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.