let myself indulge in what used to be my absolute favorite mode of relaxation, the activity I have missed most sorely since becoming a parent. I hope you are out there somewhere, doing the same. I am going to read. Goodnight.

Life, and Death, and Life

It is three weeks since I have written here, and I could write a book, or more, on why, but I will not--and not just because I clearly am having some problems producing copy. But I will use my three week absence as a transition into the notion of passing of time, which is something I have been thinking a lot about of late.

I am one of those people for whom September will forever mean back-to-school. Not only was I in school for most of my life, but my mother's life--and therefore the cycle of our family life--revolved around the opening of school each fall, and I grew up in New England, where the demarcation from summer to fall is practically tangible.

This is a good thing. I like cycles and patterns and rhythm. I like that first morning when a leaf blows across your line of vision as you're walking down the street and you think: a fluke, an errant leaf, and then another one flies by. And that first evening when the skin on your arms is a tiny bit cold and you hug yourself and think about cardigan sweaters. And I like the beginning of things, too, and although I know some see fall as the last gasp before winter, it has never seemed that way to me.

Now I have a daughter who was born in early September, a time of year I never thought of for birthdays. It is such a period of transition, one season fading away, the next assuming its place so gradually and effortlessly that if you blink you miss it happening at all. Cool mornings, hot afternoons, and the breeze kicking up at dinnertime. Early September.

Time passes, cycles through its seasons, and how can we, if we want to, alter the path? Sometimes, with certain patterns, we cannot. Today I watched from the hallway as Scout, whose true age we do not know, made his usual run for and leap onto the bed and failed to get his hind legs up. His heavy body pulled his back end down to the ground; his front paws remained on the edge of the bed, and for a moment he just stayed like that, in limbo, between the bed and the floor, unaware that I was watching. I hurried to him, bent and heaved him up all the way, and he rolled over on his side, content, the failure already forgotten, and placed his paw on my arm, looking up at me with trust and adoration. I squinted hard to keep from crying.

What of a cycle of disappointment, of our inability to see sometimes what happens again and again? Can we change people's expectations, or our own behavior? Can we change the way we see the world? Expressions tell us no, that we become "set in our ways," that we "can't teach an old dog new tricks." Not so, I think, having taught an old dog to shake paws; not so, I hope so hard, having seen those I love unable to see the patterns, let alone escape them.

Annika is two. She is establishing the patterns; the cycles are emerging, the seasons so new as to seem unfamiliar. She greets each day with a smile and outstretched arms, is somehow both messy and fastidious, as independent as her sister, funny and so often amused, and different each day, each hour, than she was the one before. She is no longer a baby but not yet a girl; her cycle is the same as Scout's. Time passes. We change, and we do not. Summer wanes, fall rises to meet the void, and before long the days are long again. School begins, with all of the promise of the best of beginnings, we blink--we heave our shiny new backpacks onto our shoulders--and suddenly the year is over all over again.

Were you worried? Have you missed me? I don't mean to be coy. I have missed this, though. I see it now, in the middle of it--or now, I realize--at the end. Don't worry. I say this to myself. I will write. I am writing. And time, as they say, marches on.

http://www.washhumane.org/HelpTrooper.asp

Some days feel like a lifetime, in a good way.

Today.

Up just past dawn with girls, cookies and lemonade made, signs painted and written, money box found, flowers readied, supplies loaded--stand a rousing success. Almost $87 earned for Trooper, the dog who is the subject of my heading. Listening to Lily explain to customers why she was raising money for Trooper some of the best moments of my life. Keeping Annika from inserting entire arm in lemonade pitcher or poking holes in cookies good reality check.

Library party for summer reading program. Girls dancing, singing, laughing--Annika in Lily's arms for half of performance. Lily and I exchanging proud and surprised looks when Annika followed dance instructions as well as the nine-year-olds who made up the bulk of the group. Ice cream sundaes.

Good phone call; book sold. Hard, joyful, life-affirming work to be done. Another one: Lily winner of mystery library prize, to be picked up tomorrow.

More lemonade/cookie stand action while Annika napping. Meet family up the street with two older girls who invite us over in the morning to meet their animals, including miniature ponies the father promises to "saddle up." Lily looks like it's Christmas times her birthday times another ice cream sundae.

Quesadillas and leftover lemonade for dinner: Lily's choice. An hour in the playroom at twilight. Lily says: "You worked really hard to make this for us, Mama. I am proud of you." I look up at the clean white ceiling imagining the birds and the butterflies. It looks just like I wanted it to, even without them.

Alone. The air is cool. Lie on the porch with an arm on each dog watching fireflies. Sadie gets up and brings me a pinecone.

Inside. More lemonade and The Wire.

Today.

http://www.sandyewilensky.com/

Should I acknowledge yesterday's skip? No, I think not.

As you may know, I spend a bit of time worrying about how much I am continuing to grow as I age, and I am eternally admiring of those people in my life who remain open to growth and change in spite of all old dog/new trick cliches and stereotypes. Which is why I can't stop thinking about how it felt to see my mother behind the table of her professional tent at last weekend's enormous art show in Mystic Seaport, in which she was selected to participate out of a competitive pool.

When I think of all the times my mother was asked to watch us participate in some kind of artistic or athletic performance, from our Nutcracker stints, to piano and cello and clarinet recitals, to library craft contests, and so much more, not to mention the endless performances we put on at home--I feel as though she should be given back ten years of her life, to sit in a hammock and read, or watch mindless television, or even just sit, peacefully, in a quiet, darkened room. Sometimes I think that, "Hey! Watch this!" could be the mantra of my childhood. But although I have, over the course of my life, seen my mother in her professional comfort zone command many classrooms, and even several times--awe-inspiringly--a school community of six hundred people or so, I have never seen her in quite this position before: vulnerably, by definition, exposing what she herself has created.

Her work, which focuses on her beloved oceans and beaches and seaside vistas, is beautiful: restful, soothing, occasionally moodily complicated, deceptively simple sometimes, and pure. To see it en masse, an oeuvre, if you will, was impressive, indicative of the amount of work and time and care she has invested in this new endeavor. But I was even more struck by my mother herself, answering questions about a painting with a customer, arranging the paintings to reflect her vision, making arrangements with a decorator who was shopping for a client, sitting, alone, behind the table at the back of the tent, watching the thousands of people walk by surrounded by what she had made.

In some ways my mother remains an enigma to me. Like her father, and her brother, too, she keeps her cards close to her vest; it is often hard to know just what she is thinking. But always, in so many ways, she knocks me to my knees. There is no complacency, no slow slide into acceptance, still, when I am least expecting it, a surprise. And this: this inspires me. To create, to be unafraid, to slow down when I need to, to push myself when I need to, and no matter what, to keep my eyes on the horizon, taking in both the long, smooth stretches of cool sand and the tumult of the waves at the line of the shore.

A Bientot

Just finished daunting work project; conciliatory post tomorrow.

To See

Spent the weekend with my parents and the girls in Mystic Seaport, where my mother was participating in an enormous art show--to be the subject of another entry. What I want to write about tonight is the La Quinta chain hotel we stayed in, and Lily.

I had taken on the task of finding us all a place to stay, and I began with the inns and bed-and-breakfasts. Booked, booked, booked. I moved on to the nicer chain hotels, also booked. A woman at a Marriott informed me, when I wondered aloud why it was so impossible to find a place to stay in Mystic, that because of the art festival and a large number of local weddings, I was going to keep hitting dead ends with my calls. She suggested I try a La Quinta, a chain I didn't know, one town over, as it had only been open for a few weeks and was therefore apt to be under the radar. She was right.

My parents arrived the night before we did, and en route I called my dad to ask how the place was. Like me, my father enjoys a nice hotel, and I knew from his curt, "You know. It's fine," that La Quinta was substantially sub par. It turned out to be very generic, on a highway near nothing save a Dunkin' Donuts, overpriced for what it was and in serious lack of managerial talent. The cleaning staff was erratic, the so-called heated pool was icy, and the complimentary breakfast--save for yogurt, dry cereal and coffee--inedible.

But from the moment we pulled into the parking lot, Lily was in heaven. "It's just so beautiful, Mama," she breathed as she climbed down from her car seat. And then. The room (with slick, polyester bedspreads and ochre curtains) was so "spacious and glamorous." The bathroom (chain motel standard, missing shampoo and soap) was "gigantic." The aforementioned pool, which I forced myself into out of profound love for my firstborn, Arctic to me and my mother, who somehow escaped going in, "the funnest fun I've had in 22 years." Even the breakfast--with its bevy of (unappetizing) choices--"delicious."

I found myself enchanted by Lily's perspective, not in a way that made me (or my father) ever want to set foot in a La Quinta again, but in a way that made me realize how new and full of possibility the world is to a five-year-old, even one who's stayed at a four star hotel before but not one that she remembers or that gave away tiny boxes of cereal to anyone who wanted one, just because that's what they do. It is a real part of my job, I decided, to help her stay this way--not as a five-year-old, of course, but as a child, an adolescent, and an adult who continues to know that, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

And finally, on our drive back Sunday evening, we stopped in at IKEA on the highway to pick up a few things. As we pulled into the lot, Lily practically jumped out of her car seat. "Look! Look what's right next door to IKEA!" I looked. Although I've been to this IKEA a dozen times, I'd never noticed the La Quinta beside it right there on 95. "We've got to tell Sands and Grandpa Joel," she added.

"That we saw it?" I asked, confused.

"No," she said. "That we saw it, and that it wasn't nearly as beautiful as ours."

Creation

You know how sometimes you get so immersed in something that you have no perspective on it whatsoever and even when someone else comments on what you are doing you can't really understand what they are talking about?

Wow, that makes no sense. What I am getting at is that today, this evening, I had a sort of a revelation--a flash of insight into my own behavior. I have been spending hours and hours of hard manual labor and challenging problem-solving and actual lifting of heavy objects--which for me is a rare occurrence--on this ridiculous project I took on of turning an unfinished attic wreck of a "room" into a viable play space for the girls.

It didn't occur to me to ask myself why. They play outside much of the time when we're here, and there was enough room for their toys downstairs and in their bedrooms, and although I am a big believer of not having all the adult space in a house taken over by children's stuff, that wasn't enough of a reason. Not to take on a project so out of my comfort zone, so physically taxing, so detail-oriented, and so dependent on an aesthetic vision for success.

I'm not quite finished yet, but today, I hauled up some heavy shelves for books and toys, some chairs, and the wooden dollhouse my mother gave Lily for Christmas. I started the most artistic part of the project, some lettering on the stairs that is hard to explain, and I brought up dozens of piles of books and puzzles, which the girls helped me begin organizing.

At one point, they were downstairs, and I surveyed the now all white space, a blank canvas just waiting for the bird and butterfly mobiles Lily and I are going to make, the artwork both Lily and Annika will make for the walls. It looks beautiful, I thought to myself, and that's when I realized it.

Sometimes, when you are preoccupied with knotty challenges, you just need to make--not buy but make, with the full involved labor of your own two hands--something pretty. Something that looks just the way you imagined it would.

Car Interior Dialogue, Take 326

Lily has always been one of those kids whose age you forget sometimes. She prides herself on competency, sometimes to a fault. Then, there are times when it is blessedly clear she is five. A dialogue:

Scene: car interior

Lily, from backseat: Mama? Have you ever built a grassman?

Me, driving and trying desperately to listen to John Hughes story on NPR: What? What did you say?

Lily: Mama! I said, have you ever built a grassman?

Me, giving up on Brat Pack analysis: No, I don't think so. What's a grassman?

Lily: You know. Like a snowman but made out of grass. You know, lots and lots of grass. Like from a big field.

Me, pausing to absorb strangeness: Hmmm. That seems like it would be hard to make. Have you ever made one?

Lily: Not exactly. I mean, I tried. It didn't get very big.

Me, choosing words carefully: I feel like it would be really hard to get the pieces of grass to stick together. Snow sticks to itself when it's wet so it's easy to make the snowballs. But grass--I can't really imagine it.

Lily, excited: Exactly! That's just what the problem is. You understand exactly. Maybe someday, we'll figure it out. Make a real grassman.

Me: speechless.

Fade out...

Distracted

Got into a painting groove and am about to fall over. Back tomorrow...just the trim left!

Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree, etc., etc.

Two nights ago, as I lay on the couch downstairs reading at 12:30 at night, I started when I suddenly saw Lily standing at the foot of the couch, Mr. Popper's Penguins in one hand, her new Itty Bitty Booklight--a colossal mistake, as you will see--in the other.

"What in the world are you doing awake?" I asked her, jumping up to take her straight back to bed. "What woke you up?"

"I haven't been to sleep yet," she said, on the verge of tears. "I'm so tired, but Mama, I just love reading so much. I just can't stop."

Last night 10, tonight 9:30 or so after the light was confiscated, to the sound of wailing protest: I know it's too late, and I want to go to sleep, but you have no idea how good this book is.

I told my mother about the 12:30 night on the phone and heard a sigh. "I can't say I'm very surprised," she said. Ah. Yes.

It's 11:30 now, and I think I will bring my book up to bed. But only for a half an hour. Famous last words.

Would-Be Baby Book Entry

Last night after dinner I told Lily that it was later than I had thought, and that we would soon need to organize ourselves for bed. I started putting some of the dishes in the dishwasher, not noticing that Annika had headed upstairs. A few minutes later, she appeared beside me, proudly bearing a short stack of clothing she had found in her bedroom. "I got my 'jamas for you, Mama," she said. And she had. The child is still only one.

And then this morning, I was reading to her from a pile of books she had assembled for the purpose. (Like Lily, whose first sentence, uttered incessantly, was, "Mama! Read this book to me," Annika is a voracious and demanding listener. Which is, don't get me wrong, a good thing.) One of the books was a counting board book, with pictures of objects numbering from one to ten. The last page was of a baby's feet, with the toes representing the number ten. The photograph had been taken from above, but I never would have noticed that--had never, in fact, having read the book before--if Annika had not said before I was able to read the line of text, "Uh oh! Poor baby." I looked at her, confused. "No, it's ten toes," I said, starting to count them for her. "No, Mama," she said, more insistently, holding her own feet up in the air like the feet in the picture. I realized the baby had to have been on its back for the picture to look like that. "The baby fell," she said.

And in a final trivial yet delicious detail, this afternoon Lily and I were doing a hard-to-explain craft/organizing project that involved construction paper and magic markers. Annika held a marker out for Lily as I walked into the room to get something. "This one, Lily," she said. "It's purple." Turns out she knows all her colors. Who knew?

Work, Oh, Work--Why Are You Always So Hard?

Oh, such frustration. And it's lingering. Usually my mistakes aren't quite so glaringly concrete.

Over the past few weeks I have spent hours of hard manual labor, alternately complicated and tedious, trying to transform the ramshackle attic room of our house into a special playroom for Lily and Annika. Home improvement projects are way out of my comfort zone; I can hammer nails into a wall, and that's about the extent of my regular experience. And this room was in terrible shape. Somebody had shoddily put up a layer of thick, hideous wallpaper, slapped unmatching, uneven layers of paint on wall, stairs and ceiling, and nailed down patches of a filthy, dead-bug-covered carpeting. It was not a beginner's job, but then again, if I'd known that, I never would have started it. And although I'm not finished yet--and today's debacle set me back some, for sure--I have a feeling I'll be glad that I stuck it out, even considering I am typing with my index fingers only right now, due to the open wound on my thumb. Injured in the line of carpet-removal. As you will see.

So in short, this is what I did today. I had rented a heavy-duty carpet cleaner from the grocery store, hoping I might be able to make the carpet, which although white and patched in places, was a sort of wintery white wool and in theory, not totally impossible, if only I could get the stains out. To my surprise, once I'd figured out how to operate the thing, the carpet cleaning machine worked wonders. When I'd finished about half of the space, I stood back at the top of the stairs to assess: not bad at all. I was excited--it seemed that I might actually be able to finish the carpet and paint the stairs before the girls came home from my parents' house, which would be quite a surprise, more than I'd hoped for. Suddenly, I spotted the spray can of blackboard paint I'd bought. Without stopping to think, I decided to use it to paint the inside of the closet I am planning on turning into a secret little reading/clubhouse nook and just started to spray, standing there. When the can was emptied, I told myself I'd pick up another at the hardware store when I went back out later in the day, but then I looked down.

All around me, for four or five feet beyond the floor of the closet, green spray paint had scattered fine droplets on the white rug, heavy nearest the closet, lighter as you headed away. I confess: I cried. I sat at the top of the stairs, and I cried. So much work--and time and money, too--but mostly work, had gone into my project so far, and now this. I was too mad at myself to walk away. Instead, I gathered turpentine, and nail polish remover, and WD 40--anything I could think of to try to get the green paint out. I put some of it in the carpet cleaning machine (sorry, grocery store rental facility) and tried that. I saw that in my efforts I had spread the paint wider and added a couple of green footprints to the now unsalvagable situation. Although I could get quarter-sized spots out by dumping turpentine on the rug, I was beginning to worry that the room was on the verge of spontaneously combusting, which would have suited the mood I was in at the time. I also felt light-headed from the chemicals I had inhaled, which might have affected my judgment as I made my next move.

In one swift motion, I ripped up a corner of the carpet. When I had done this originally, it had looked to me like there was just unfinished plywood underneath. Now I could see there were painted floorboards. I ripped up the rest of it. The floor was in bad shape but I could patch some of the holes, sand some of the damage. First, of course, I would have to rip up the thin strip of wood that had been nailed all around the edge of the room and pull out the hundreds of staples all over the floor. Then, I would have to take on another painting job out of my comfort zone--paint buying, sanding, priming, painting, fixing.

But this was, although I had not thought so in the heat of the moment, a surmountable problem. I had done something rash and thoughtless, yes. But now I could, would, make it better.

Annika, Love

Apparently this morning, Annika--who is at my parents' house with Lily--came to Lily and told her that she needed to wash her shoes. Lily told her no, that her shoes did not actually need to be washed. Frustrated, Annika went and found my mother. She told her, "My shoes are thirsty." My mother got her some water. Presumably, the shoes "drank."

A reminder, as I seek to find the right words in my own work, that there are so many ways to say just about everything. And a reminder to pay attention, as close as I can. The way these children of mine are growing and learning is astonishing.

Creaking Back Still

Ugh, I'm so rusty, rusty, rusty, and I even fell off the wagon yesterday after only two days, and it's 12:34 right now, which means it's technically tomorrow already, and the truth is I really don't know what to write about. It's not because I can't write--it's because I have been writing, but not about me, and I'm just not in that zone right now, and I feel like my brain can only do so much writing in one day, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I do think that part of the way I am feeling is because I let myself slide so far off the path, and I am hoping that if I claw my way back on, tooth and nail, I'll find my way again.

So what to say? For one, tomorrow I will write my sevenhundredfiftywords during daylight hours, that is for sure. I guess I have been thinking all day long about the concept of balance. The last few days have been such a mix for me of real, down-in-the-trenches physical work and real, down-in-the-trenches intellectual work, and I feel like a heightened version of myself, if that makes any sense, sort of like I am operating--at least for this short spell--at a greater capacity than I usually do.

Although I am explaining this in such an awkward, knuckleheaded way, this is a good thing. As you may know, I have a bit of a hang-up about how lazy people are--of course I mostly mean me, but I also mean people in general. We use such a small part of ourselves, I fear, and I worry that it is not just a myth that we shut down even more parts of ourselves as we age, narrowing our interests and activities to a safe and shopworn few. Or at least it seems to me that lots of us do.

So when I have a long two days that involve painting a room and weeding a garden and hauling furniture, as well as an intense conversation with a mentor about early childhood education and research into a corner of history I'm realizing I've always neglected and writing for hours in that rare way that makes me forget about time, I defy these fears, show myself that I don't have to be complacent and predictable. There is also something, I think, to the notion that humans need a balance of the body and mind--that is where I started, and I see now I went off on a tangent about laziness, but both points are valid, and not unrelated.

See? I'm out of practice. But with a little luck, tomorrow will be just a smidgen easier.

Just Saying

So yesterday I drove to the library in our little town, as I've been doing pretty much every day for the last four or five weeks, and was surprised to find the parking lot pretty full, considering it was about 4:30 in the afternoon on a day when the library closes at 5. Before I had kids I used to sometimes, when I was in the right frame of mind, park deliberately far from the entrance of my eventual destination, just like my grandfather used to do. He did this, I am told, because he figured the extra walk, short as it may be, was a good thing. Averse to suburban car culture as I am, I like this mentality--and the concept of these secret little personal refusals to play into a system you do not admire. But that being said, with an independent five-year-old and a squirmy, would-be runaway of a one-year-old, these days I mostly get as close as I can. Which--although I was alone--was the mindset I was still in when I pulled into the library parking lot.

I looped a circle, then returned to a spot I'd seen pretty near the front doors. It looked tight, but although I am a mediocre driver at best, parking is my forte; I take pride in my ability to slide into spots and parallel into impossible ones. I can do this, I thought. I turned in, put my foot on the brakes at just the right moment, and turned off the car, pleased with myself. It appeared I was centered perfectly between the cars on either side of mine. And then, I opened my door, slowly, so as to avoid hitting the car on my left with it, and realized there was not enough space for me to actually get out of the car. I tried to squeeze through but to no avail. Now angry with myself, I maneuvered my way back into the driver's seat, turned on the engine, and found another spot on the other side of the lot.

Why I am I telling you this? Because as I was stomping out of the car once I was finally able to open the door it occurred to me that I need to be more watchful of my tendency to do this, to focus single-mindedly on some goal or another, ignoring the context, the consequences--all of the possible ones. The best spot in the lot is meaningless, in other words, if you can't get outside to go where you're going.

That's all.

Back in Black? On Track? Whatever.

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and it's as though the previous month, or even, say, five weeks, just sort of disappeared on you? No? Well, it might happen to you someday, and if it does, I will be a sympathetic ear. What is that famous quote, it's by some guy whose name sounds like Elvis but isn't? Never explain. Your friends don't care, and your enemies won't believe you anyway. Or something like that. I'm going with the guy whose name sounds like Elvis on this one. All I will say is: I'm back.

Having said that, I feel as though expectations may be high. If you've wondered where I've been, why I haven't been writing this blog (and let me just say, as a person who loathes a red herring, hates a teaser: there is no big secret here, just a mad confluence of full time summer vacation children, disorienting country living, cleaning, exhausting and exhilarating work writing, knuckle-scraping gardening, house-bound dogs and exhaustion), you might be hoping for a splash of a re-entry, a dramatic appearance from a hidden perch offstage. The written version, if you will, of the scene you have surely seen me do from my Nutcracker days (especially if you have been in my presence after I've consumed more than two glasses of wine) when I emerge, arms outstretched, into indoor falling snow and connect with the audience in wonder and sheer delight. But my re-entry, like my life, is late and scattered and all over the place. It doesn't arc nicely like a novel, have perfect edges like a professional paint job, swoosh free throws without so much as hitting the rim. But it is here, and it will move forward, and, like me, it will try even harder tomorrow.

Good night. I'm glad to be back.

Reason 357 Why I Like Children More Than I Like Adults

Today I worked with an eleven-year-old boy for the first time and was reminded, thank god, why I need to keep working with kids. Returning to a recurring theme, there is something just perfect about eleven-year-olds. Too young to be jaded or fresh, old enough to hold a real conversation and have fascinating thoughts and ideas, they are, in my mind, perfection in age.

This one was a particularly charming specimen of the genre. I had been told that he "hated reading" and "lacked focus." (This is code for: he's not doing as well in school as we'd like and balks when assigned Virginia Woolf in fifth grade.) As soon as we sat down at his desk, I noticed that he had all four "Twilight" books in a stack on the floor. "Did you read those?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said. The first one I read in one day. I started it, and then I couldn't stop."

"I read it too," I said. He looked at me as though I had sprouted antlers. 

"Really?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. We sat in silence for a moment, my student contemplating his mother's sanity in hiring me, me contemplating the wisdom of full disclosure. And then. In a quiet voice, hesitant but buoyed by conviction, he spoke.

"I loved them. All four of them. And I can't wait for the next one to come out." I smiled. He smiled too. And then, as if scripted, he spoke again, in a whisper, so as not to alert any other members of his family who might be within earshot. "And I don't really hate to read."

"I can see that," I said, resisting to the urge to hug him or grasp his shoulders and shake him, shouting, Holden Caulfield-style, "Don't let the phonies get you!" Or, like Johnny: "Stay gold, Ponyboy! Stay gold!" 

Because that, of course, is the problem with eleven-year-olds, so true, so clean, so honest, so open, so unabashedly, unselfconsciously, deliciously themselves. They turn twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen, and the world, and their parents, and their peers, and their schools, do their damnedest to shake that purity out of them, and they become not teenage zombie drug dealers or drunk drivers or sex addicted derelicts but grown-ups, who care too much what other people think and don't worry about hurting their parents' feelings when they confess their passion for vampire lit and never stay up all night reading under the covers with a flashlight and can't remember what it feels like to know that about some things, all of the rest of the grown-ups are actually wrong. 

Stay gold, my young friend. When it comes to reading, I will do what I can to help.

Drink on This

I have always been a little skeptical of those who say that the sense of smell is the most evocative. Yes, certain smells remind me of, say, my Mormor's kitchen, in a good way, or a hospital room, in a bad one. But as a trigger for memory, smell has never come to close to the other senses for me. What do we call the sensation of swallowing? Touch, I suppose, but that doesn't seem right. 

This afternoon, in an apartment on the Upper West Side, I was asked if I'd like a glass of water. I said yes. When I took a sip, I was momentarily surprised to find the water so cold it was almost hard to swallow the first gulp--as close to ice as water can get without being actually frozen.

And then, I was no longer in this kitchen nook but in a tiny kitchen in a tiny apartment in the woods about thirty years ago, an apartment I could suddenly see as clear as day in my mind's eye. I saw the blue couch in its plastic cover, the lamps with bases like china dolls, the sheen of the coffee table, the blue jar filled with hard candies, the half walnut shell with a picture of me taped inside hanging from the wall on a piece of gold cord, a handmade gift from a ten-year-old girl to her grandmother. How did I get there? It was the water.

A quirk of my grandmother, my father's mother, who died when I was fifteen, is that she only drank water that was extremely cold. She kept it in the refrigerator, which she kept at the coldest setting, and when you asked for a glass of water you got this: that almost numbing sensation followed by the ultimately satisfying quench of thirst, a pleasurable experience, ultimately, so much so that I have always considered frigid water a genuine luxury, on the few occasions I have been served it as cold as hers.

And I could see my grandmother: her red hair, thick and wavy like my father's and my aunt's, cut in short layers and set professionally, the fine lines around her eyes, her "house dress," flowered and to the knee, the veins in her legs, which I have, too. 

It is true that we do not forget those we love. But sometimes it is surprising how and why we remember them. 

Scooby Dooby Doo

Generally I pride myself on being very pragmatic and immune to anything that could be remotely described as woo-woo or unscientific, but the secret truth is that I believe a little, little bit in karma: in the idea that what you throw out to the universe comes back in some unspoken, sometimes incomprehensible way. Of course, the pessimist's definition of karma is: you get what you deserve, but I don't even mind this, as I like the idea, however far-fetched, that goodness breeds goodness, even if the theory offers no explanation for all of the badness that goodness breeds too.

Anyway, that was a rambling and not entirely well-suited introduction for my little story, although maybe it will make more sense when I read it over tomorrow. Today, on our way home from her first day of a week-long camp at her new school, Lily and I rode the subway downtown in the middle of the day, when traffic is light and you can almost always get a seat on one of the benches. We got one, and just a few minutes into the ride a man stepped onto our car with an electric guitar hooked up to some kind of a portable battery, which Lily immediately noticed and was intrigued by. And then, he started to sing. He had a pretty voice, and he didn't sing too loudly, in spite of the electric guitar, which I appreciated. As frequent subway companions, Lily and I have come to an agreement regarding those asking for money below ground, or above. Although the socialist in me wants to give a dollar to every soul who asks me for money, the capitalist--or perhaps the pragmatist--in me, has decided that if somebody is performing, working in some way to earn the money they are asking for, I will give it to them. 

This situation qualified, but for some reason, probably because I was so tired, and so distracted by other things--Lily's experience with all of her future classmates, the afternoon meetings I had stacked one right after the other--I sat tight, even as Lily smiled at the performer, and I too admired his voice. And then, as he walked past us toward the end of the car, Lily looked at me with a question in her eyes, although she didn't ask why I wasn't giving her a dollar, as I usually do, to give to the singer. Quickly, now not sure I even had any cash on me, I rummaged in my wallet and found some, stuffing it in Lily's hand. She jumped up and handed it to the man, who took it with a smile, bowing to her in thanks. By this point he was standing at the door, ready to push through and sing for the next car on the line.

Instead, he turned on his guitar again, strummed an opening chord. "This one is for the little lady," he said, and Lily looked at me, eyes huge, as though she'd just been announced as the winner of an Academy Award. And he played and sang the entire original theme song from Scooby Doo.

After the first bar of music, I recognized it; how could I not after so many early Saturday mornings sunk into the rust-colored couch in my parents' den, eating cereal from the box with my sister, as the gang rode around in the mystery van? And as Lily laughed, I watched pretty much everyone on our subway car realize what he was playing with such reverence and start to smile too, perhaps remembering their own Saturday morning cartoon experiences, or just enjoying the incongruous act, the spontaneous expression of fun.

Karma? Who knows. But a good moment just the same.

Exhaustion

Back from weekend away--which somehow seems like a month. Back on track tomorrow, I promise.

Alone but Not Alone

It's really, really late, and I have had a few glasses of wine, so I am going to keep this brief. The options, in this condition, are either brief, or endless; trust me: I think you will prefer brief. The reason I was able to go out this evening and have a lingering dinner with friends, is because today--for the first day in years--I was without child and without dog, a state I will maintain through Sunday. I am in a wedding this weekend, and because we are going to a very remote part of Connecticut for the wedding, and because the girls are not going to the wedding, my parents took them, and the dogs, to Massachusetts for the next few days. I had big plans for this day--the only day I did not have wedding obligations--and of course I mostly frittered them away. But I will not lie to you: To not have to think about where I was going and when I was coming back and knowing that I was not paying somebody else for the luxury of my solitude was pleasant, maybe even more than that. That being said, I now feel as though I understand the concept of the "phantom limb." Sleep well, girls. I will, I think, but I will dream of you.

Still Swirled

Still circling my subject matter--the end of Lily's preschool years--although I know I am going to hone in eventually. The Watermelon Party was today--this is her preschool's end-of-year celebration. I was reminded, as we sat waiting for the children to come down the stairs and sing for us, that just a few weeks ago in our ongoing series of "Tell Me a Story from When You Were a Little Girl, Mama," I had told Lily, almost offhandedly, about something I hadn't thought about in decades: my own preschool's end-of-the-year celebration.

It's funny that Lily's school celebration is both named after and focused on the consumption of a particular food. Because the only thing I remember about my last day of preschool is the little sundae cups. Do you remember these? I think they're still around, but I haven't seen one since I was five. They come 10 or 12 to a package, I think, in little plastic containers with paper lids. The containers are plastic, I am assuming, because you can see that way whether you are getting the chocolate swirl or the strawberry swirl; I always wanted the strawberry. (My love for chocolate has always been narrow and specific as opposed to all-encompassing.) The cups were eaten with those little flat wooden "spoons." 

My preschool, in the suburb in which I grew up, had a big outdoor space surrounded by a fence, and it was in this yard that we ate the sundae cups. When I had finished describing the cups to Lily, I stopped and looked at her intently, waiting for her to say, "And then?" or maybe, "So?" But she did not. "I can imagine you eating one of those," she said instead. "I would like to try one." And it became clear to me, for the hundredth time, that these stories for her are not about plot or character development or larger meaning but instead about feeling connected to me, to the child I was, like she is now, and about knowing where--in even the most minute and seemingly inconsequential ways--she comes from. 

So even if all Lily remembers is the watermelon, I, now, will remember so much more: the smile she exchanged with the classmate standing next to her on the steps, the way she threw herself into her teacher's arms, the book she pulled out of the red canvas bag, the swirling chaos of the parents in the classroom, the overwhelmed little boy retreating to his cubby, the laughter, the sound of the singing, the moment when, walking down the stairs, she spotted me in my folding chair and very lightly touched her finger to her nose, the symbol we had agreed upon so she could know I was watching. I wonder if my parents remember the sundae cups.

Oh, To Be Royal

Lily is "graduating" from preschool tomorrow, and I am so overwhelmed by my emotions concerning this fact that I can't yet write about it, if that makes any sense. Instead, I turn to the default device of the emotionally overwhelmed and relay an amusing anecdote. And apparently adopt a vaguely British, stilted style that I hope is on its way out with the ending of this sentence.

Tonight at dinner, Lily, who has been doing her darndest to convince me that she is in no way, shape or form ready to go to kindergarten and instead should be shipped off to military school, appeared at the table swathed in a blanket, cradling her stuffed frog, which was wearing a diaper and some kind of a hat. "I am not Lily," she announced. "I am a queen." My parents and grandmother, who had just arrived from Massachusetts, were amused, and Annika looked solemn, as though thinking, "Well, duh. Tell me something I don't know." I rolled my eyes.

"And who's the frog?" 

"It's not a frog. It just looks like one. It is my daughter. The princess." She suddenly started laughing so hard she couldn't speak for a few seconds. "And did you see? She's wearing a diaper!" Ha, ha, I thought. Good one. 

"Your child doesn't look like you at all," I said, knowing on some level that this was the wrong thing to say, and Lily's face immediately darkened. 

"That is not funny, Mama," she said, "and if you--" The look on my face, for once, stopped the sentence in its tracks. "Not funny," she whispered instead to the frog, who, I must say, looked like an ass in his diaper. I carried some dishes into the kitchen. When I returned and sat down, Lily waved her hand in the air, chin held high. "Silence!" she said. "The queen must speak." My mother gave me her version of my previous look, a much more effective version--it seems to lose effectiveness as it is passed down through the generations--and I held my tongue.

"I told you I am the queen. Well, you," and then she pointed squarely at me, "are my servants. Servant?" Again, the finger across the table, directly in line with my forehead. I rolled my eyes again. "You must agree. You are my servant. And that baby over there?" With this she pointed at Annika. "She is my other baby. And that means you are her servant, too."

Suddenly, I felt exhausted. And I wasn't entirely sure she was wrong. 

Excuses, Excuses

Ugh. Blog called on account of children who woke up at 5:00 a.m. this morning and work day that just never ended and a few cooking projects interspersed throughout and a general sense of ineptitude. 

And Another Thing About Annika...

Walking up the stairs behind Annika tonight on our way up to put her to bed, I said to Lily and Ben, "Can you believe she's going to be two in September?" What I was thinking about was the night before she was born. When you have to schedule your baby's delivery, the twenty-four hours beforehand becomes increasingly, almost intolerably, weighty. That night, I could not fall asleep. Hours after my parents, Ben and Lily had retired for the evening, I sat on the reclining chair trying not to think. I "watched" a Law and Order, then about four more. Five minutes later I couldn't remember the plots of any of them. At some point somebody walked down the hall on the way to the bathroom and said to me, "You really ought to go to sleep. Big day tomorrow!" Can you conceive of more of an understatement? And so I sat, in my favorite lavender maternity shirt and my black leggings, my hands on my belly, feeling the baby kick. I kept thinking I wished I could just slow down the passing of time, although each time I looked at the clock it still seemed like forever until the morning would come. I am not ready, I kept thinking, feeling. Seven more hours. Six. Five. Four-and-three-quarters.

And then it was the morning of September 4th, and we said good-bye to everyone, discussed which route to take--Will there be traffic on 10th this early?--and drove ten minutes up the street to experience the second biggest change of my life, which I knew, thanks to modern medicine, would happen at 8 a.m., shortly thereafter, if the doctor had been forced to wait for her coffee. It seemed so strange: so mundane: so earth-shatteringly insane. And then time flew, of course, and at about the time most people were arriving at work, EST, I was holding this baby, this Annika.

I wasn't intending that preamble. What I had in my head when I started was a quirk of Annika's that seems so her own; it was not something Lily ever did, or does, and Annika has been doing it since she could speak. At many points throughout the day, but especially when she is sleepy or in the car or just with me, Annika will become preoccupied with where each member of her family happens to be. "Lily is?" she will ask. "Dada is?" This means, as clear as day and she's been saying it for six months now: Where is Lily? Where is Dada? "Sadie is? Scout is?" she will ask, and even, when I am holding her, or standing at the counter with her at my feet, "Mama is?"

"Mama is right here," I say. "Right here with Annika." She nods solemnly. She knew this all along, but clearly it comforts her. "Annika is?" I say sometimes, just to revel in her response.

"Annika is," she says each time. Annika is." Not a question, but a statement of fact. Yes. She is.

Tooooo Late

Just finished a big work project. I started to write an entry afterward but it was baaaad, and not in the Michael Jackson sense of the word. So although very early on in this experiment I explained that I would not be filtering myself, deleting entries that I had not sufficiently worked over, I apparently lied. I erased. And we are all the better for it. But I will now sleep the righteous if unfairly short sleep of the worthy, and tomorrow, I will, exhausted, begin anew. It's a good thing I'm down with this whole "beginning anew" thing, wouldn't you agree?

Contagious

For a couple of weeks now, Annika has been spontaneously breaking into what Lily and I now call the "Happy Song." This consists of her shaking her shoulders, waving her head from side to side, and singing the words, "Happy, happy, happy!" repeatedly, all while smiling winsomely at her audience. This is one of those "baby book" items (that isn't yet in the still-blank baby book) because it so epitomizes to me who this child is. It also seems relevant to me in a time when happiness is a focus of study for writers, psychologists and sociologists, as well as a key player in the zeitgeist. Americans seem mildly obsessed with happiness these days: What is it, how do we get it, why do we need it, and more. The thing is about Annika, that she just is. And she has been that way from the very beginning: happy. I don't mean to imply that all this fuss about happiness is really pointless because so much of it seems to be a person's birthright, or maybe I do, a little bit. Don't get me wrong. I certainly believe that a person can make themselves more or less happy than they might be by nature, and that circumstance and discipline and sheer awareness can have a major impact on how happy we are. But the fact is, some of us are born singing the "Happy Song." I feel fortunate to have one in my house. 

The End of Something

Lily is always begging me to tell her stories "about when you were a little girl," and I search my reserves of memory for them, telling some again and again--the summer my mother banned Popsicles, the popcorn-induced babysitting fire--and occasionally remembering a new one.  When she says "story" she means a juicy memory, not necessarily one with a plot but with a flash of lightning, burst of flame, satisfying denouement. And if truth be told, these are, in fact, the memories that exist closest to the surface, the easiest ones to recall. But they are not my only memories. They are not even the memories I cherish or hope to hold onto.

No, those are the fleeting, seemingly ordinary scenes, the moments that appear or occur to me unpredictably, with no context or framework, the thoughts or actions that would never be captured in a photograph, or, typically, in words. 

Lily's preschool experience ends next week, and I am thinking all of the time about transitions, about endings. And beginnings, too, of course, but more about the finite nature of experience, and the duration of experience, and endings most of all.  And I found myself one day sitting on a chair in my dining room remembering an afternoon twenty-one years ago, just around this time of year, when I was days away from graduating from high school. I remembered walking through the dining room in my parents' house, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror that still hangs on the wall, and hardly recognizing myself: a wash of dark hair, a pale profile, a faded navy blue T-shirt that was partly disintegrating even then and is still kicking around today. I remember, quite specifically, thinking the words: This is the metaphorical end of my childhood. And then, sitting in my father's den, on a velvet sofa that is no longer there, thinking: What will happen to me? This is the beginning of my very own life.

I wonder what Lily is thinking. 

Dear

Oh, it is just so, so easy NOT to write. I almost talked myself out of writing right now--was so close I could taste it, or rather feel the pillow under my head. But it is too easy not to write, and that is the problem. The older I get, the more I see how much of writing is discipline, and how much of discipline is learned. I am still learning. I am determined to learn. And so I write. Badly, sometimes. In brief, much of the time. And when I stop, as happened last week, I start again. As Emerson wrote, in a quote I keep by my desk, "Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." Begone nonsense. Tonight, I write. Tomorrow, I write again. Serene? Not so much. Maybe in a dozen years or so. But begin, yes. That I will do. As many times as it takes to continue from there.

Today I have babies on my mind. No, don't worry mother of mine. Not more for me, but other people's. Or rather, other creatures'. Yesterday two fawns were born in our yard in Connecticut. I will give you the short version of a story I have been telling ad infinitum, to the point that the thought of it exhausts me. One of the babies was left behind when the mother ran off to protect herself and the baby who could already walk, and after a long day of agonizing on the parts of me, the weak and hungry and terrified newborn, and presumably the heartbroken, brave and desperate mother, the fawn was rescued by wildlife rehabilitators: a couple who spend their days answering calls about orphaned infant raccoons and rebuilding turtle shells with fiberglass and treating the broken beaks of vultures. In other words, people who will go to heaven if there is one, people who make me proud to be a human being.

And in the middle of this day, I lay with my own baby, indulgent at her nap time, unable to turn my thoughts from the stricken mother deer, who had no choice but to leave this tiny helpless creature behind, who saved herself and the stronger of her children but instinctively could not risk dying for the other, singing--stroking my own child's hair, and singing in a low, sad voice, praying, in my own way, for the mother to somehow return. 

By the end of the day, she had not. I had doubted she would be able to. So many screaming children, barking dogs, running lawnmowers, ringing phones, starting cars--it was too bright, too loud, too chaotic. I know she was watching from somewhere unseen. Waiting. Or at least biding her time, if I am humanizing the mother too much. But she did not, could not, and we had to leave, could no longer keep the dogs shut up, prevent the rain from falling, keep the infant warm, or fed. And when the rehabilitators came, showed up in a car full of rescued baby raccoons and blankets and carriers and gloves and medication and bandages and food, I had no real choice but to agree with them when they decided to take the baby to a fawn rescue facility, where he would never again see his mother--whom he knew for mere minutes on earth--but would likely, with luck and specialized formula and another one of these human/saints to care for him in his infancy, survive.

And it was not until much later, after a sleepless night spent dreaming of this mother deer, this powerful, daunting creature who had rushed a dog in defense of her own, dreaming of her return to a fawnless site, her agony at the loss, that I connected my actions with hers, that I realized in allowing the fawn to be taken, to be saved, I was obeying my own maternal instincts, that voice that says, no matter what, against all odds, in the face of all adversity: The baby must survive. 

Doctor Laborde

Blog called on account of Nicole's arrival in NYC. Back tomorrow.

NYC

Early this evening I was walking through one of the subway stations near my apartment on my way home when I walked past a dad with two kids: a boy who looked to be about ten and his sister, younger by a year or two.  The boy was holding a Metrocard; the dad was waiting for them a few paces ahead. There was nothing remarkable about the scene, nothing even vaguely out of the ordinary. A dad, two kids, on their way somewhere, or going home like me; I didn't know, it didn't matter, but as I kept on walking, I suddenly stopped, right at the base of the stairs to the street.

Everything was out of the ordinary about that scene, at least in terms of what had been ordinary for me for so many years. I found myself thinking, pounding the obvious over the head with a hammer: Oh my god. Children actually live--LIVE--in this city!" Mine do. 

When I was growing up in a borderline rural town that has since become more classically suburban, trips to the city, and Boston, mind you, not New York, were special. We went quite a bit: my father went to every Boston Celtics home game, and we went with him sometimes, my mother liked to take us to see plays and go to the ballet,we went shopping, or out to dinner, or to visit our urban pioneer friends, who lived in the then still slightly edgy South End, where my father felt nervous parking his car. But every time I walked down Newbury Street, or looked for books in the Boston Public Library, or later, even when I lived in Cambridge and took the T downtown every single day, it still felt like a mini event: Here I am in the city!

Which I think is why I occasionally have these moments, these instances of feeling shell shocked that my children will have Metrocards, that their "ordinary" will be hot dog stands and 24 hour delis, taxis to Chinatown, picnics in the park. Their "ordinary" won't be waiting for a ride, being driven to a friend's house, walking around to the side yard to get the mail. I don't think my oldest, at five, knows what a mall is, or a car pool. When we are not in the city she doesn't understand that you can't get things delivered. 

And she has an urban confidence that I remember even as a small child noticing in my South End friends: an assumption that the streets they walked were theirs, a total absence of that "Look, I'm in the city!" vibe that I possibly still exude to some extent, in the best possible way, because I think it with such pleasure. 

I didn't plan this, living here. If you'd told me twenty years ago I would be, I would have laughed in your face, called you insane. But here I am, heading home each day on the express train, my unlimited ride card in my wallet, with this child who owns the streets of New York, and another one, who can walk all around the block, if you give her an hour or so, who's got a little swagger, too.

Yes, kids live here. Mine do. 

On Their Terms

Today was my gardening class, and we had two special guests: a pair of garden snails transported into the city by a family I love with the plan of moving them permanently into one of the new planters we have set up on the roof. The children were unanimously excited by the snails. They wanted to touch them, but only the shells. They wanted to peer at them very close up and speculate as to how they "slimed around." They completely didn't get my escargot joke at snack time, but that's okay; it wasn't very funny anyway.

For most of our class, the snails waited patiently in their cozy Tupperware container, certainly more patiently than most New Yorkers wait to move into their new digs. Approved wholeheartedly by the co-op board and just in time for the still low financing rates, at about 4:15 they were carried over to the chosen planter, at which the point the carrier, who was supposed to put the snails on an appealing patch of dirt, stomped her foot. "They won't come off," she said. "They don't want to leave the container."

"Let me try," another gardener requested. He, too, could not dislodge the stubborn snails, who were possibly thinking that they should rent instead, in the hope that another six months would provide even more advantageous circumstances. I took the box from the child and tried myself. They were right: The snails, having had their snail universe rocked over and over in the course of a week or so, were not going to give up the ghost. This was their Tupperware now, and they weren't giving it up just because we had planted a few herbs and hydrangeas for them. 

The gardeners were becoming restless, worried, even. Without thinking about what I was saying, I set the lid of the container, which was the part the snails were clinging so desperately to, down on a nice patch of dirt near a healthy-looking clump of cilantro. I hoped it wouldn't taste like soap to the snails. "What are you doing?" one little girl said. They all waited for my response.

"I think they just need to do this on their own time," I said. "I think they will slime off when they're ready." The children, seasoned gardeners now who know all too well how to resist when they're pushed, nodded, all seven of them. This made perfect sense to them. And later, when I thought about it, it did to me too.

Meditations on Basil

I have been doing a lot of planting lately: my garden in Connecticut, the garden on our building's roof deck, the roof deck at Lily's school, where I teach my gardening class. And some of the time, much of the time, Annika has been gardening with me. It might surprise you, how much a twenty-month-old can garden. As it turns out, babies this age like pots and trowels, soil and digging, and--at least in the case of mine--the taste of herbs.

Lily is also a bit of an herb fiend, in the straight-up and not Jerry Garcia sense of the word. That is to say that she enjoys chives snipped in her scrambled eggs, cilantro in her guacamole, rosemary in her hash browns. What she really likes to do, however, is stand in our herb garden plucking things and chomping on them with gusto, asking me, even when she knows the answer, "Are you sure I can eat this, Mama? Are you SURE?"

I think it is because for five years I have been telling her that nothing can go into her mouth but actual food, and the herb thing seems a bit like cheating the system. Regardless, she has taught Annika how to wander around the beds, picking and chomping, and I was quite proud to hear Annika utter her first herb just last weekend: "Basil," she said quite clearly, pointing to an enormous patch of sage. "Basil!" 

So this morning, as the two of us sat at the kitchen counter eating apple slices, I pulled the little pot of basil that was a gift from my in-laws close to us and told Annika what it was. Imitating Lily, she asked, "Eat it?"

"Yes," I said. "You can eat the basil. Would you like to try a leaf?" I plucked her one, and she chewed thoughtfully, smiled. Then, as I sat beside her, wondering if I should intervene, she proceeded to eat every leaf off the plant, one by one, Every Single Leaf.

I'm not even sure what to say.  

Triple Word Score

So at some point on Saturday evening I found myself standing at the counter at our house in Connecticut sorting tiny Travel Scrabble tiles into rows by letter. I actually had this thought: It is Saturday night, and I am standing at the kitchen counter sorting Scrabble tiles. I could never have predicted this moment in time.

The reason for the sorting, or at least the outward purpose, was that for some idiotic reason we apparently own (or owned, thanks to the missing "K") two Travel Scrabble games, both of which were out at kid level, leading Lily to come up with the clever notion of taking all of the letter tiles and combining them in one of the little pouches included in each game. This, of course, rendered both games unplayable, not that I have ever in my life been in a situation where I was one of a group of people in which this conversation suddenly broke out:

Hey! I feel like a game of Scrabble. Anyone in?

Me! I do! I want in! Can I play too? 

And so on, until there were too many people for ONE game alone, and I was able (or not able, as this exhilarating dialogue is hypothetical, remember?) to say:

Well, it's a damn good thing I have TWO sets right here then, isn't it?

But still. Even two people couldn't play Scrabble using the letters from two games combined, so I decided to do the onerous sorting, figuring I would learn in the process if--after five-plus years of children--the majority of the tiles had survived or been digested.

I use the word "onerous" (and, inexplicably, many sets of quotation marks), but the truth is, the work was actually square on the side of enjoyable. Much like folding laundry, cleaning the linen closet, sorting Scrabble tiles turns out to be one of those mindless repetitive tasks that provides enormous satisfaction in being absorbing and more importantly, finite. 

I think I have written here before about my love for finite tasks. I love finite tasks. Almost everything I do, personally, professional, parentally (?), is open-ended, never-ending, subject to interpretation. Not finite tasks. Finite: I even like the word. Onomatopoeia: Short, crisp long vowels, done. 

As I stood there sorting, my husband came into the room. I waited, knowing he would say one of two things when he saw what I was doing. He said the first: Why are you doing that?

I was ready.

Well, we don't have a movie, and I thought it looked like fun.

No, seriously. Why don't you just throw those all away and get a new game?

That was the second--I had the satisfaction of predicting both.

I know there are many people who would never take the half hour or so it took to sort the Scrabble tiles.  I am married to one of them, related by blood to another. But I am not a member of that tribe, and not just because I loathe throwing anything away, have difficulty, sometimes, buying new things.

In this world, in this family, somebody needs to be the person who sorts the tiles, who notices the bag of useless mingled letter squares, who dumps them out together, who steadies her jaw, and sorts. Who has the satisfaction, a better kind, of filling one bag with a complete set, putting away the game, out of child reach, this time, and storing the set with the missing "K" in the hopes that it might be found and the set moved on to the donation bag, so some other family somewhere can have the satisfaction of never playing Travel Scrabble either, at least while their kids are still too small.

Yes, somebody needs to sort the Scrabble tiles. Today, anyway, I am glad that this person is me.

Oof. Those easing-back-in entries are always so rough. Will, once again, resist coward's impulse to delete. As promised, onto The Once and Future King.

So I just reread this, for the first time since seventh grade, and I found it so much more enjoyable this time around. It is so important, I think, not to read books too early. This, I think, is an art: to know when to read what, to know it well enough to guide others, such as one's offspring. I hope I do right by mine in this regard. Anyway, my seventh grade memories of the book involve an agonizing extra credit assignment and a real sense of trudging through whole chunks, although even then I found substantial sections charming and funny and clever. This time, however, I got the epic-ness of it, if you will, the mythic part of the myth. I am thinking now that seventh grade is a little young in general for "epic" and even, in some regards "myth." In seventh grade, what seems epic or possessing of a mythical quality is almost always later determined to be almost inconceivably irrelevant, such as hair crimping, or one's mother's policy on eye shadow. But I digress.

At the end of the third chapter of the first book in the book, I came across this line, uttered when Wart, the future King Arthur, learns that Merlyn is to come home with him and be his tutor: "My!" exclaimed the Wart, while his eyes sparkled with excitement at the discovery. "I must have been on a Quest!" I most certainly do not remember this line from my childhood reading, and I do not think the word "quest," or rather "Quest," for it is in the text and intentionally so a big Q Quest, would have resonated had it been brought to my attention. What struck me this time was how lovely, how inspiring, how redemptive is the notion that one might be on a quest--even a Quest--at any given point in time and not even know it. What magic it would be--is sometimes--to learn it.

To nobody's surprise, I am sure, this made me think of parenthood, which believe me, I try not to think about as hard as I can, but the mind does what it will, especially when the objects of one's thoughts simply refuse to go away, twenty-four hours a day and are, for the most part, very loud. The last two days, for example, have been arduous, exhausting. As briefly if cryptically noted yesterday, Annika and I were stuck in a subway turnstile for a full ten minutes. There was a distressing dog incident I can't quite bring myself to write about yet. Lily and Annika have both been having a hard time (this language, which most of me loves--having a "hard time"--occasionally makes a regressive little tiny part of me want to yell at my progressive, open-minded, modern parenting self: It's called "acting like a massive brat and driving your mother to drink," but anyway.). Annika's is more of a physical nature: in short, an infected toe that is healing slowly and needs to be bandaged constantly and twice-daily antibiotics that have almost left my index finger decapitated a dozen times. Lily is, well, I'm not sure what Lily's going through right now, but I know it has to do with leaving the school she's been at for most of her life, since before her long term memory kicked in, and also probably something to do with being five, which from where I'm sitting looks like a lot on the plate, emotionally speaking. 

And then this line. I read it yesterday, before my book group met, because I had folded over the page corner, and then I read it again today, because I wanted to see if it read the way I remembered it. It did. And I felt a wave of relief wash over me in a sea of discontent at the idea that all of the trying moments of parenthood, and let's be honest, even the hours, and the cups of water hurled out of the crib, and the dismantled remotes and cell phones, and the public and private temper tantrums, each harrowing in their own special way, and those worst of all moments when your child cannot communicate what she wishes to you, and you cannot will yourself into understanding anyway: they are all part of a quest, my Quest, or one of them, and someday, in a more obvious way, or maybe just in an increasing series of realizations like this one, I too will be lying on an isolated beach somewhere (because why not a beach? it's my fantasy), looking back, and I will be able to say to myself, with profound relief and satisfaction: Ah. Ah. I must have been on a Quest." 

Baby Got, No Is, Back

As it turns out, I am not very good at writing every day when I actually have a lot of other (read: paying) work to do, which was the case over the last week when, as was noticed by my aunt if nobody else, I have not posted at all. This is a problem, as the writing is meant to be the other (read: primary) work. But for now, it is unavoidable. To be fair, the work I do when I am not writing here is writing, in a sense, and editing and revising and teaching writing to other people, but you know what I mean. It's not the same thing at all. Let's see if I can get myself back on the rails, one day at a time. Have I lost you? I hope not. How can I woo you back?

Tonight, I don't have much. All week I've been thinking of entries I would post when I had the time, but for some reason, right now, in the moment, I can't remember a one of them. Although perhaps someday in the future I will want to write about getting stuck in the subway turnstile with Annika in her stroller or how Annika responded when Lily made a guest appearance in her toddler group today, or the acapella group I heard this morning singing, beautifully, a song I love: This Magic Moment, or the planting I did on the roof with my class of five-year-olds today, but for now, I'm just not feeling it; remember: I'm easing back in.

So instead I will leave you with this: what I saw at the subway station at Union Square as I exited my train to head up to the street and back home after my children's literature book group. A man, standing at the base of the stairs to the street, with a stack of fliers in his hand. His sweatshirt was white, with an image of Jesus nailed to the cross silk screened on the front in black, surrounded by red and orange flames. The words: Jesus will save you from hell. All the way back home I kept thinking about this message: what it says about this man's interpretation of Jesus, what it says about this man's vision of hell, but most of all, what a very odd, very unfriendly, aggressive, presumptuous and hideously ugly design to be wearing around on your sweatshirt. 

Remind me tomorrow that I can write about a passage from my book group book: The Once and Future King. A quest!