Fatigue Sets In

It's 11:57. Before anyone who knows me thinks to himself: So typical, posting by the skin of her teeth, let me just say for the record that I pledged to write 750 words a day, seven days a week, with a day by definition being a 24-hour cycle. I never said I'd be done before midnight. (It's nice to know that one's weaseling out of deadline skills don't dry up after a lengthy drought.)

No, in the words of, I think, Stephen Sondheim in one of his less good songs, "I'm still here." I actually can't believe it myself. That might be a bad song lyric too--yes! I actually remembered lyrics under duress--it's from the Greatest American Hero. I think the song goes, "I still can't believe it myself." So pretend I wrote that. Okay. Too tired for much tonight, it's clear, and still a little fired up from watching the republican debate. Although they're still a whole lot of crazy, the candidates seemed a little more sober somehow, as though they sensed that their usual tactics (barely suppressed rage, starched condescension, and so on) would not play well on this stage. Some of the questions and responses were even a little boring, unusual for this creationism-crazy crew of Mormons and Holocaust deniers. I almost longed for the now burnished, shopworn schticks of the Black! Woman! Populist! candidates across the aisle.

This is the problem with a blog, and maybe I will allow myself this slip-up because I am so tired: It's way too tempting to just talk about whatever you want to talk about, imaging an audience that has any interest in your thoughts on the most random or tedious of subjects. There are so many things I want SO BADLY to write about now: Huckabee's planted Easter eggs, my deep and abiding love for Hugh Laurie, the 140 word I scored in a recent Scrabulous game against a fellow blogger who shall remain anonymous, the unexpected and fascinating reemergence in my life online of a number of people from my third and fifth grade classes and the unexpected and fascinating things some of them are doing, more thoughts on princesses, including the highly relevant comment by a reader that really threw me for a loop about boys liking princess stuff, why American don't eat treacle toffee, the omnipotence of Boston sports, and more.

Actually, I don't really want to write about any of those things. It's a highly contrived list, and with the exception of Scrabulous, which I do really want to write about as part of a larger project, and the new princess angle, I had to strain to come up with the rest of the items. Don't get me wrong, I do love Hugh Laurie, but that's all I have to say on the subject. What I will make myself do is write an anecdote for the beginning of the Four Generations piece, which I increasingly feel will have to be about five generations by the time I ever write the thing. Here goes:

We are sitting on a bench in Union Square by the fountain: my grandmother, mother, daughters and me. Actually only three of us are sitting; Lily is standing as close as she can to the fountain without falling in, and Annika is asleep in her stroller. My father has gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar when it opens. My grandmother is sitting next to the stroller, which she pushes like a wheelchair when we go out in the city, where I live and where they come to visit from Massachusetts as often as they can throughout the year. We have been to the greenmarket, and the stroller contains not just the baby but winter produce: root vegetables, apples, and kale.

A man walks by, middle-aged, polished in camel hair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiles at my grandmother, who wears coronet braids and is watching Lily with a furrowed brow, nervous about her proximity to the fountain. I see him smile at her and smile back on her behalf, as she hasn't noticed, and he takes in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing the food we have bought, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under some pussywillows.

"Is that four generations?" he asks, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me. I stare at him for an instant, uncomprehending. Generations? What is he talking about? I look at my 92-year-old grandmother watching my four-year-old daughter. My mother is looking at the man now too.

"Yes," she says, as the realization hits me. That is what we are: four generations of women, women and girls, spanning nearly a century, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love.

"Yes," I add, unnecessarily, echoing, as always, my mom.

"That's just terrific," the man says. "Just wonderful." He would have tipped his hat, had he been wearing one, but instead he slightly bowed, in the direction of Mormor, and my mother and I, the only two members of this motley crew who'd heard the exchange, stood to gather our brood.