The Push and the Pull

1992.  I was sitting on the kitchen steps to William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Mississippi, no one home but me and Jordy.  We'd snuck onto the grounds after the caretakers had locked up. The Ole Miss marching band was rehearsing somewhere beyond the trees.  The sky was low and heavy, still very humid in mid-September.  I was awash in emotion, mostly sad.  "What is it?" Jordy asked, seeming unsure whether I wanted comfort or to be left alone.  I tried to explain, knowing how crazy I sounded.  I had fallen in love with this place but knew it would end, and was mourning it already.  Without questioning my logic, Jordy replied kindly, "But maybe it won't."

Places do this to me.  I fall for them, the same cascade of feeling, surrender, irrational sense of inevitability usually reserved for love between humans.

When I was 14, my mother invited a Japanese college student for a study-abroad home-stay.  Naoko was entirely alien to me -- her language, both verbal and body, her fashion, her neatly arranged toiletries.  Yet before her three weeks were up, I felt an inexorable pull to go to Japan.  I was falling. Six years later, in my muchachuka Japanese, I gave a toast at Naoko's wedding in Osaka.

When I landed in Los Angeles for film school, my neighbor, Melodee, a divorced former actress now commercial real estate agent, illuminated it all (after a pitcher of Cosmopolitans).  I had to return to Japan because I'd been a geisha in a previous life, and I had probably committed suicide.  I was pulled there to make peace, to mend, my broken past.  Only in LA!  (I nursed quite a hangover that first day of film school orientation!)

Jordy was right -- I've never stopped loving any place I truly loved, but I have felt the instinct that it's time to move on, often when some other place has pulled me.  In the rare instance when I left a place before I was ready -- Mississippi, left it for what I thought was love of a person -- I regretted it, and resented whatever place received me after (San Francisco).  Los Angeles was a surprise, the first pragmatic move (in-state tuition for graduate school) undertaken with the double prejudice people from the Bay Area and New England hold against that city.  But soon my tolerance for LA blossomed into a proper love affair, endless strip malls and all.

But New York was calling...  During the Tribeca Film Festival,  Jordy, baby Duncan and I climbed to the roof of the West Village apartment we'd rented through Craigslist (later, oddly, Craig himself would award my film a prize, so funny) with my little brother Richard and his girlfriend, Breanna.  It was sunset, springtime in New York, layers of quaint village buildings and water towers rising toward shiny Midtown.  A pair of wispy clouds bracketed the sky like wings, pink in the afterglow, and I was awash with the feeling that we should move to New York, and if we did, New York would look after us.  I smiled to imagine my grandfathers, New Yorkers both, somehow engineering the sunset to deliver this message.

Most people wouldn't make transcontinental moves based on such a moment.  Of course, there were many other more reasonable factors.  But once the decision to move was taken, Brooklyn didn't "speak" to me -- it shouted.  There I discovered an entire borough of people like me - scavengers of the broken pieces of a tired world, having fun seeing what new things we can make of them.  (I was a kid who dragged trash from the dumpster of our condominium complex into a dwelling in the woods, appointed with discarded chairs, plants, newspapers, dishes...)

So, what are my broken pieces?  How did they get broken?  And what can I make of them?

Admission:  I've just finished Kate Atkinson's extraordinary novel, Life After Life, in which her heroine, Ursula, is born and dies again and again, until she "gets it right."  I am mesmerized by Atkinson's construct and still much too involved in her characters to let them be fictional, subject to sudden bouts of weepiness both sad and grateful, etc.  Long ago I wrote a blog entry here called "A Pseudo-metaphysics of Birth" in which I toyed with some of these ideas.  (Was my cold clarity that Jordy must leave the house when he contracted Swine flu in my eighth month of pregnancy with Tucker callousness on my part, hysteria from all the warnings to pregnant women, or a flashback to my great-grandmother's own swift death in New York City in 1919 from Spanish flu?  In any case, Jordy recovered more quickly for being relieved of parenting duties, and Tucker was born with a surplus of good health.  We are traveling the fork of history we all wished for.)

But, really, who knows how anything works?  Maybe not a geisha and suicide, but I did bring back something of Japan, or found something of myself there, that travels with me now forever, as does Mississippi.  We are very attached to the idea of our autonomous identities in American culture; we revere people who are "true to themselves," "authentic" and so forth and so on.  Yet we are so shaped by our family, our culture, our moment in history.  Without evoking reincarnation fantasies, it's pretty clear that a person's sense of self will be radically different if raised in rural China or adopted to a Brooklyn family.  Do the people make the place, or the place make the people?  (Or, of course, both?)  Are some people (gee, who?) more impressionable to place than others?  (One of my best friends responded, when I told her I was taking a part in a play this fall, "Of course you are!  You've always been a chameleon!"  It was said lovingly, though I felt ambivalent about the characterization.)

So why back to New Hampshire?   Why now?  We've got endless reasons, all of which sound pretty convincing (and have, as Jordy's Hungarian friend Robert would say, "the added benefit of truth"), but in the end it's an instinct.  We're supposed to come home now.  At least for a while.  To gather something?  Glean something?  Rest back in the source?  Make peace with the source?  Maybe, like Ursula returning to the day of her birth amidst a snow storm over and over again, being here gives me a chance to return to some of the forks in my life and walk a different way, if ever so slightly, or just walk it again and discover it's still -- and maybe has always been -- there.  The other day I was wading in the stream that wraps around our house, and time collapsed -- I was eight, wading in the stream behind Brook Hollow, content among the trees and dandelions tumbling down the white water, whole in some way that felt lost. Earlier this summer, our determined little Reeve leapt into the pool, forgetting his goggles, and groped with terror in the blurry water without finding the ledge of the underwater bench. Time collapsed and I was the one, four years old, having lost my grip on the steady silver rail of a motel pool and groping in watery oblivion for what felt like forever.  I lept after Reeve, leading him to the bench and reassuring him.  When I drive the back roads home from Cornish Elementary, I catch my breath at the view of the Green Mountains, instantly in my mother's car returning from a piano lesson, Susan Stamberg on the radio, greeted by this same view 32 years ago.  This summer the kids entered the Cornish Fair; in the spring Jordy and I hope to make maple syrup with them.  Yesterday I picked up my husband and son, passing the time while waiting for their ride with an acorn battle in front of the post office where, at the eleventh hour (literally) on May 1, 1987, I switched my "Yes" from a familiar East Coast college to one in California, off the map of my cozy, familiar world, and threw the envelope in the mailbox before fear could change my mind.  I leaned on the hood of the car that night, alone in the dark, trembling for minutes before I was fit to drive again.  But here I am again, picking up Jordy and our three-year old, who just demolished a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

Tiny loops of time folding back on themselves, carried by gently clicking knitting needles working out some pattern I only glimpse but can't quite yet make out.

Twenty-six years ago I ran to the big wide world that beckoned me.  But I also ran away because, though I had no idea at the time, my heart had been broken here in ways I couldn't grasp until I started to gather the pieces in far flung places.  It feels like an undeserved blessing to get to come home, and to realize that of all places, I love this one the most.

Leaving Sesame Street

Sesame Street and I started the same year, 1969.  Though I was born a world away, in Boulder, Colorado, I drew closer to that enchanted Street in 1972 when my parents' divorce necessitated a move back east.  We landed in Greenwich, Connecticut to be near my mother's family.  My mother rented a little house, once the servants' quarters to a grand estate, which was where I began to make sense of the world.  I knew the couple behind us (Gary and Cheryl?) smoked something called grass. I learned you were supposed to tie a yellow ribbon around an oak tree if you missed someone, and that Smoking in the Boys Room was both naughty and cool (and that our teenage neighbor 's band had cracked the plaster of their basement walls from sonic impact).  I overheard that the president had done a very bad thing and had quit the job before he could fired.   And I understood that there were places you could only go if you were a member, or a cousin of a member, like the swimming pool.  I knew that we were different from neighboring families, in ways mostly defined by what we lacked (money, a father, a Betty Crocker ready-bake oven, etc.).  

But on TV I saw another world.  It was a friendly place with cheerful neighbors of various hues who greeted you and sang songs and told funny jokes.  Furry puppets could fly overhead or pop out of garbage cans at any given moment.   Fire hydrants spouted plumes of water for happy hot children to dance under, and in the evenings people and puppets alike hung out on stoops recounting all the fun that was had and thanking the Letter that had sponsored that episode.  There were no gates, no membership requirements, and no one was left out.

This utopia, which I understood existed in a place called New York City, battled in my imagination with the other New York City I knew.  In my other New York, my mother took the Ford station wagon into the city for a date, only to have the gasoline siphoned and our child seats stolen.  We kids were only allowed to make day trips (it was never explained what ominous things might happen at night), and it was always hot and stinky, and fire hydrants signified heat riots rather than a cheerful neighborhood cooling station.  New York City could swallow you up without anyone noticing or caring... My elderly babysitter lived in an impersonal apartment building, a housing project designed to stack the people who showed up in this city with nowhere else to go, a place where hooligans slide lit matches under her door for fun.  Frances died in her sleep and was not discovered for several days, an anonymous city ending to a life begun at the turn of an earlier century in a Swiss village where she had once been someone.

Years passed and I moved to New Hampshire and grew up; meanwhile, Guiliani and Clinton happened, and out of the wreckage of New York rose a new city.  Crime was down, real estate prices rising. The forgotten boroughs were getting hot, the Brooklyn my grandmother left in 1940 hottest among them.  Expecting our first baby, Jordy and I were living in Los Angeles but decided to stop over in Brooklyn en route to a wedding in Europe.  We never could have predicted the events that would lead us to move here -- eviction, an opportunity for Jordy to return to his previous career in finance, my brother-in-law's sudden death.  At the time I was just motivated by curiosity about this place of my ancestors, this phoenix of urban renewal.  

It was July, sweaty, sultry.  We walked the streets of Cobble Hill, finding neighbors chatting on their stoops, green markets sprouting local vegetables.  Hot kids found gleeful relief in the numerous and artful playground fountains.  We cooled off with lemonades at a community bookstore, and found a sidewalk Italian eatery for dinner.  At dusk we strolled the Promenade where the Manhattan skyline twinkled benevolently and we chatted with a friendly stranger about our pregnancy.  We capped it off with at the ice cream truck for a chocolate dipped cone.  We found ourselves, of course, on Sesame Street.

Two years later, when faced with a sudden move to the New York area, I wanted Brooklyn.  We found a house with a porch on a tree-lined street near the park.  On the playgrounds we found a mini U.N. negotiating world peace on the monkey bars.  On the summer solstice the strains of live bluegrass attracted us to the gates of Celebrate Brooklyn, an outdoor music concert. Disappointed we didn't have tickets, we inquired if any were left... Only to discover that tickets were not required (donation only!).  Overwhelmed with the joy of discovering this inclusive, creative place, we gave a hefty donation for the privilege of not having to.

We are not alone in seeking the Sesame Street utopia here in Brooklyn.  Whether refugees from suburban childhoods; West Coast transplants seeking more open minds and fellow creative spirits in the midst of New York's monied, old-world culture; Israelis exploring their Jewishness in a less polarized place than their home country; or natives who stick around because they dig their hometown, our friends and neighbors all seem to have heeded the same siren song (whether in English, Hebrew, Spanish, etc.)...  "Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?"

And we found it.  Kind of.  The other New York, we have learned the hard way, remains close despite falling crime statistics.  We've had our car tagged bumper-to-bumper in graffiti; we've had 3 break-ins to the car.  Our dry cleaner, an older Korean woman, was strangled to death with a wire in broad daylight by a thief who wanted her car.  A teenaged neighbor was witness to a friend's abduction by a con-artist pretending to be a plain-clothes cop on the subway.  And on a December morning in 2010, with baby strapped to my back and our two bigger boys in tow, I walked into the final act of a domestic tragedy that ended with the death of our neighbor.

Many people express ambivalence about a New York City that has become too wealthy, too squeaky clean, too Disney-fied.  I get the complaint and share the concern, even as we are probably part of the problem.  Part of the Sesame Street charm was that people hung out on their stoops and ran in fire hydrants; they didn't have central air in condos with doormen and rooftop pools to gate them off from each other.  Achieving just the right amount of grit -- poor enough to seek wealth in community rather than things, but wealthy enough to keep neighborhoods from falling to blight and crime -- is a quixotic quest that obsesses Brooklyn residents and generates a steady stream of material for the New York Times.

Whatever else we tell ourselves to explain our real estate choices, though, we seek neighborhoods that offer basic safety first, then a place to thrive.  At the simplest level, parenting is about keeping our kids alive and safe, an urgent instinct that comes roaring out of us at their birth.  So the question of the ages is, of course, what constitues safety?

There's a sweet irony to our own family's generational migrations in search of safe nesting grounds.   Like many Americans, we've added upward mobility to the search for safety.  Improvement upon the past, by definition, excludes returning to the place of your own upbringing, and so my grandparents, native New Yorkers, built their nest in suburban Long Island because they could afford to get out of the city.  Both my husband's and my parents, feeling their souls deprived by these hard-earned suburban upbringings, headed off to rural New England to raise their babies.   Where could Jordy and I go but full circle back to the city?  

New Yorkers defend that our city is as safe as any place else.  Murder, for example, happens everywhere; it's just more spread out in the country.  Which is true, and which is why I don't fear for our lives here.  I feel safer -- and I think our kids do too -- because I don't live in fear of other people, for whatever reasons they may seem "different" and despite our tougher experiences here.   (I am surprised time and again out-of-town visitors still express reservations about using the subway!)  We love the endless parade of colorful characters that this life offers.

But it's also true that where we grew up, you're much less likely to walk into a murder scene on the way to school.  City living means other peoples' trauma reverberates through you, like it or not, through the very walls of your house, and you've got to toughen up, even in this sheltered Brooklyn enclave, to cope with it and shield your kids appropriately.  It's exhausting work, on top of the energy required just to get the kids across the street, keep irrational toddlers safe on subway platforms, teach kids to ride bikes without training wheels amidst buses and bikers, or locate your kids on a populated playground where they can disappear from view in a moment's distraction...  This fatigue has helped us better understand our parents' choices.

So next week we are leaving Brooklyn for a year.  We haven't given up on Sesame Street; we just want to take a break.  The vision was more clear for family life in this city when our kids were still small enough to be restrained in a stroller and believed in talking Big Birds.  But these little bodies are not so little any more, and they don't want restraint.  Yet how to let them stretch their wings towards independence at this age, in this city, without a parental anxiety attack?  And as much as we love Brooklyn, we find ourselves increasingly over-stimulated; these days the buzz of the city amplifies the buzz within our household to create more noise than music.  Reeve recently summed it up, "I used to like Celebrate Brooklyn, but now I don't like it.  It's too many crowds."  We want all of this pulsing life, and want to give it to our boys, but we don't want to force feed it -- we want them to seek it when they are ready, and when we are ready to let them go find it on their own.  For the moment, we want to let them follow their bodies' impulses to climb, wade, build, run and holler to the wind without angering neighbors.

We haven't left yet, but just the prospect of leaving Brooklyn has made us fall in love with it again.  The fireworks after the Philharmonic in the park, all things Brooklyn Nets, 78th precinct youth baseball, the beach at Fire Island, the amazing musicians of Celebrate Brooklyn, Terrace BAGELS -- but above all, our friends.  Doctors by day, punk rockers by night.  Dancers who use their art to heal.  Chasidic wise women in the form of pre-school teachers.  Metaphysical plumbers.  Nanny confidantes.  Our friends here, of all ages, have something in common and uncommon in our worldly wanderings:  They are wonderfully weird and seem to invite each other to be more than they seem.   To quote Kermit The Frog, they are the lovers, the dreamers, and me, who sought Brooklyn for the open-ended place that it is and the place we want to make it.  So, despite the betting pool among our nervous friends who say we're never coming back, I'd put our money on our return, refreshed, hopefully with a winning concept for the sequel, Sesame Street 2: The Teenage Years.

(de)Composition

Here at the end of April in Brooklyn, each morning greets me with some new miracle.  Today, suddenly, dogwoods.  Pink and white, they open their square petals to the sky like plates on the hands of expert waiters bearing delicacies to celestial diners.  My mother used to recall lying with me on the grass in front of the post office, gazing up at the dogwoods.  (She later corrected my memory of her memory -- rewind, erase, insert cherry blossoms.)  In any case, a fleeting moment of me at three, hand in hand with my mother, bound by memory to every spring's bloom.

The discovery of a tulip opening in my planter this morning hits me with a wonder akin to that I felt when I first saw Duncan's ribs rippling in gray-blue ultrasonic water as the technician waved her magic wand over my pelvis.  What force compels these structures to take shape?  I cannot grasp their emergence in the flow of time.  If I had stayed up all night, flashlight trained on that tulip, would I have witnessed the precise moment its petals pushed their way into the world?  Would 24-hour ultrasound surveillance reveal the moment Duncan sprouted ribs?

Structure can fail, as Jordy and I painfully learned when we lost our first baby to a renal system anomaly discovered by ultrasound at 16 weeks.  Until then I'd never considered the possibility that this diligent construction, molecule by molecule, could go wrong.  Ever since I am filled with awe that it ever goes right.  Every March when daffodils surface through decaying leaves and rotting trash on the perimeter of Prospect Park, I feel a surge of gratitude for their epic conquest over the forces of entropy.

But I must give entropy its due.  Yesterday I mustered the courage to tackle the compost.  In one of my well-intentioned and totally unrealistic efforts to tred more lightly on the planet, several years ago (who's counting?) I asked my mother for an urban composter.  I had constructed a clothesline in the backyard and had considered starting a worm colony in the basement (at this Jordy drew the line). So I did some research, found a tidy little drum that would fit in the corner of our back yard, and set out on this new ecological adventure.  True, the compost bowl on the kitchen counter attracted flies; also true, the composter had something of a swampy aroma when you got close (not hard to do in a yard the size of a suburban master bath).  Minor prices to pay for saving the planet.

In my zeal I jammed every bit of green matter I clipped from the garden into the drum.  I turned the thing religiously for aeration; I added shredded newspaper; I avoided citrus and meats.  The kids enjoyed opening the hatch to spy on the colonies of bugs taking residence, then running away, noses pinched, screaming, "Ewwww!"  I was proud to carry on my mother's legacy at the environmental vanguard -- as a kid, I loved the rainbow sticker on the back window of our Ford station wagon that signified access to a recycling center, a obscure counter-culture in Greenwich, CT in the early '70s. My kids would take their care of Mother Earth to the next level.  What a good mother I must be!

By the end of the first summer, it was clear something had gone awry.  Much to my surprise, even the structure of decomposition can fail.  The English ivy vines I'd jammed in there were as intact as the tropical hardwoods they use for the boardwalk planks at Coney Island.  I was discouraged.  Winter was coming; I would leave it for next year.  But next year arrived, and the next.  Another baby came. I was busy.  The tangled vines mocked me whenever I dared open the hatch.  Eventually the composter became nothing more than a jungle-gym feature for the boys to climb, granting visual access over the fence to the neighbors' backyard and at least one seriously bloodied limb upon falling from its slippery top.  It turned out I had bought yet another giant hunk of plastic that would just end up clogging a landfill.

Yesterday (three? four? years later), I resolved to clear the thing out once and for all.  Maybe I'd assuage my guilt by offering it up on ParkSlopeParents.com to some other ambitious new parent eager to instill ecological consciousness in their offspring.  I suited up in gloves and glasses, readied a contractor bag, armed myself with a shovel, and lifted the hatch, prepared for ultimate putrescence. Lo and behold, the wonders of nature!  A few ivy vines were still discernable, and some egg shells, OK and some rubber bands and banana stickers, but the rest of this stuff looked remarkably like soil. Even more remarkable, there was no stench, in fact hardly any smell at all.  Clumps of various shades of brown made me ponder the coffee grinds after sleepless nights with new babies, carrot tops from farmers markets in summers past, and New York Times reports of the financial collapse, or perhaps Obama's triumph over Hillary Clinton in the primaries, deposited here long ago, now ready to replenish my flower beds.

Last night I had the rare chance to share a bedtime snuggle with Duncan; the younger brothers usually demand theirs first, and Duncan, who no longer even wants one most nights, easily concedes.  But the younger ones had passed out quickly after a day of vigorous play at the Botanic Garden with their Nana and Pappa and Vanderbilt playground.  I was about the leave the room when Duncan whispered,  "Can I have a snuggle?"  As I laid down beside his body, now not much shorter than my own, he said out of nowhere, "You know, Mom, we really don't have to worry about it, because there's nothing that gets broken that can't be fixed."  I pondered this a moment, unsure if we were talking about Legos, hearts, or something else.  What about when someone dies, I asked.  "It's actually OK, because their body just turns back into dirt, and then God just blows some more spirit into them, and they turn back into people."  He laughed. "So if you think about it, I just might be your great great great great great great grandfather!"  Who knows?  I agreed, remembering Reeve's comment last week: Upon leaving his friend Margot's house, Reeve stopped on the front porch, looked around a moment, and said, "I didn't think the future would be like this."

I had no idea the future would be like this seven years ago in Venice, California when our baby Duncan, sixteen months old, sang his first word, "Blue!"  I recognized the pitch; he'd learned it from the blue key on his little Leap Frog Learning Table, which had also aided his first independent steps by giving him solid support at just the right height.  We've been on a tear to clear out our basement for an over-due renovation where the forces of entropy have been hard at work:  Our stairs, which list to the north, sprout greenery in summer months; the waste stack for a toilet above is held together with silicone; and removal of the steel shelves with years of accumulated stuff has unearthed a crumbling foundation.  What to do with all that stuff?  Anything with life left in it -- light fixtures, Mason Jars, old books, the grill -- has gone to the street where, in the mysterious ecosystem of New York City, it walks off with people who can imagine uses for it.  But what to do with a grimy Leap Frog Learning Table that no longer sings "Blue!" or anything else, no matter how fresh the batteries?  Or the Fisher Price baby chair with rice cereal ground into its fabric from Reeve's first foray into solid food?  After several days on the stoop, no takers.  Time to let go.

After a gloriously sunny weekend, it's raining this Monday.  As Duncan and Reeve bounded down the stairs for the bus, I almost stopped them to say goodbye to their little table with its trombone-playing froggie and the baby chair with its silly bumble bees.  But they didn't notice them in the piles of garbage waiting at the curb.  I decided it wasn't my place to force my nostalgia on them.  After waving them off I walked Harpo, hoping his bowel's distress after ingesting one of Tucker's dirty diapers yesterday was resolving itself.  As we turned the corner toward home, I heard the roar of the garbage truck.  My heart seized with the thought that I must rescue the Leap Frog and the Bees, it was all a mistake, I wasn't ready after all.  But I held back, watching the powerful compactor of the truck crush the baby chair's little green aluminum tubes.  I let the tears go, ridiculous as I knew them to be.  And took solace as I looked back and realized it was the recycling truck that had claimed them, not garbage.  Perhaps God, or some factory somewhere, will blow a little spirit back into them, and someone drinking from a plastic soda bottle will wonder why they have the sudden urge to sing, "Blue!"

Stoller Butt Syndrome: Portal to Esoteric Wisdom

My friend Cindy listened kindly as we waited for the bus in front of Joe's Pizza.  She'd heard it before, I was sure.  I've lost track of whom I've told what.

"It started as pain in my left foot when I'd get out of bed in the morning, a sharp pressure, like my foot had turned into a grape while I slept, now being squished under my weight to near bursting."  The intensification had been gradual; over weeks, my subconscious had invented explanations that, by the time the pain crossed the threshold to consciousness, my better judgment couldn't refute:  It was a circulation issue, a hydraulic problem caused by my still-nursing infant, who often fell asleep across my arm, leaving it tingly in the morning.  I had had lots of aches and pains from bearing three children in my late 30s.  Annoying, but this too would pass.

Full disclosure:  I was also training for the New York Marathon, which would have been the first suspect for any normal person, but I would not then, or now, let running take the blame for what would be revealed as "plantar fasciitis" and much more.  My mother and I have been engaged in a years-running battle over the virtues v. evils of running.  I maintain, if I have to get bionic knees someday, as have my mother and her siblings (none of whom we runners), I'd rather run my way to the OR.  

But I was stubbornly ignoring whatever my feet were trying to tell me.  After admitting to myself that it got worse after long runs, so might not be a side-effect of night nursing, I started to investigate.  "Plantar fasciitis" came up early as a possible culprit, but my ignorant self confused it with plantar warts, which visual examination quickly disqualified.  A pre-med student once upon a time, I love the mystery of diagnosis, but I am also descended of stoic Yankees, with one strain of Christian Science mixed in, who milked cows through all kinds of undiagnosed pains without a whimper; plus I'd postponed running the NY marathon once already when I got pregnant with Tucker, so like hell was I going to miss it again; which is all to say, I was my own worst enemy.

It turns out the hip bone really is connected to the knee bone, and the knee bone really is connected to the... ankle bone, and so on.  Six months after the marathon, after which I'd stopped running all together to let it heal, the pain was not relenting at all.  If anything, it was getting worse.  I finally went to a Manhattan podiatrist who informed me that my other area of chronic pain -- namely, the underside of my butt -- could be related.  The butt pain intensified whenever I pushed the double stroller, i.e. 100 pounds of boy, metal, and yogurt-encrusted canvas, which I did for an average five miles a day at that time.  At this point in the story, my friend Cindy nods sympathetically and says, diplomatically, "You do have a very... athletic... way of pushing that stroller."  It's because I'm always late, I say, suddenly self-conscious of my stroller-pushing form (do I stick my butt out too far?  why hasn't anyone ever stopped me and let me know that I'm a spaz, or worse?).  Where was I when they taught new moms the right way to push a stroller?

It also turns out that, not only are all the parts connected, but they never forget all the bad things you've done to them, and when you reach a certain age, they feel entitled to remind you.  1983: Cold rainy field hockey practice --  pop, my hamstring. 1988:  The Stanford Dish, finals done, end of freshman year -- my friend Elizabeth and I stumble back to campus after two bottles of wine, now in pitch darkness, when rip, my ankle rolls over into a ditch.  1997: IT band pain from Big Sur marathon.   2004-Present: Pushing, hauling, heaving, nursing, twisting, crooking, lifting kids, strollers, bikes, groceries, knotweed, dogs, phones, etc. usually with another kid stashed on my left hip (need right for stirring the pot! answering the phone!).  2013:  Butt and foot pain metastasizes to right lower quad and left hip, with possible SI joint involvement (is that the popping sound in certain yoga postures?).   At last, I submitted to a chiropractor, who takes one look at me and pronounces my right leg shorter than my left.

What?  How many pediatricians should have detected this?  This would explain so many imbalances in my life.  Was this a genetic anomaly, or a development problem?  Had my right foot been gotten stuck somewhere in my mother's womb?  Would I need those special shoes with the extra platform on one side?  Dr. Safko cut me off.   You are like a car that came out of the factory perfectly aligned, he explained, but you've hit some bumps and potholes along the road and lost your alignment.  You can drive like that for years -- you're young, your body compensates -- until one day, out of nowhere, you have a blow-out.   

As I've stood in the breakdown lane waiting for roadside assistance these past months, other cars whizzing pitilessly past me, the vulnerability of my physical being has set in.  Our biologist friend, Harry, calls the 40s "the age of the crumblies."  Sigh.   I submitted to weekly chiropractic therapy this winter, involving electrification and excruciating massage (Dr. Safko's welcoming words: "This is not a spa").  I was encouraged when he declared, after three sessions, "Your alignement is great!  No leg discrepancies!" Until I injured something new while performing a therapeutic twist at home on my mat, and my hip, quad and butt started bickering again.  I was discouraged.   

But there is a silver lining to my ominous cloud.  My running friend Jimmy Moore, who ran until his death at 90, used to say pain is our bodies' way of talking to us, and we are wise to listen.  I found this profoundly true in child birth; the pain guided me to what I needed to do, and my body revealed its own stores of relief.  So why have I been I so resistent to listening now?   

Like most people, I find it hard to face time passing, to accept that my body no longer just heals by itself while I keep pushing it, to deal with the ways my life's structure wreaks low-grade havoc on my body, a structure I have felt powerless to change.  To add insult to my injuries, I've always found middle-aged people who can only talk about their aches and pains to be bores, and yet here I was (am), joining their ranks.  Hence poor Cindy, stuck at a bus stop listening to my tale (and tail) of woe, probably again.  Hence you poor people, reading this blog post!

But I decided to commit this tedious story to print paradoxically to let it go.  I don't want to forget the worthy lessons of this chapter, lest healing come and I be tempted to charge back into older bad habits; rather, I hope to strengthen some of these new, better habits so I don't have to keep thinking about them all the time (and can become an old person with a broader spectrum of interests!).  It turns out I am not powerless to change the structure of my life after all, but I have to start with my head.  I've been frustrated not to "find the fix," instead of realizing that the fix is a process rather than a destination.  From now on, some body part or other will always be chattering at me with information I don't want to hear, but if I listen instead of shutting it up, I'll come out better in the end.  Small changes make big differences.  I go to yoga first, then deal with household chores.  I don't pinch the cellphone in my neck while making dinner.  I sit crisscross apple sauce while watching Friday Night Lights, my hips slowly recovering lost mobility.  And I don't push the double stroller any more, for which my butt thanks me.  But now it is telling me to get off it, so I will.    

Pause

The most important button on the DVD player to Tucker is, without a doubt, Pause.  He cannot allow a single moment of the program to be missed when Nature calls, no matter if She is calling audience members other than himself.   No matter how I reassure him that I don't mind, he shouts anxiously, "Mommy! You gotta hit pause!" And so I do, for him, so I won't miss a beat.

I guess it's an occupational hazard of growing up, but as a parent, I am especially guilty of living in all times but the present.  I toggle constantly between Fast Forward and Reverse.  (Will they ever get their shoes on in the morning?  FF. Where did my babies' chubby rubber-band wrists go? RW. Will we ever have our evenings back?  FF.)  If it is anything, this blog began as an attempt to notice the moments as they pass, to pause them by slowing down enough to describe them.

Today I read the following article, which explores these ideas far better than I:

Tennis with Plato

Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Darth Vader

It's evidence of something -- whether of progress, injustice or surrender, I'm not sure.  It required epic strength to resist as long as we did.

We made it all the way to age 7 before our eldest son was allowed to watch the Star Wars movies. Duncan owes his deprivation to four people:  A pre-school classmate he barely remembers whose sadistic play habits and obsession with Darth Vader at age 3 thoroughly freaked me out; a benevolent older cousin, who recalled his own childhood nightmares about Darth Vader and cautioned us to wait; and his rookie parents.

Given the logistical impossibility of separation, Duncan's brothers suffered or enjoyed no such protections.  They watched Star Wars at ages 4 and 2.  So much for the Resistance.

I wax wistful and amused at my lost parental innocence.  Star Wars is gentle stuff by comparison to what came after those floodgates were opened... The boys have now seen the first 4 Harry Potters, The Avengers, The Hobbit, Home Alone (all 4), and are about to complete the Lord of the Rings trilogy, among others I've lost track of.  They laugh at the breakfast table about how "Kevin shot the bad guy in the wiener with the staple gun!"  They re-enact the battle of Helms Deep with their Legos, or on each other, arguing over the best way to kill an Orc.  Tucker brings the Lord of the Rings DVD cases to Junior Nursery for show-and-tell, introducing his 3-year old classmates the "Ohtches" (Orcs) and the Evil Eye of Saran.  Now it's my kid who freaks out the new parents.

The tragic deaths in Connecticut last month have prompted soul-searching and finger-pointing about the origins of evil in our culture.  A snippet on NPR this week had NRA leaders pointing fingers at video game executives and Hollywood lawyers who pointed fingers at the Bible for justification of our eternal fascination with violence and the unprovable link between our fantasy lives and violent behavior.  Like all parents, I can't think about Sandy Hook without imagining myself in the position of those parents, my children in their classrooms.  It's unbearable to ponder.  But even more unbearable is the thought that something could go so wrong in our parenting, or in our health care system, or in our culture, that one of my kids could grow up to inflict such harm.  Against the real potential for such horrific behavior, how do we responsibly grapple with the dark content of our fiction?

At this point, I don't actually worry about my sons taking a seriously evil turn.  I witness their kindness, sharing and comforting each other without adult enforcement.  Their moral reasoning grows day by day, rooted in an instinct for justice.  While we are far from out of the woods (a grabbed toy can still elicit retaliation in the form of near strangulation), I believe they are "good boys," not because they are compliant, but because I can see them reaching for good within themselves.  And one of the guys I thank most for helping them on their quest is Darth Vader.

It's not easy to find our way through the raging impulses that compose human existence.  Whether snatching the last brownie or smashing brother's Lego Temple of Light, there are so many ways, petty or grand, to do harm. But Darth Vader began an unending conversation in our house...  Why did Anakin turn to the dark side?  Where does anger come from?  Why was he so sad?  Why did he want to hurt people?  Why does he change back to the good at the end?  And (shocking realization), can kids actually teach their parents how to turn into better people?   The better we know Darth Vader, the more we love him.  Luke showed us that the only way to be rid of the mask was to love the guy behind it.  To seek his destruction only makes him stronger, by turning us into him.  

Without Darth, we wouldn't have been ready for Gollum.  Starting with making sense of names.  We get that Anakin became Darth, so we can kind of get how Smeagol becomes Gollum.  The road to redemption starts when someone (Luke, Froddo) comes along who reminds them of their former names, their better selves.  But Gollum's journey is much more slippery.  His evil is less mythically pronounced.  He is no fascist, orchestrating empires of tyranny; Gollum's is more the petty destruction of an addict, but with consequences no less lethal for those who get in his way.  His unreliability makes him scarier.

My son Reeve has long been one to embody the characters of his imagination fully (see http://ricketyladder.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-run-as-mermaid.html and http://ricketyladder.blogspot.com/2011/06/super-reeve.html).  What would he do with Gollum?  Before we even got home from The Hobbit (opening weekend, in 3-D no less, that's how far things have gone here), Reeve was twisting a popcorn butter-stained napkin into a ring and testing it on his finger for invisibility.  At home under the couch, Reeve found Harpo's "bagel," a circular rawhide chew toy that was the dog's Hanukkah gift.   Bagel no more... Like its cinematic inspiration, this unearthed "precious" provoked murderous thoughts as 3-year old little brother discovered its mysterious allure and determined he would have it, at any cost.  A rawhide chew toy to the head can do some real damage.  A teachable moment, as they say.

As we make our way through the 3 Lord of the Rings, following Reeve's own post-Hobbit ring misadventures, Reeve asks anxiously and repeatedly, "Is Froddo going to turn evil?'' ... (minutes later) "Is he turning evil now, Mommy?"  "Is he going to be evil at the end?" He doesn't ask why Saran is evil; somehow he gets that the "eye" is an icon of potential, not a real character.  The danger lies in what power it holds over us.   More than death, it is evil that preoccupies Reeve, who seems to get that even death can be accepted as long as you "turn good" in time.

And as Froddo resists the power of the ring better than Smeagol, new questions arise.  Watching me type just now Reeve asked, "But Mommy, it doesn't make any sense.  If Saran made the ring and it's evil, then how does it turn people not to any side?" Which led to a discussion of the meaning of power ("The Ring of Power, one ring to rule them all"), what people do with it for good or ill, how it works over time, whether regular people have more or less power than kings, children or parents, and how a lowly Hobbit could possible go up against Saran.

Don't get me wrong... Reeve loves the fighting, and the unredeemable Orcs justify mass killing without disquieting conscience.  He has adopted Legolas, the archer, as his new persona (instructions for building a quiver for Fresh Direct boxes available on request).  Watch out -- he takes aim at anyone and anything with the bow and arrow he did chores to earn.  But at age 5, Reeve is reckoning with our vulnerability to our desires for pretty and powerful things.  He is pondering what kind of strength Froddo needs to survive his journey into the fires of Mordor, knowing what happened when Anakin submitted to the volcanic fires and wanting desperately for Froddo to forge a different destiny.  He is sorting out Gollum's perplexing multiplicity.

Thanks, Darth.

  

Enter Harpo

He's my first online guy.  Blond, muscular, handsome features,  a little bad boy in him but mostly sweet, 4 and a half.  (or 32, in people years).  His name is Harpo.

It's been over a year since Wiley died.  The (human) boys have been begging for a dog for months.  We put it off.  Winter.  Tucker.  Australia.  Jordy and I wanted one too, but were we up to another critter to care for?  We had to admit, our pet-less year had provided certain freedoms in our otherwise constrained lives of present.  But Jordy was back from Australia and our excuses had run out.

I looked at shelter websites all over the New York area but found Harpo just down the hill at the Sean Casey Animal Rescue Center.  He was my top pick, based on looks and profile.  I'm a sucker for that tilted-head, goofy look on a guy.  He was old enough to be past puppy issues; young enough to be unlikely to die in the next 3-5 years.

I resolved to meet him on my own before introducing the rest of my guys, not wanting to encourage premature attachments.  My entrance to the dog unit set off a cacophony -- frantic dogs barking, wildly leaping from side to side in their cages.  In the far corner one dog lay quietly, not a whimper or a wiggle.  He just looked up, tilted-head, goofy but also sad get-me-outta-here eyes.

The next day all five of us took him for a walk.  Tucker howled with frustration when we wouldn't let him hold the leash by himself.  (He wasn't receptive to the he-weighs-60-pounds, you-weigh-28 argument.)  Everyone but Reeve wanted him instantly.  What do you think, Reeve?  "His eyes are too worried, like Wiley's."  But finally Reeve came around, concluding after much thought that dogs must just have worried eyes, and maybe he wouldn't be so worried if he came to live with us.

***

Harpo is uncannily Wiley-like in many ways, just dipped in yellow.  His build, the flop of the ears when he trots.  When it comes to dogs, I guess I have a type.  So he surprises me when he's not Wiley, for better -- no interest in trash, not even candy! -- or worse --biting through the no-pull harness, pacing at 5:45am needing to relieve himself, then howling with excitement when you reach for the leash (three boys untimely ripped from slumber = not pretty), enjoying 45, 50, 60 minute walks with no action, then pooping in the living room as soon as we're home, etc.

We thought Wiley was a handful, but we never really taught him to poop on walks -- he just did it.  What do we do now?  We didn't teach him not to eat through his harness -- he just didn't.   But lest we forget, the first 18 months of Wiley's residence with us was no walk in the park.  He bit an old man.  He ate every sweater I had.  He whizzed all over the house the first day.  He'd bolt when we needed to leave the house.  We had to partition the house to resolve the cat/dog turf war, turning the bedroom into a restricted West Bank for our depressed cats.  Somehow by the time Duncan arrived, it all worked out.  No whizzing, no chewing, no partitions.

So who is this guy?  What now?  What will our story be?

Our neighbors are none too excited about Harpo's arrival; he is suffering the unfair burden of a disputed history over appropriate uses of a back yard.   Even the best-intentioned friends say, "Just what you needed!  As if you didn't have your hands full enough with three little boys."

But when I doubt the sanity of taking an animal into our home, I watch Tucker curl up next to Harpo, stroking his head and saying his name again and again like an incantation of love... "Hahpo! Hahpo! Hahpo! Hahpo!" and (all 27 inches of) Tucker carrying Harpo's dog dish ever so carefully to give him dinner.  I remember how Duncan begs for Harpo to escort him to the bus and how he looks for Harpo from the bus in the afternoon.  I love the scratch of his nails on the wood floor, the sigh when he settles onto Wiley's old dog bed for the night (and he's a great sleeper), and the fact that I have someone to give the tasty chicken drippings to again on Shabbat while Wiley looks down from heaven, dripping envious drool.

The first night Harpo was here, he wanted nothing more than to be in the middle of the sleeping action (yes, even sleep is an action in this household), trying to get into every boy's bed.  Every night we sing "I love you..." to the tune of Happy Birthday to each boy; that night we also sang to Harpo whereupon Reeve, enthusiastic but still guarded in response to Harpo, burst into tears.  "I miss Wiley so much!" he sobbed.  Duncan burst instantly into tears as well, "Me too!" and Tucker too, just to make sure he wasn't left out of whatever it was we were crying about.  They asked the unanswerable questions about life and death and dogs, finally agreeing that loving and losing is definitely better than not loving at all.

They assured Harpo they were ready to love him too, and off four boys drifted to sleep.