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."