Bringing It Back to Boston

Well, I had today's entry all planned out, but after a triple--yes, I said triple--overtime game, even a viewer needs a rest.

Banner Day

It's nearly May, and so--nearly six months after the election--I have made an important executive decision in my own household: It's time to take the Obama/Biden banner out of our living room window and retire it to the basement, where all good banners go to be disappeared by non-voting, yet Democratic in spirit, building superintendents. 

Now the jaded among you, or those of you who have known me for longer than about ten minutes, might think that the banner has been in the living room this long because of what I shall call, generously, a lack of interest in the cleaning arts. This is not the case, although we will leave the discussion of the clumps of dog hair I hid behind the couch tonight instead of taking them to the trash can one room over while watching Gabriel Byrne's show (how I like to think of it) on HBO tonight for another "session."

No, the banner has been in the window because I like to look at it, still, because although I have succumbed to human nature by not walking around every waking moment of every single day with the words: We won! We won! ringing in my ears, I don't want to forget about what happened on that already distant-seeming election day, and I don't want the election itself to be the most significant victory. 

But even the most triumphant banner, when clumps of dog hair adhere to its sides, and bits of smushed banana dot its surface, is ephemeral by definition. I do not need a banner to remind me of what has been done, what must be done, what we will do. 

(But I am secretly hoping that my lovely superintendent can't bear to throw it away and tucks it in a back corner with the cleaning supplies, where I can peek at it every once in a while when I need a fix.)

What a Piece of Work is Man

A friend invited me to see "Hair" tonight, on Broadway, which I realized with a start once it began I had never before seen performed live. Some of the songs seemed wholly unfamiliar, including one, whose lyrics struck me, both because I liked them, and because they echoed a phrase that so reminds me of my mother, and my grandfather, a phrase I myself use all the time. I know it is only a matter of time before Lily utters it; I hope she will be grateful that although I have continued in the longstanding tradition of "piece of work," I have fully exorcised "gauchos" and "slacks." But mostly I like the concept. I usually refer to individuals as a piece of work, but Shakespeare, as per usual, had it right (even though he was actually using the phrase reverentially, not with exasperation, as per the excerpt that follows). But man is a piece of work. The whole damn lot of us.

From Shakespeare's Hamlet:

I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king and queen moult no feather. I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Life Imitates...Life

Today I found myself walking down 5th Avenue after picking up Lily at school with a babysitter and two of Lily's classmates, a girl and a boy. I tried to gain entry into the children's conversation a few times, although I should have known better. When three five-year-olds are walking down the street together, the last thing they want is a grown-up asking them how their day had been. When three children are walking down the street together, grown-ups are so much background noise. 

So I did what any grown-up worth her salt would do in such a situation. I kept walking alongside the group, feigning disinterest, and I eavesdropped as hard as I could. The most interesting conversation, after it had been determined that the babysitter would bring all three children to the park, was about what they would play at the park. The two girls wanted to play "family," a game Lily is a big fan of that has many variations but is basically role-playing. At any given moment about half of the children are animals, pointing to a latent desire for a 50/50 ratio between humans and pets in a household.

The boy, however, wanted to play a different game: "fight." I have seen versions of this, as well. It's not as bad as it sounds. If the "family" crew wants to pretend they are making dinner and walking the dog, the "fight" crew really just wants to chase each other around while yelling. The girls negotiated. "We can play "family," and just do the "fight" part too," Lily explained. The boy looked skeptical. 

I don't know what actually happened at the park. Liberated by the other children's babysitter, I ran home to play a game I like to call "work." If I'd asked, I would not have been given an accurate answer. So I didn't ask. But I did find myself thinking how funny it is--odd funny, not humorous funny--that children this age like to form little mock-family units and play out mundane situations taken from their actual lives or run around pretending to capture or blast each other's heads off. 

Or maybe it's not actually that odd funny at all. 

Belief

I got a couple of very thoughtful responses to the entry I wrote about my father's relationship to his religious background, but only to my private email account. People are funny about religion. One in particular has had me thinking all day; it was sent by someone I love very much, who also knows and loves my dad.

This person is religious herself, practices her religion, and--I think, believes. She is faithful in the best sense of the word; that is to say, she has actual faith that guides her to be a kind and decent person and helps comfort her in times in need. I wish I could have faith like this, too, but unfortunately, like long legs or a good singing voice, you either have it or you don't. You can get it, I guess, according to all of the "saving" reports, but I am never wholly convinced by those. They so often seem to come from the vaguely unhinged.

I have always felt, intuitively, that this person believed in her religious practice, but we have never discussed it. I have never heard her proselytize or try to convert anyone; in fact, her belief seems very private, which to me makes it seem all the more convincing and affecting. I have never understood why part of believing must entail harassing others into sharing your belief.

But what really struck me about the lovely message I received from this person was that she brought up the fact that her own children don't actively practice the faith they were raised in, don't--as far as she can tell--believe the same way she does. At least I think this is what she was saying; I hope I am not presuming. And this is something I think about all of the time as the mother of two very young children: How can I teach them what to believe? How can I show them what is good? And sometimes, although I am loathe to admit it, because it sounds so, well, mundane in its petty self-centeredness, I wonder how I can live so they will want to believe what I believe, because even though we humans can be insecure and full of doubt, essentially--come on, admit it--we believe what we believe because we think it is right.

This is coming out all wrong, as though I want to brainwash my children into being little clones of me, which is not the case at all. In fact, I hope they are different from me in so many ways, and I want nothing more than for them to be open-minded, independent thinkers who decide what to believe on their own terms, in their own time, in their own way. But then that voice, again: the one that says believe this because I do, because you are a part of me, and because I love you. 

The person who sent me the message expressed none of this, by the way, just noted the fact that her own children have not followed the tradition in which they were raised, in they way they were raised, and that she had been thinking about this herself. And I guess, ignoring my little scared voice that wants my beliefs to be so powerful that they are, indeed, inescapable, I say this to this person, believing it myself: You have done this right, this believing, and this influencing of belief.

When I first took Lily to a toddler group, when she would walk away from me and explore the classroom while many of the other children sat glued to their parent's lap, I grew nervous that she was secretly not as attached to me as these other toddlers were to their parents, that I was not as connected to her, that she did not need me as much as she was supposed to. I called my mother, who has spent nearly fifty years working with children, and shared my concerns. She laughed, gently, and told me that Lily was exploring the classroom because she felt safe with me; she was independent because she felt so secure. 

Live as you believe, and those you love will see who you are. It may not be reflected back at you in a way you can easily understand, but I think it will be there. I am hoping so.

Animal Kingdom

Today, in a virtually unprecedented turn of events, at least in my adult life, I saw two movies in actual theaters. Coincidentally, both movies were about animal behavior. The first movie, Earth, I saw with a friend and her children, and Lily. It was beautiful: beautifully filmed, awe-inspiring in all of the intended ways, and respectful of those of us who want to be down with the cycle of life but can't stop eating bacon and get angry when other people step on ants. In other words, the obligatory animal deaths were handled delicately but honestly, and so thoughtfully in a few cases that I heard Lily say as a scene featuring a wolf pouncing on a caribou faded into black, "Oh, good. He only got his tail." Sorry, Lily. But you can wait until you have your own email account to learn the truth. 

I was worried about the polar bears; it's impossible to discuss global warming without picturing a starving polar bear, at least for me. Sure enough, the dignified father polar bear does not survive; I will see him again when I fall asleep tonight. And as soon as I saw the polar bear family, and realized that animal deaths would be filmed in a real and honest way, I was a little worried about the children, all three perceptive, sensitive and inquisitive, in different ways. I love how children surprise us, again and again, over and over, defy our expectations, refuse to play into our preconceptions, insist on continuing to grow, in spite of how many times we insist on strapping them to the couch and forcing them to watch cartoons. 

Kidding. About the strapping part, anyway. But as I tried not to think about the certain fate of Mr. Bear, all three children kept whispering wise, insightful comments about the unprecedented images they were seeing on the screen. There were no tears or shrieking when an elephant was attacked by a pride of lions in the middle of the night because they understood--were able to process in spite of their empathy for the elephant--that the lions were starving. How can four and five-year-olds make sense of this, allow this empathy to exist for predator and prey? They did. 

The second movie, which I saw at night, after the children were asleep, was about the preschool application process in New York. Its portrayal of animal nature was far less appealing, although awe-inspiring in its own way. The less said about it, the better. But as we walked home, my friend and I remembered what Lily had noted, after the umpteenth scene in the movie Earth in which a mother animal sacrificed food, water, shelter, safety and life itself for her child. I think it was after the narrator, which the junior Star Wars fans among us may not have known was Darth Vader himself, explained that the polar bear cubs had survived the winter by nursing (exclusively, for all those wondering if polar bears have access to formula or the statistics on IQ points or allergy rates), while the mother polar bear had lost half her body weight and was emaciated. "It seems like there's always enough for the babies," she said, "But the mothers never get enough of anything." Hmmm. 

I feel proud to be a member of a subset of the animal kingdom that bands together to protect its young against a threat of death, whose individual members know instinctively that what matters most is to love our children more than life itself, no matter what. With this in mind I will try to be less judgmental of the mammals in the other movie, generously hoping that what motivates them is the same.

The Take-Away

What happened this evening after dinner: I suggested that we take a walk, all six of us (including the dogs) to the corner of 18th Street and 6th Avenue, where I happened to know a Mr. Softee ice cream truck was parked. Lily wanted to take her scooter, and because I knew Annika would be upset to be scooterless, in spite of her total lack of ability to scooter, I got the doll stroller for her to push, and everybody put their shoes back on, and we clicked the leashes onto the dogs' collars, and we set out into the lovely spring evening. And then the fun really began. Lily, totally oblivious to pedestrians, almost careened into half a dozen of them; Annika, who is, to be fair, only 19 months old, set the pace at about a block per fifteen minutes. If you don't know New York City blocks, this is not fast. The dogs, confused by the cluster of us and the squeals of excitement and the near-constant near-collisions, peed randomly and frequently on every object on the sidewalk, and Scout--poor, neurotic, rescued Scout--barked crazily and nonsensically at a fuzzy, foolish-looking, pincushion of a dog who was actually wearing a windbreaker. By the time we arrived at the ice cream truck, it was midnight, and the truck had gone home for the night. No, it was still there, and it wasn't too late, and the girls were so happy with their small cones of soft-serve that I almost forgot the dozen near-lawsuits that had occurred en route, and stood on the corner watching them lick joyfully, not think, I swear it, of all of the laundry each lick would entail, just of their joy. And then, the walk back, on which Ben and I had to control both dogs while holding a scooter and a stroller, while ensuring that our two slow, now chocolate-covered walkers did not get hit by cars, knocked to the ground by larger people or have their ice cream stolen by the previously mentioned canine members of the group. Annika stopped, only to wipe her runny nose on my freshly dry-cleaned suede jacket. Lily walked into a mailbox while trying to isolate a piece of chocolate coating from her cone. Annika walked even more slowly than before, with the newfound focus of the ice cream, and both wanted to push the stroller while eating it, and realized she could not, causing occasional tears of frustration, stopped only by another joyful lick. Lily drew unnecessary attention to us when the dogs finally did their real business. The word "stinky" was shouted several times before the threat of a Mr. Softee veto was invoked. And when we reached the door, loud and sticky and stinky and snotty and tired, our gay neighbor who was waiting for the elevator took one look at us and said, "Oh, you straights. I am so, so sorry for you sometimes." I won't even go into the effort it took to finish the ice creams, deposit the ends of the cones in the trash cans, fend off a temper tantrum and a pajama rejection, with the dogs barking behind the locked bedroom door, because it doesn't seem necessary. But this does. 

What I, what we, will remember of this night (without pre-reading this, of course) in twenty years, or more: a rare family walk to the ice cream truck on one of the first lovely spring evenings of the year. The joy.

Background Noise

Late at night, while trying to fall asleep, or early in the morning, before I get out of bed, and occasionally just while lying on the couch in the living room when I have a lot on my mind, I idly listen to the street sounds: cars driving by, mostly, rain, sometimes, or thunder, a barking dog, shrieking woman, booming car stereo, a jackhammer, garbage trucks. Most of the time, however, I don't even notice it, and I always find myself surprised when people--staying in our apartment or just musing from another city--ask me how I can stand the street noise in New York.

Tonight, one of those occasional nights on the couch where I was just thinking and listening, I found myself realizing that as a child, at least for the summer months, I fell asleep each night to louder sounds: the crickets in the swamp by the pond in my parents' yard. The first time my best friend from college came to stay with us in the summertime she sat straight up in bed. "Are you kidding me?" she asked. "What the hell is that?" 

"What do you mean?" I asked, truly not knowing. I am thinking that maybe I filter out a lot of background noise, focus too much sometimes on the internal chords, a useful skill, perhaps, for sleeping, but a potentially problematic one in life. I have always taken pride in the fact that I can sleep anywhere, in any setting, find myself annoyed when others are fussy about their mattress or white noise machine or pillow or curtains or shades but especially sound. I think I am going to try listening harder.

Why I've Always Hated the Word Assimilate

In spite of what he may like to think, my father's relationship to religion is not casual; it is extreme. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, attended yeshiva until he was in high school, and was surrounded by adults who spoke in Hebrew or Yiddish until he left home for college where, not coincidentally, he immediately pledged a Jewish fraternity. And then, he graduated from college, moved to Boston, and became suddenly, miraculously, not Jewish.

Except he didn't. That was a simplistic way of saying what I want to say; I wrote it for dramatic effect. What he really did was somehow neutralize himself in a superficial sense. He always identified himself as having been raised Jewish but conveniently left out how just to what extent, and from as early as I can remember would claim to have no interest whatsoever in organized religion, which he found more deleterious than good. Except for family ceremonies, he never set foot in a synagogue.

As I got older, this explanation became less and less satisfying to me. For one thing, I had a Jewish grandmother, who lived in my hometown, no less: a Bubby. I had second cousins who all had bar or bat mitzvahs, which we attended, and although he didn't know I was watching him, it didn't escape me that my dad seemed to know all of the rituals and the prayers. And there was more. Almost all of his close friends were Jewish. On certain occasions, such as at any overt display of Christianity, he became visibly uncomfortable. He didn't like entering churches. Culturally, from the food he liked to his taste in books and movies to his sense of humor, he identified--voluntarily or not--as Jewish. And then there was the fact that people almost always assumed I was, because of my name. 

From a very early age, when people asked me what religion I was, I would say I was half Jewish, half Unitarian, Unitarianism being the compromise my parents had made when they married, when--again in a revelatory fashion--my father had said to my mother something along the lines of, "I'm fine with whatever you want to do, but I just don't want them raised Christian." Hmmm. Not Jewish, but not Christian, which Unitarianism is, technically, although there were so many mixed marriage families at The First Parish in Sudbury that we honored all of the Jewish holidays along with the Christian ones, built a sukkah each year in Sunday school and were never taught about any religious beliefs or traditions without also being taught about their context in world religions at large.

This was a tolerant, open-minded, expansive, and informative way to grow up, religiously speaking, but it wasn't very satisfying in a gut way. I have friends who were raised Catholic and haven't been to church in years but will cross themselves involuntarily when the car stops short; I have friends who were raised Baptist who loathe the hypocrisies of their church but can tear up at the sound of gospel music. Their religion is visceral; it may not be something in which they believe, or believe wholeheartedly, but they feel it when they see it. When I hear hymns, I automatically make them gender-neutral in my head. When I learn about molesting priests or sexist rabbis, I think: Well, yes. 

And then there is my father, whose mysterious connection to his very deepest roots, is a puzzle I will be puzzling all my life. There was a rabbi who favored the more socially prominent families in town, including the boy whose bar mitzvah fell on the same day as my father's. There was the fact that he felt his own parents were adhering to convention more than heartfelt belief in their own practice. There were the hours of religious study in lieu of baseball, the obvious discrepancies in the ways men and women were treated in the Orthodox faith, the fact that although he loved them, in a way, his own parents were not people he truly admired.

Last week I got a message on the answering machine from my father, passing on some chatty news, a message that ended with the words, "Oh, remind me to tell you a funny story about the minyan." I played it twice. Funny story about the minyan? I called him back. It turned out the Orthodox congregation that meets in his office building, down the hall from his office, had asked him in the past if he was interested in joining them for any events. He had said no, that he was not interested. But this day, he had been asked to please consider giving just a little bit of his time for a minyan, the quorum required of ten men in Orthodox Judaism for certain ceremonial functions; they had nine, needed a tenth, and there was nobody else to be asked. 

Begrudgingly, my father said yes. I could imagine this interaction: the asking, and my father's response, and I found myself very glad he had said yes, even before hearing the rest of the story. We cannot choose the groups we are born into, regardless of how far we stray. Sometimes, I think, we find that the journey is a circle, and not the line with an arrow we'd once imagined, or hoped. And, as he told me on the phone, trying to sound bemused, I think, but actually with a measure of awe in his voice, it "all came back." I remembered the Hebrew, he told me. Fluently, he said. I was always good at reading it. I understood everything. I didn't stay for very long, he added, and I was silent, still. Frankly, stunned.

Of course it came back, I wanted to shout, then. Of course it did! This was your life, the language you heard spoken, sung, since infancy, the sounds of your childhood, the prayers of your adolescence, men who looked like your father and uncles, dressed like them, speaking like them, assuming you into the fold not for what you believe, necessarily, but for who you were born to. This, I wanted to say, not even understanding the feeling, was your heritage.

The thing is about your past is that you can't ever get away from it, and you shouldn't really want to. We can choose so much about who we become, but in a way, we become who we already are. 

Kindred, Again

I have written before about the concept of kindred spirits, which I learned about from the Anne of Green Gables books, although I don't know if L.M. Montgomery should get credit for coining the phrase. I love the idea of kindred spirits, but even more, I love when I encounter them, and when they become a part of my life. One of the best aspects of kindred spirithood is its unpredictability, the fact that a kindred spirit may be older or younger than you, from a different background, of a different race, religion or gender--kindred spirits can be found anywhere at all if you remain open to the possibility that you might actually find one.

I have a friend I've known since we were eleven. I love my friend, and there is much I could write about her, but my focus here is on her dad. I don't remember the first time I met my friend's dad, but I do know, that even as an eleven-year-old, I found him to be excellent company. He is, was, older than all of my other friends' dads. He was married before he married my friend's mother, and he is only a few years younger than my grandmother, but until I was an adult, I never thought about this. I'm not sure I even realized it back then. I did know that he was funny, and that frequently, the same things made us laugh. 

I never spent that much time with my friend's father; like all parents, he existed in the backdrop of our lives. But once, when I was in my twenties, I was in a home goods store and found myself waiting in a line by a display of cocktail napkins with cartoons and jokes printed on them, the kind of thing I would never in a million years buy. But the line wasn't moving, and I started scanning the rows of napkins, and I stopped on one package featuring napkins imprinted with the line: Who invited you?

Without thinking, I took the packet off the shelf and bought it. Not for me, but for my friend's father, whom I knew would find it funny in precisely the way I did. I mailed it to him. I can't think of another time I have purchased a novelty gift for anyone, let alone a friend's father, and sent it to them for the pleasure in knowing it would elicit a smile. 

My friend's father is even older now, as, I suppose, am I. Over the years we have occasionally sent each other trivial little gifts of this sort, always targeted toward the other's sense of humor. This is never planned, and never discussed. It just is. I will miss it when it ends. 

I see my friend's father every once in a while, and I always feel a sense of relief when I walk into a room and he is in it. There he is, I think, and smile. 

Feverish

Annika: 102. Me: 102. Coincidence? You decide.

Can't sleep, as feel terrible, but think I won't write in this state. The screen is blurry. 

Dog Day

Lost a day to travel there; back in NYC and ready to write. And write and write and write, I hope.

This evening, after hours spent in cars and on planes, the girls and I went on an outing to get some fresh air and exercise and, it must be said, cupcakes. Annika was traveling by stroller, and Lily by scooter, meaning we were not anybody's favorite sidewalk sight right off the bat. Factoring in Lily's propensity for wild twists and turns and occasional crashes, and my absent-minded tendencies behind the wheels, we were a disaster waiting to happen. Except we weren't. We made it all the way to the market that was our ultimate destination, did some necessary shopping, ate a pleasing number of free samples (a learned behavior I cannot spare my children), purchased our cupcakes, and headed back out onto the not-so-mean but potentially irritable streets.

About halfway back, with Lily yelling from about twenty feet behind me, "Mama! I'm going to up catch you!" over and over, and Annika shouting random syllables in sympathetic joy, we saw a woman with three dogs, purebred pitbulls, up ahead; I could tell Lily saw her just as I did because she actually picked up her pace for a change. "Can I? Can I ask her?" she asked me, and I gave my customary answer. Our rule is she can ask anybody with a dog if she can pet it, and if the person says no, she is to say thank you just the same and back away.

I kept pushing Annika as Lily scooted ahead and approached the woman, a somewhat surly-faced twentysomething who did not reek of child-friendliness. The dogs seemed nice enough, but my hackles went up as we got close enough to see the choke collars, the fact that the two females had very recently given birth, were still nursing, and that the male wasn't neutered.  I heard Lily, polite and eager, hair wild from the windy ride, ask if she could pet the dogs, and I heard the woman, not rude, definitely surprised, say no, she could not.

This happens so rarely that Lily always seems both disappointed and dismayed--she has expressed her opinion before that these dog owners are really depriving their dogs of her, as well as her conviction that people don't know that she is a dog owner herself, and not just an ordinary dog novice kid. This time, for whatever reason, she didn't just walk away, shrug her shoulders at me. "Are they boys or girls?" she asked, and the woman, backing away from her a bit, jerking the dogs on their leads, looked at me, then away just as quickly. "Two girls and a boy," she mumbled, trying to turn her back on us, keep walking, but the dogs--sensing interest, pulled toward us, panting and jostling for attention.

I realized I was gripping the stroller handles quite tightly; my hands hurt. I relaxed them, stretched my fingers, looked at the dogs. I had a very bad feeling about these dogs, about what they were being used for, about the way the woman holding them was behaving. She was staring at Lily, who kept openly, curiously, firing questions at her, and she wouldn't make eye contact with me. I waited for Lily to say what she always says when she sees choke collars, which is: "My mother says those collars are not nice for dogs," but she didn't. I thought about asking the woman a question or two myself, about these pretty, tired-seeming, untrained, straining at the bit, apparently untouchable dogs, but I didn't. 

Instead, I spoke sharply to Lily, more sharply than I had planned to, told her to come right now, that we needed to get back home. She said good-bye to the dogs and shot me a mad look, and I started pushing again, and Lily started scooting again, and Annika started calling out words again, and we all headed back up the street toward home.

About halfway up the block, I turned, in spite of myself, and the woman was still standing where she had been, frozen in place, watching us go. I wonder if Lily made her think about those dogs. I wish I could stop thinking about them myself. I hope I am wrong.

Old

I have spent the past few days in the company of a woman born over ninety years ago, and the few days before that in the presence of another. And so I have been thinking quite a bit, in spite of myself, on some level, about what it means to be old.

One of the most useful things I have learned about being a parent is that you are the kind of parent you are a person. Terribly put; what I mean to say is that becoming a mother, say, does not actually change who you are, even as regards your relationship with the previously nonexistent child in your life (although it changes essentially everything about your circumstances). I am exactly the kind of mother I sort of knew, subconsciously, I would be. My friends, too, parent as they are. 

Becoming old is like this, too. It is done in the fashion one does everything else, as one is. Quirks, after years--decades--of wearing in grooves, become amplified, extreme. Traits shriek, habits--fearing extinction--fight hard for survival. In some ways, an old person is an exaggeration. 

There is something exhausting about the elderly, who induce in those of us lucky enough to still be young, an intense feeling of, "There but for the grace of god." Funny: What we should be thinking is, "When?" There is also something beautiful and fierce (in the extroverted and timid alike) in the character's refusal to be subdued, the self's insistence on itself.  

The self's insistence on itself: sad, tragic, even, but beautiful, too.

Safe

Touche (with an accent, please), oh you who commented that the quitting seemed to have taken. Have not had access to a computer for the last few days, so I have decided that I will make up for the last two missed posts by NOT taking off the weekend. Sound fair? Good thing this isn't an actual dialogue.

I am writing from my aunt-in-law's office in Illinois. We are here for the weekend, visiting, and the girls were both wound up and exhausted after nearly a day of travel. Annika, generally the easiest baby in the world to put to sleep, was not quite buying it in a wholly unfamilar room, new crib, no sister, familiar music or Flat Dog (my fault), and a few minutes after I'd put her to sleep she was still whimpering, and so I went back in. 

She was standing in the crib, one of the portable, fold-up versions, hands on the side, shaking her head and saying, "No, no, no, Mama. Where? Where?" I scooped her up and lay down on the couch in the room with her, and she immediately snuggled into me with a contented, audible sigh. I'm generally pretty good about not comparing my girls, so I will allow myself this one flagrant comparison: at this same age, Lily was not very much of a snuggler. In fact, unless she had a high fever or was being read to, she rarely lay still in my arms; Annika--like Sadie, it must be said--is of the maximum skin-to-skin school of snuggling, and as a person not known for overt displays of affection, I must say, I love it. 

I had found an old radio in the room we are staying in, and on my first try at sleep had set it to what I thought was an innocuous, generic, FM lite station with little DJ commentary. As  lay on the couch with Annika in my arms, this at first seemed to be the case. And then, the tempo picked up, and I realized that it was 7:30 Central Time and that I was lying on a couch in Champagne, Illinois, with my 18-month-old baby in my arms, listening to Men Without Hats bust out "Safety Dance." To continue the theme of time travel, I was suddenly half there, half in my eighth grade gymnasium at a school dance. I could practically see the robot moves, the worst offenders, who shall remain nameless; a few of them might even be reading this now. 

What I am steering toward here, although I know it doesn't seem remotely like it, is that the music was far from relaxing, evocative for me, at least, of an intensely unrelaxing time and place, but that lying there with Annika melting into me was the most relaxed, content, I've felt in months. These moments of stillness with her and her alone are so rare; I am glad I have held onto the ability to cherish them, even when the world around me is all Men at Work-style chaos and discord. 

And then. As if her ability to transcend Safety Dance weren't enough, I felt a tiny hand on my cheek, along my jawline. A tiny voice say, "Amy. Mama. Amy." Just perfect. Exactly what I needed to hear.

Can't Quit

Writing: I wish I knew how to quit you.

Not really, although pretty much yes, most of the time, I hate to be writing this, let alone thinking it, and it is true that I don't mean it in that if given the choice to never have to write again, or feel the impulse to do so, I would take that choice, I do mean it in that these days I wish so much of the time that I had gone to medical school and become a world-famous brain surgeon, or even just a well-paid dermatologist who could leave work in time to have dinner with her kids.

My relationship to--with?--writing these days has some very Brokeback Mountain elements. I am full of yearning and dreams, self-loathing and shame. (No, Dad, this does not mean I am secretly a gay cowboy.) The other day, a new friend who is a successful novelist posted a Facebook Status Update that said something like: I hate writing, and although I had just met this woman I felt an overwhelming kinship with her and immediately posted back to her with such enthusiasm she's probably still thinking: Yikes. What's her problem? I was just kind of kidding.

It's the "kind of" that's important there, because I suspect, actually, she does hate writing, sometimes, just like I do, and maybe she even wishes she could run from it, "quit it," choose something else, something safer, saner, more socially acceptable and consistently productive, either to do for a living or simply to love.

I think that's one of the reasons I am writing this blog right now: to try to make myself fall back in love with writing, or in the hope that if I don't let myself run away from it, keep my relationship to--with?--it out in the open, that it won't just quietly disappear. It's always better to be honest, right? Out in the open and true? Writing, I don't really wish I could quit you. Except when I really, really do.

On and On

Still in Sudbury, still staying with my parents, still existing in alterna-universe where most of the people I encounter have known me since birth but not so much over the past twenty years, causing me to feel like a not quite amalgamated hybrid of a number of my former selves.

Not to mention that being here, as is true to a lesser extent of being anywhere outside one's regular stomping grounds, makes me think differently, think about different things. Tonight, I took the girls over to my grandmother's house up the street to make a guest appearance at the weekly "Knitting Group" held in my grandmother's kitchen. Although this started out as an actual knitting group, it eventually became yet another version of my mother's lifelong women's-only wine and cheese and talking get-togethers, as apparently nobody even bothers to bring their knitting anymore. 

Annika had not napped and was a mess in my arms, and although all of the women oohed and ahhed over her and Lily, as propriety required, I was so tense and exhausted that our stay could not have been very enjoyable for any of us. Except, my grandmother. As I sat at the table for a few brief minutes while Annika distracted herself with a plate of spaghetti, I drank a glass of wine as though it were a shot of tequila and contemplated my grandmother. She sat at the head of the table, and it was readily apparent to me, at least, that she could not hear a word being said. At one point I asked her a question, and she beamed and shook her head as though to say, "Oh, Amy," but this was just to acknowledge that she'd seen my lips move, to let me know she was glad I was there.

Two of the attendees were two of my mother's oldest friends, women who have known me since infancy. One was my parents' neighbor at their first apartment complex, where they lived when I was born; later, she was my fourth grade teacher, my sister's, too. I overheard her telling Lily at one point that I had been "a wonderful student, the kind of student who did 'extra,'" which I let slide under the circumstances, and that my sister had "brought all kinds of of household treasures into school every day," which I also let slide. At one point these two women had a rather intense discussion about how I was suddenly "much more like [my] father" than ever before. "Do that smile again," one said, "so I can show her," and I obliged, forcing a fake-feeling grin as Annika screamed in my arms, wiped tomato sauce on the arms of my sweater, Lily beside me poked holes in a strawberry, I searched the room for what must have been left of the bottle of wine.

And just before we left, I looked at my grandmother again, still smiling, still essentially deaf, holding a fork but not eating, feeling--I knew somehow--a partly subconscious sense of relief that life--continuous and choppy, wailing and wistful, messy and dishonest and heartfelt and true--was happening still in her kitchen. And that she was a part of it too. 

CVS

I'm at my parents' house, the house I grew up in, for the most part, and earlier today I had to make a run to the drug store, for diaper cream and wipes, which I'd forgotten in the rush of packing. This drug store--like most of the places of business in my hometown--has been here for decades, and as I pulled up to it and parked, right in front of the store, I had that feeling I get every time I come "home" that time is slipping all over the place. 

As I walked up to the entrance, to buy my diaper cream, mind you (diaper cream! I am a mother!), I was no longer thirty-nine but eighteen, and it was the night before my parents drove me to college in a packed Country Squire station wagon, and I was meeting my friend Kate, who lived up the road in the next town over, so we could buy school supplies to bring along to school. School supplies! How ridiculous, I think now, although I guess we were more in the market for dorm room supplies, shampoo and such, although to think now that I must have wondered if these items would be hard to find on campus seems unfathomably naive.

But this is not what I was thinking as I walked up and down the aisles, not looking for what I needed, yet, just walking. I was thinking: That was yesterday, not twenty years ago. I remember what I was wearing, the shorts and T-shirt, the sneakers with the stepped-on heels, how my skin looked: tan, what I was feeling: unbearably nostalgic in that self-glamorizing eighteen-year-old fashion, what I heard: my friend's unmistakable laugh in the make-up section, where I used to buy cover-up and green clay masks--do teenagers do this still, or are the green clay masks another relic in the teenage girl graveyard of self-improvement tools?

What has happened in these twenty years? I found myself thinking. Everything--most of my life--and yet nothing at all. I have two children, and sometimes I need to buy diaper cream, but I am still that same freckled girl who thought she was so old and wise and ironic, buying pencils to take off to college, quite easily made to laugh so hard in a drug store over something moronic that a clerk is summoned to check on the girls in the make-up aisle, girls whose idea of make-up is chapstick, girls who look like they're playing dress-up when they experiment with mascara, girls who will someday, two decades later--or at least one of them will--walk back out of this very same drug store wondering how the last twenty years disappeared in the blink of an eye, the firm slam of a car door, the turn of a key.

Beat This

 So when is the last time you were at a children's birthday party? Get this: the pinatas are no longer hit with a stick. 

I've been to so many children's birthday parties in the last few years that a weekend without one is beginning to seem like a week in the Caribbean. And many of these parties feature--among numerous other activities and performances--a pinata. The first few times, I didn't notice what was up; I was too busy making sure that if there was so much as a half-slice of pizza left over for "the parents" that I was the parent who grabbed it. For some reason I always arrive at these things hungry. But at the last party,  I'd eaten my fill of mini hot dogs and swallowed down a couple plastic cups of juice, and when the pinata came out, I was ready. Maybe I could catch a few pieces of candy on the outskirts of the crowd if I was quick.

The children lined up behind the birthday child. They seemed oddly somber. Joyless, even. I looked at another parent to see if she had noticed the grim mood, but she was watching, patiently, as though she'd seen this show before.

And the birthday child stepped up to the hanging pinata, a superhero of some kind, I think, and...pulled a piece of ribbon dangling at the bottom. Nothing happened. 

And then the next child came up and did the same thing, and then the next child, and the next child, and finally one pained-looking child pulled her ribbon, and some candy fell out--did not dramatically spray around the room causing shrieking, happy children to scatter with it--and the children fell on it, and then quickly got up, clutching their bags (I don't remember the bags, either; we got what we could hold), and moved on to another activity. The anti-climatism was deafening.

I know much has been made of today's "safe" parenting, so-called helicopter parents and the uber-involved, ultra PC moms and dads who think a water balloon is the childhood equivalent of a battlefield grenade, and I have nothing much new to add to the debate. Except this: I'm kind of sad about the pinatas.

Just a Thought for Today

"We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Experience"