Silence

Think of this as a little Quaker meeting...

History-making

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gambler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luck of the draw, sometimes.

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

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

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

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

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

The Curse of the Sexy Hobo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Excuses, Again

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