This week I discovered that I am going extinct. Leon Wieseltier ("Among the Disrupted") confirmed what I've suspected for a long time (like, at least since the iPhone 6 came out and, once again, I didn't give a hoot): My generation was the long tail of western European liberalism, humanism, and the Enlightenment, all of which have been rendered irrelevant, no dir, by the DIR (the Digital Information Revolution). We are officially relics.
To call us a generation is a stretch - what is a generation? Technically, the freshmen who entered Stanford (class of 1994) when I was a junior are my generation, and yet we are pleistocenes apart. They used email, in college. I submitted papers - on paper! (so retro!) - and used telephones that were wired to the wall. I took exams in blue books! I road-tripped to Stanford from New England with nothing more than a AAA Triptik to guide me (does anyone else remember?), the optimized route lovingly highlighted by hand, just for me. You had to order that, like, at least 5 days before your trip.
Something inside me which I can only call my soul (that phenomenon construed by my verbal cortex to provide the sustaining illusion that "I" exist, or matter) longs to highjack one of the consumer space travel technologies currently being tested in Siberia and re-program it to take me to the Enlightenment. I would buy Kant a couple of pints in exchange for his thoughts on what moral imperatives apply to conduct on Facebook or the use of drones in warfare. I'd check in with Spinoza about global warming and God and nature and all that stuff, break it to Pope ("Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man") that neither God nor Man gets many "likes" these days unless He's shirtless (or pantless, depending on the app).
When I left for Japan in 1989 I had a tidy plan to guarantee my expensive liberal arts college education would justify itself: I would have fun thinking about things for a couple of years, all the while completing pre-med requirements for a secure and productive future. But once I left the matrix of the Stanford campus, an existential crisis set in. I returned to campus a year later, confused. I went to the only person I could imagine might direct me - Lee Yearly, whose Introduction to the Humanities class had offered the most exciting intellectual (does that word still exist?) conversations of my life. He listened patiently to my rambling, then offered simply, "I don't mean to be imperialist, but I think you are asking religious questions." Religious questions?! Thank you, I said (while my Thought Bubble mocked: Intelligent, modern people don't ask religious questions.) But as I walked out, I began to wonder... What does he mean by religion? Is it possible to ask religious questions without identifying with a given religion? What's the difference between religion and spirituality? What is the spirit? Why does it matter? What is the right kind of language to express the ineffable? Can art or nature generate legitimate "religious experiences"? I changed my major and abandoned my plans. If not a religious experience, then it was at least a very good tickle to the neurons.
I am entertaining a vainglorious fantasy that my generation, derogatorily dubbed "Generation X" -- the neither-here-nor-there generation raised with '60s free love ideals and '80s AIDS realities, the last Cold War kids to know what ICBM and MAD stood for, too late (or unimaginative) to invent Google or YouTube -- will Save the World in the end. When the computers take over, and we are their slaves, and we must go offline to survive, outwitting our new Digital Gods by navigating with moldy maps and thinking long thoughts and reciting poems from memory, we will be the revered Elders of Humanity who remember how... (If we can remember anything at all by the time we're that old, but I trust we'll have eradicated old age by then, so why worry?)
The other day over massaman curry I asked Gifford, my scientist friend who studies climate change, what era we are in. There's debate on this question, he replied. We're either at the very end of the Holocene Era, which started after the last ice age, or we're just entered the Anthropocene Era, the first named for the impact of humans on the Earth, mostly in the form of widespread extinctions and pollution.
I told you I was the end of an era! Good thing I uploaded some selfies from the Holocene to Facebook where they will live forever.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Snow Shoes
It was a sunny Los Angeles Saturday winter morning, the kind that makes a transplanted New Englander like myself feel guilty for getting away with something (for which they'd pay later). My mother was visiting from New Hampshire. As we got out of the car en route to Shabbat services, the sun struck my shoes. My mother took note, muttering, "You are really not a New Englander any more." Shame washed over me.
This was my first public outing in the shoes. They had caused me anguish when I bought them at the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade the previous week. They were espadrille-ish, steep crepe heels, gold satin cloth, little sequins and fake crystals glued on. They were pretty, and girlish, and frivolous. They revealed the vanity of their wearer for all to see. Made in India, they would not last, like whatever fading beauty I had left. I loved those shoes, but I couldn't let myself buy them. But then I did, and I sweated all twenty-five dollars I spent on them (that should have gone to something more useful).
A New England woman, no matter what my mother says, never gets over her New England sensibilities, when it comes to footwear and all fashion. I have long lusted in secret for those strappy little patent leather Italian sandals in the J.Crew catalogue, but I know mud season would make a public mockery of my illicit desires. I restrain myself, as is the New England way.
New England women don't entirely surrender the impulse to make their feet pretty. LLBean and Merrill have come up with a few feminizing details (if you look carefully). The other day when I picked my step-mother up for a music rehearsal, I realized I'd parked her into the mud and offered to move the car first. She was wearing house shoes, a vaguely Mary Jane embellishment on the basic hiking-boot sole. "Oh, don't worry!" she replied cheerfully. "My shoes have rubber toes!"
A New England woman perusing her options in a shoe store examines the height and material of the heel for how it will stack up in snow drifts and muddy trenches. For how it will exhibit the shape of her ankles and calves? Not so much. In a baffling triumph of marketing, though, the Australian company Uggs has convinced women across the world, even those in Los Angeles with no climatic impediments to good taste, that a shapeless animal skin was high female foot fashion. I'm not a believer. But I have to give Uggs some credit. For New England women who actually need that shearling warmth but can't entirely surrender their vanity, Uggs offers sequined winter boots, in silver or pink! That is, if you can convince your mother to buy them for you. (How do you get mud out of sequins?)
There's a quick cheat in acting known as "shoe acting." Change the shoes, transform yourself. Watch the kid who slides his feet into his mother's heels for the clearest illustration of the power of the shoe. Close your eyes and try on a pair of heavy military boots. A ballet slipper. Your dad's polished leather work shoes... The other day in the locker room at the Aquatic Center, I noticed a heavy-set older woman pulling up her masculine white tube socks over bluish calves, then lacing up her hefty leather walking shoes. Who would she become if she slid on some Dolce Vita heels? I'd like to see the faces when she walked into the St. Paddy's day corned beef supper at the Volunteer Fire Department in those numbers.
This winter I'm working hard to renew my New England credentials, diminished by my 27-year sojourn in climates that degrade one's character. We picked one of history's longest coldest winters, reminding me that warmth is the urgent first priority of footwear. But just when I thought I was toughening up, sacrificing my vanity, as is my duty, proving myself a real New Englander again, I noticed a mother at the kids' school in Cornish who only ever seemed to wear flip-flops. For real? My feet, like my character (are they separable?), had been wrecked by excessive flip-flop wearing during my time away. And yet here she was, in sub-zero temperatures, bare feet in cute little preppy flip-flops. Was this a brazen display of vanity, or testament to the highest degree of New England cred -- imperviousness to cold?
"My feet just burn hot," she explained without seeking to impress. Sigh! I will never be worthy...
This was my first public outing in the shoes. They had caused me anguish when I bought them at the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade the previous week. They were espadrille-ish, steep crepe heels, gold satin cloth, little sequins and fake crystals glued on. They were pretty, and girlish, and frivolous. They revealed the vanity of their wearer for all to see. Made in India, they would not last, like whatever fading beauty I had left. I loved those shoes, but I couldn't let myself buy them. But then I did, and I sweated all twenty-five dollars I spent on them (that should have gone to something more useful).
A New England woman, no matter what my mother says, never gets over her New England sensibilities, when it comes to footwear and all fashion. I have long lusted in secret for those strappy little patent leather Italian sandals in the J.Crew catalogue, but I know mud season would make a public mockery of my illicit desires. I restrain myself, as is the New England way.
New England women don't entirely surrender the impulse to make their feet pretty. LLBean and Merrill have come up with a few feminizing details (if you look carefully). The other day when I picked my step-mother up for a music rehearsal, I realized I'd parked her into the mud and offered to move the car first. She was wearing house shoes, a vaguely Mary Jane embellishment on the basic hiking-boot sole. "Oh, don't worry!" she replied cheerfully. "My shoes have rubber toes!"
A New England woman perusing her options in a shoe store examines the height and material of the heel for how it will stack up in snow drifts and muddy trenches. For how it will exhibit the shape of her ankles and calves? Not so much. In a baffling triumph of marketing, though, the Australian company Uggs has convinced women across the world, even those in Los Angeles with no climatic impediments to good taste, that a shapeless animal skin was high female foot fashion. I'm not a believer. But I have to give Uggs some credit. For New England women who actually need that shearling warmth but can't entirely surrender their vanity, Uggs offers sequined winter boots, in silver or pink! That is, if you can convince your mother to buy them for you. (How do you get mud out of sequins?)
There's a quick cheat in acting known as "shoe acting." Change the shoes, transform yourself. Watch the kid who slides his feet into his mother's heels for the clearest illustration of the power of the shoe. Close your eyes and try on a pair of heavy military boots. A ballet slipper. Your dad's polished leather work shoes... The other day in the locker room at the Aquatic Center, I noticed a heavy-set older woman pulling up her masculine white tube socks over bluish calves, then lacing up her hefty leather walking shoes. Who would she become if she slid on some Dolce Vita heels? I'd like to see the faces when she walked into the St. Paddy's day corned beef supper at the Volunteer Fire Department in those numbers.
This winter I'm working hard to renew my New England credentials, diminished by my 27-year sojourn in climates that degrade one's character. We picked one of history's longest coldest winters, reminding me that warmth is the urgent first priority of footwear. But just when I thought I was toughening up, sacrificing my vanity, as is my duty, proving myself a real New Englander again, I noticed a mother at the kids' school in Cornish who only ever seemed to wear flip-flops. For real? My feet, like my character (are they separable?), had been wrecked by excessive flip-flop wearing during my time away. And yet here she was, in sub-zero temperatures, bare feet in cute little preppy flip-flops. Was this a brazen display of vanity, or testament to the highest degree of New England cred -- imperviousness to cold?
"My feet just burn hot," she explained without seeking to impress. Sigh! I will never be worthy...
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Birthday Boys
After years of elaborate Scooby Doo parties, haunted house parties, Harry Potter parties, etc. Jordy and I have tried for two years to host a "simple" birthday for Duncan.
Last year's simple plan: Invite a small group (5 max) of buddies to a sushi lunch in Manhattan. Last year's reality: Eight boys (=5 guests + our 3) take the first F train to pass under the East River after Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel (slightly nerve-wracking) to Rockefeller Center (crowded, hectic, the usual) where frolicking and revelry at the Nintendo Store leads to frolicking and revelry at the Lego Store a leads to sushi-rolling lessons at Ruby Foo's, capped off by candy bonanza at Toys-R-Us in (shoot me now) Times Square. By Party's End, Jordy and I collapsed like sheepdogs on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wall-eyed with tongues draped from the sides of our mouths.
This year's party, whatever it was, would be in one place. Duncan made the plan: Invite the 6 boys in his 3rd grade class here in Cornish, NH to a sports-themed sleepover. First, football, then chess. Dinner, presents, cake & a movie. 3 would then go home; the remainder would pull out their sleeping bags and go to sleep. Easy enough, and dirt cheap by Brooklyn standards.
In bare bones, all went according to plan and a great time was had by all. But, being 6 + our 3 boys, we contemplated trips to the Emergency Room no fewer than 5 times.
Football. For the week leading up to the party, Duncan insisted they be allowed to play tackle ball, this after he sustained a near sprain the previous weekend tackling with a buddy on the sidelines at the Dartmouth football game. Duncan's insistence grew in proportion and sophistication to my objections: Without equipment, it won't be safe, I said. So he rallied the support of his friends who play on teams to bring their gear. The conflict culminated in the near cancellation of the party over the tackle issue, at which point Duncan backed off.
But can you really stop a pack of nine-year old boys determined to tackle each other? Jordy presided over the football while I got burgers ready to grill; on my brief excursion out to take photos, I witnessed a gaggle of bodies, t-shirts off, leaping, lunging, rolling and diving, sometimes into the knotweed after the ball. Duncan came in crying at one point, upset as best I could tell by the lack of compliance with his rules (and maybe just because his own team lost). Complaints of injuries to an ankle, a leg and a hand were made in the course of events, but all limbs remained attached as we moved inside for chess.
Chess went off without bodily injury, though it came close. Littlest partier, Tucker (age 3), knocked pieces off a board at some point, I think?, raising an angry ruckus but, to their credit, the third graders restrained themselves and re-started the game.
They actually sat in their chairs, mostly, to eat -- I think they were starved and parched -- but popped up and out as soon as they'd had enough to take the edge off. We asked everyone to take a seat while Duncan opened his presents. Fat chance. They swarmed him, or else jumped on the couches, or else took off their shirts to whip each other. The presents were, in the birthday boy's summation, "totally awesome." Fire-vision Nerf football for nighttime play, basketball trinkets from the Basketball Hall of Fame, Lego sets, a Jeter Yankees t-shirt (given by a die-hard Red Sox fan, a true act of love), and -- my personal favorite -- "Sonic Distractors" -- little grenade shaped things you clip to your built, and when distraction is called for, push a red button (which then blinks) and roll into the situation, detonating a random sound effect (dog barking, fire engine, etc.).
How to focus all this energy? Cake! We presented the football field cake, with Duncan's name in one end zone and one of his friend's in the other, as they shared the day, with a rousing double chorus of Happy Birthday. By the time it was served, however, many had already popped out of their chairs again, eager to get out in the dark for FireVision Football. A few nibbles of cake were eaten and some icing licked; most of it ended up in the trash. Which was probably just as well... Did they really need more sugar?
We had to cancel FireVision football when two kids came in after a multi-boy pile-up, seeing as it was now pitch black and only 2 of the 9 had the FireVision goggles to see anything. We settled them in to watch Air Bud, the Disney classic about a boy who finds a dog with preternatural basketball skills. We had chosen the film carefully, striving for age-appropriateness with no risk of scary imagery that might keep sleepers-over awake. That morning many of the boys also had their first basketball practice, for some -- such as Duncan -- ever in their lives. And for our family, the film also touched on the dog theme, salient in the wake of Harpo's death two weeks ago and our adoption that same day of a new rescue dog. What could go wrong?
It was a total hit: The boys were remarkably focused. Our younger two were as captivated as the big boys. One of the boys was so moved by the dog that he spent most of the movie relating stories to me about his own Siberian Husky. What an inspired movie choice! I was so bloody proud of myself.
First Tucker burst into tears. Then Reeve, his sorrow silent, tears streaming down his face, sobs choked back to the point of not breathing. "Why did he yeave dat dog!?" Tucker objected. Then, "All I can think about is Harpo," Reeve whispered. And, "Why did he leave him like that?" ("Because he thought if he kept Buddy, the evil clown would come back again to get him again," I explained... "He was trying to give Buddy his freedom, even though it meant he had to give Buddy up himself too..." Narrative logic that held no sway in the hearts of our three- and six-year olds...)
We held each other tight until the State Championship game, at which point Buddy's fate is unknown and the team has to face their arch rival. So involved had our pack of nine-year olds become that nary a one could stay seated, or reclined. They stood on the bed in anticipation, leapt with the players on screen, took their shirts off once again to whip each other, screamed with each basket, roared with delight when Buddy appears again on the court to save the day, and lifted the roof off the house at the end when Buddy chooses the boy over the evil clown to be his master. Not a hint of irony in this group. Utterly delightful.
In the mayhem, one of the boys rolled off the bed, landing on another's hand with the possibility of a broken bone. Ice? Hospital? "No, I'm OK." Three of the boys went home, after which the sleepers-over headed out for one last round of FireVision football, followed by wrestling matches in the tent we had set up for sleeping in the living room.
As the clock ticked off the minutes late into the night, Jordy and I watched the outside of the tent, its walls bulged and pulsed with bodies lunging against it, trying to discern the right moment to intervene and precisely where to set the limit. The limit became clear when one of the boy's blankie turned into a whip yet again (what's up with that behavior?), almost taking out another boy's eye. Bedtime!!
We determined that sleep would never happen without surveillance, so Jordy set himself up just outside the tent like the NSA, monitoring activity and dictating silence and stillness as needed. At last, they drifted off, somewhere around 10:30pm. As we drifted off ourselves, I remarked to Jordy on our good fortune that the clocks would "fall backward" that night -- an extra hour of much needed sleep after an active evening.
But when we heard the first stirrings at 5:51am, now 4:51am, I understood the flaw in my logic. I wanted to threaten no iPad time, anything, to enforce a return to sleep, but Jordy was right -- there was no getting those genies back into their bottles. And so I closed our door, trying to keep Tucker asleep and abandoning still sleeping Reeve in the tent to his fate. They whispered, briefly, still under covers. But they couldn't help themselves. Soon their bodies rose with the noise level, until another full-on wrestling-whipping match was on, and a failure to intervene became unethical.
Solution? "FOOTBALL!!!" And so they suited up, at now 5:30am, to go out into the 28-degree perfect blackness to play football. Minutes later, Duncan comes in, limping and grasping his hip. A few minutes later, another boy comes in: "I think I have a tick on my penis." (Sure enough...) And a few minutes after him, the rest race into the house. "We saw someone out there!!! A ghost!!" Jordy and I exchange a look. Only three and a half more hours to go.
The iPad provides diversion, when not inspiring warfare over whose turn it is, and a pancake breakfast fills at least twenty minutes. As the sun rises, the boys head back out for yet another round of football, but invent instead a vertical version of the game from the deck of the treehouse to the field below, which requires the boys to ascend and descend a challenging rope ladder...
One of the boys comes screaming into the house, "Jordy! Jordy! The ladder broke!" Our blood ran cold as Jordy sprinted out to find the unfortunate fellow on his back, his eyes closed. We fought panic, brought him in for hot cocoa (no loss of consciousness of apparent inability to move), and got the story of how one of the wooden rungs had snapped and he'd landed on his butt, then back. (Not his head, he reported.) Even this hard-scrabble bunch of boys admitted later that seeing their friend fall was "super scary."
We were already on a first-name basis with the triage nurse in the ER, after consulting on the tick, and nearly went in for a personal visit this time, but the boy seemed OK and we called home instead and kept watch. He complained of a headache, which the boys all shared ("sleep deprivation," we explained), but no other clear pain. We plugged them into another movie for the remaining 90 minutes, desperate to keep them as physically inert as possible until their parents could reclaim them.
As I scanned their nine-year old faces zoning out to the movie, their ruddy cheeks still a little rounded with the last bit of baby fat, exhausted but still eager, I felt a surge of tender affection for these little men. In just ten years, they will actually be men. I imagined this party then -- and realized what we'd survived was something like the movie The Hangover, nine-year-old style. What a privilege to ride the wild bronco of little boys' birthdays -- no matter how close they bring us to a nervous breakdown.
Last year's simple plan: Invite a small group (5 max) of buddies to a sushi lunch in Manhattan. Last year's reality: Eight boys (=5 guests + our 3) take the first F train to pass under the East River after Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel (slightly nerve-wracking) to Rockefeller Center (crowded, hectic, the usual) where frolicking and revelry at the Nintendo Store leads to frolicking and revelry at the Lego Store a leads to sushi-rolling lessons at Ruby Foo's, capped off by candy bonanza at Toys-R-Us in (shoot me now) Times Square. By Party's End, Jordy and I collapsed like sheepdogs on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wall-eyed with tongues draped from the sides of our mouths.
This year's party, whatever it was, would be in one place. Duncan made the plan: Invite the 6 boys in his 3rd grade class here in Cornish, NH to a sports-themed sleepover. First, football, then chess. Dinner, presents, cake & a movie. 3 would then go home; the remainder would pull out their sleeping bags and go to sleep. Easy enough, and dirt cheap by Brooklyn standards.
In bare bones, all went according to plan and a great time was had by all. But, being 6 + our 3 boys, we contemplated trips to the Emergency Room no fewer than 5 times.
Football. For the week leading up to the party, Duncan insisted they be allowed to play tackle ball, this after he sustained a near sprain the previous weekend tackling with a buddy on the sidelines at the Dartmouth football game. Duncan's insistence grew in proportion and sophistication to my objections: Without equipment, it won't be safe, I said. So he rallied the support of his friends who play on teams to bring their gear. The conflict culminated in the near cancellation of the party over the tackle issue, at which point Duncan backed off.
But can you really stop a pack of nine-year old boys determined to tackle each other? Jordy presided over the football while I got burgers ready to grill; on my brief excursion out to take photos, I witnessed a gaggle of bodies, t-shirts off, leaping, lunging, rolling and diving, sometimes into the knotweed after the ball. Duncan came in crying at one point, upset as best I could tell by the lack of compliance with his rules (and maybe just because his own team lost). Complaints of injuries to an ankle, a leg and a hand were made in the course of events, but all limbs remained attached as we moved inside for chess.
Chess went off without bodily injury, though it came close. Littlest partier, Tucker (age 3), knocked pieces off a board at some point, I think?, raising an angry ruckus but, to their credit, the third graders restrained themselves and re-started the game.
They actually sat in their chairs, mostly, to eat -- I think they were starved and parched -- but popped up and out as soon as they'd had enough to take the edge off. We asked everyone to take a seat while Duncan opened his presents. Fat chance. They swarmed him, or else jumped on the couches, or else took off their shirts to whip each other. The presents were, in the birthday boy's summation, "totally awesome." Fire-vision Nerf football for nighttime play, basketball trinkets from the Basketball Hall of Fame, Lego sets, a Jeter Yankees t-shirt (given by a die-hard Red Sox fan, a true act of love), and -- my personal favorite -- "Sonic Distractors" -- little grenade shaped things you clip to your built, and when distraction is called for, push a red button (which then blinks) and roll into the situation, detonating a random sound effect (dog barking, fire engine, etc.).
How to focus all this energy? Cake! We presented the football field cake, with Duncan's name in one end zone and one of his friend's in the other, as they shared the day, with a rousing double chorus of Happy Birthday. By the time it was served, however, many had already popped out of their chairs again, eager to get out in the dark for FireVision Football. A few nibbles of cake were eaten and some icing licked; most of it ended up in the trash. Which was probably just as well... Did they really need more sugar?
We had to cancel FireVision football when two kids came in after a multi-boy pile-up, seeing as it was now pitch black and only 2 of the 9 had the FireVision goggles to see anything. We settled them in to watch Air Bud, the Disney classic about a boy who finds a dog with preternatural basketball skills. We had chosen the film carefully, striving for age-appropriateness with no risk of scary imagery that might keep sleepers-over awake. That morning many of the boys also had their first basketball practice, for some -- such as Duncan -- ever in their lives. And for our family, the film also touched on the dog theme, salient in the wake of Harpo's death two weeks ago and our adoption that same day of a new rescue dog. What could go wrong?
It was a total hit: The boys were remarkably focused. Our younger two were as captivated as the big boys. One of the boys was so moved by the dog that he spent most of the movie relating stories to me about his own Siberian Husky. What an inspired movie choice! I was so bloody proud of myself.
First Tucker burst into tears. Then Reeve, his sorrow silent, tears streaming down his face, sobs choked back to the point of not breathing. "Why did he yeave dat dog!?" Tucker objected. Then, "All I can think about is Harpo," Reeve whispered. And, "Why did he leave him like that?" ("Because he thought if he kept Buddy, the evil clown would come back again to get him again," I explained... "He was trying to give Buddy his freedom, even though it meant he had to give Buddy up himself too..." Narrative logic that held no sway in the hearts of our three- and six-year olds...)
We held each other tight until the State Championship game, at which point Buddy's fate is unknown and the team has to face their arch rival. So involved had our pack of nine-year olds become that nary a one could stay seated, or reclined. They stood on the bed in anticipation, leapt with the players on screen, took their shirts off once again to whip each other, screamed with each basket, roared with delight when Buddy appears again on the court to save the day, and lifted the roof off the house at the end when Buddy chooses the boy over the evil clown to be his master. Not a hint of irony in this group. Utterly delightful.
In the mayhem, one of the boys rolled off the bed, landing on another's hand with the possibility of a broken bone. Ice? Hospital? "No, I'm OK." Three of the boys went home, after which the sleepers-over headed out for one last round of FireVision football, followed by wrestling matches in the tent we had set up for sleeping in the living room.
As the clock ticked off the minutes late into the night, Jordy and I watched the outside of the tent, its walls bulged and pulsed with bodies lunging against it, trying to discern the right moment to intervene and precisely where to set the limit. The limit became clear when one of the boy's blankie turned into a whip yet again (what's up with that behavior?), almost taking out another boy's eye. Bedtime!!
We determined that sleep would never happen without surveillance, so Jordy set himself up just outside the tent like the NSA, monitoring activity and dictating silence and stillness as needed. At last, they drifted off, somewhere around 10:30pm. As we drifted off ourselves, I remarked to Jordy on our good fortune that the clocks would "fall backward" that night -- an extra hour of much needed sleep after an active evening.
But when we heard the first stirrings at 5:51am, now 4:51am, I understood the flaw in my logic. I wanted to threaten no iPad time, anything, to enforce a return to sleep, but Jordy was right -- there was no getting those genies back into their bottles. And so I closed our door, trying to keep Tucker asleep and abandoning still sleeping Reeve in the tent to his fate. They whispered, briefly, still under covers. But they couldn't help themselves. Soon their bodies rose with the noise level, until another full-on wrestling-whipping match was on, and a failure to intervene became unethical.
Solution? "FOOTBALL!!!" And so they suited up, at now 5:30am, to go out into the 28-degree perfect blackness to play football. Minutes later, Duncan comes in, limping and grasping his hip. A few minutes later, another boy comes in: "I think I have a tick on my penis." (Sure enough...) And a few minutes after him, the rest race into the house. "We saw someone out there!!! A ghost!!" Jordy and I exchange a look. Only three and a half more hours to go.
The iPad provides diversion, when not inspiring warfare over whose turn it is, and a pancake breakfast fills at least twenty minutes. As the sun rises, the boys head back out for yet another round of football, but invent instead a vertical version of the game from the deck of the treehouse to the field below, which requires the boys to ascend and descend a challenging rope ladder...
One of the boys comes screaming into the house, "Jordy! Jordy! The ladder broke!" Our blood ran cold as Jordy sprinted out to find the unfortunate fellow on his back, his eyes closed. We fought panic, brought him in for hot cocoa (no loss of consciousness of apparent inability to move), and got the story of how one of the wooden rungs had snapped and he'd landed on his butt, then back. (Not his head, he reported.) Even this hard-scrabble bunch of boys admitted later that seeing their friend fall was "super scary."
We were already on a first-name basis with the triage nurse in the ER, after consulting on the tick, and nearly went in for a personal visit this time, but the boy seemed OK and we called home instead and kept watch. He complained of a headache, which the boys all shared ("sleep deprivation," we explained), but no other clear pain. We plugged them into another movie for the remaining 90 minutes, desperate to keep them as physically inert as possible until their parents could reclaim them.
As I scanned their nine-year old faces zoning out to the movie, their ruddy cheeks still a little rounded with the last bit of baby fat, exhausted but still eager, I felt a surge of tender affection for these little men. In just ten years, they will actually be men. I imagined this party then -- and realized what we'd survived was something like the movie The Hangover, nine-year-old style. What a privilege to ride the wild bronco of little boys' birthdays -- no matter how close they bring us to a nervous breakdown.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Sojourners
I've had a recurring dream for years: I am going through airport security when, inexplicably, my life's possessions spring free from their baggage, an endless stream of toothbrushes, underwear, boots, books, diapers and what-nots subjected to individual x-ray surveillance, an ungovernable mess on the other side as fellow travelers look on with impatience mounting toward rage. Toddlers (mine) break loose on the periphery of dream consciousness as I make a futile effort to re-dress myself and gather everything.
In the latest version, sometime recently, we are on a bus en route to an airport, or other terminal, when a kindly bus driver offers an infinite supply of Legos to our boys. Soon the floor of the bus is littered with millions of Lego pieces sliding this way and that as the bus careens around corners. Without warning, the driver announces our arrival at the terminal. We must collect all the pieces and get off this very minute, or miss our connection. Outside, horns bear down on our delay.
This is not going according to plan. After months of painstaking design after years of waiting to renovate, it seems we are selling our Brooklyn house instead, on the road once more. And so my dream returns with an updated vengeance. (We had not yet entered the Lego Stage of life when the dream first appeared in Los Angeles years ago!) My sister informs me that we are perfect candidates for an HGTV reality show entitled "Love It or Leave It." Is there a category for both -- love it and leave it?
It is an economic decision, my left brain states with Republican certainty. It is a leap into the unknown, my right brain whispers with Democratic honesty. My grandfather said decisions about your home should be kept separate from investment decisions. He lived in an era when many people with 30-year mortgages actually paid them off while still living in the house. But he would also say (with Republican certainty) that it's time to move on, that our growing boys need room to stretch. My grandfather was a master of timing, largely because he looked the future straight in the eye without flinching and planned accordingly. I need to study his example now.
A warm little body crawled into my bed sometime in the madrugada this morning. My half-lit brain began to play back images of our life on Howard Place, flickering like an 8mm movie. Walking into the picture were two strangers. They already love it, or the idea of what it will be, as I loved it on first sight seven years ago. They are planning the paint they will use to cover our crazy murals everywhere, erasing us. I happened to hear Garrison Keeler read this poem on the Writers' Almanac this morning:
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked in white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
- Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"
The sudden about-face to sell happened during the festival of Sukkot, when our rickety huts are meant to remind us of the harvest bounty, in spirit as much as from the earth, even -- or maybe especially -- in the midst of exile. Like the chuppah wedding canopy, the sukkah must be built to be temporary and allow a view of the stars through the roof. Home is made up of the people within guided by the lights above, not the structure without, I thought this morning as little toes wiggled under my tummy seeking the warmth of mommy and daddy, wherever we are.
It's taken me six years to read 284 pages of Aviva Zornberg's Genesis, reading a page or two a night since I barely understand any of it, and yet I'm addicted. She makes these ancient stories read like self-help texts to me, all the more reliable for their endurance and resistance to too obvious interpretation. I've been into Jacob recently, when he's making his way back from his twenty years' sojourn in the land of Laban. According to Rashi according to Zornberg (wow, I'm putting myself out here), "Jacob would like to settle his life, to find some measure of tranquility after all his troubles. One might even say that is characteristic of righteous people to yearn for such a 'settling,' a clarification of the turbulences and anguish of life. But God rebuffs this yearning, in a tone of strange sarcasm: 'Is it not enough?'" (243) Jacob "wants to compose a whole world of his own... a cognitive and aesthestic ambition to see history resolved, sojournings over, in this world." (247)
But God offers a "counternarrative"... Instead of peace, Jacob suffers extraordinary pain and dislocation at the supposed dismemberment of his beloved son, Joseph, the fulfillment of anxious premonitions he's suffered his entire life. Anxiety, grief, the troubling of the spirit are all parts of being human, and "to seek peace prematurely is to beg off from reality... a profound disqualification from the human project." (259) In her last piece of magic, Zornberg puts this dismal picture of existence back together in the hopeful human process of "re-membering" against the dismemberment of experience, as Jacob must do when he discovers Joseph to be alive. "There is, it seems, a painful law that obtains in this world -- particularly painful for the righteous who would like to retain memory intact, to be loyal to all of life as it was experienced." (278) And in her final triumph (for me!), Zornberg draws on a 19th c. Hasidic writer, the Ishbitzer, to conclude that "Jacob's desire for a stable, coherent reading of his own experience, based on cognitive certainty and moral scrupulousness (which the Ishbitzer calls 'fear' and 'humility,' respectively), is countered by God's insistence on the tragic nature of existence in this world... In this world, what is most needed is not fear, which deprives man of initiative beneath the sleepless eyes of God, but love -- the capacity to act in a world where absolute clarity is not obtainable." And shortly thereafter, "God turns Jacob's quest away from philosophy, from the search for certainties, to the world of poetry. Poetic language is the loving act of the human being, who seeks to redescribe his reality, in the midst of, and against, teruf." (279)
Got that? I'm not sure I understand one bit of it. But I love it nonetheless, and her interpretations somehow imbue our little journey with a hint of cosmic relevance, or at least resonance.
The other day the boys and I read Eric Carle's A Home for Hermit Crab in which the protagonist discovers he's grown too big to return to his shell. He seeks a new, bigger one, but finds it drab, so he wanders the ocean floor inviting sea anemones, starfish, barnacles and sea grass to help decorate his home. By the time he's done, he has grown not only a home but a neighborhood. In the meanwhile, however, he has outgrown his shell yet again. He is bereft until he finds a sweet little hermit crab who promises to take good care of both his shell and his friends. ("Mommy, why are you crying?" my boys ask at this point in the story.) In the end, the hermit crab finds a bigger drab shell and sets off once again to re-decorate with new friends discovered on the way.
Maybe this is going according to plan, just not my plan. I think I'm down with that, if it qualifies me for the human project. Just let me know if you hear of any bigger shells going on the market...
In the latest version, sometime recently, we are on a bus en route to an airport, or other terminal, when a kindly bus driver offers an infinite supply of Legos to our boys. Soon the floor of the bus is littered with millions of Lego pieces sliding this way and that as the bus careens around corners. Without warning, the driver announces our arrival at the terminal. We must collect all the pieces and get off this very minute, or miss our connection. Outside, horns bear down on our delay.
This is not going according to plan. After months of painstaking design after years of waiting to renovate, it seems we are selling our Brooklyn house instead, on the road once more. And so my dream returns with an updated vengeance. (We had not yet entered the Lego Stage of life when the dream first appeared in Los Angeles years ago!) My sister informs me that we are perfect candidates for an HGTV reality show entitled "Love It or Leave It." Is there a category for both -- love it and leave it?
It is an economic decision, my left brain states with Republican certainty. It is a leap into the unknown, my right brain whispers with Democratic honesty. My grandfather said decisions about your home should be kept separate from investment decisions. He lived in an era when many people with 30-year mortgages actually paid them off while still living in the house. But he would also say (with Republican certainty) that it's time to move on, that our growing boys need room to stretch. My grandfather was a master of timing, largely because he looked the future straight in the eye without flinching and planned accordingly. I need to study his example now.
A warm little body crawled into my bed sometime in the madrugada this morning. My half-lit brain began to play back images of our life on Howard Place, flickering like an 8mm movie. Walking into the picture were two strangers. They already love it, or the idea of what it will be, as I loved it on first sight seven years ago. They are planning the paint they will use to cover our crazy murals everywhere, erasing us. I happened to hear Garrison Keeler read this poem on the Writers' Almanac this morning:
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked in white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
- Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"
The sudden about-face to sell happened during the festival of Sukkot, when our rickety huts are meant to remind us of the harvest bounty, in spirit as much as from the earth, even -- or maybe especially -- in the midst of exile. Like the chuppah wedding canopy, the sukkah must be built to be temporary and allow a view of the stars through the roof. Home is made up of the people within guided by the lights above, not the structure without, I thought this morning as little toes wiggled under my tummy seeking the warmth of mommy and daddy, wherever we are.
It's taken me six years to read 284 pages of Aviva Zornberg's Genesis, reading a page or two a night since I barely understand any of it, and yet I'm addicted. She makes these ancient stories read like self-help texts to me, all the more reliable for their endurance and resistance to too obvious interpretation. I've been into Jacob recently, when he's making his way back from his twenty years' sojourn in the land of Laban. According to Rashi according to Zornberg (wow, I'm putting myself out here), "Jacob would like to settle his life, to find some measure of tranquility after all his troubles. One might even say that is characteristic of righteous people to yearn for such a 'settling,' a clarification of the turbulences and anguish of life. But God rebuffs this yearning, in a tone of strange sarcasm: 'Is it not enough?'" (243) Jacob "wants to compose a whole world of his own... a cognitive and aesthestic ambition to see history resolved, sojournings over, in this world." (247)
But God offers a "counternarrative"... Instead of peace, Jacob suffers extraordinary pain and dislocation at the supposed dismemberment of his beloved son, Joseph, the fulfillment of anxious premonitions he's suffered his entire life. Anxiety, grief, the troubling of the spirit are all parts of being human, and "to seek peace prematurely is to beg off from reality... a profound disqualification from the human project." (259) In her last piece of magic, Zornberg puts this dismal picture of existence back together in the hopeful human process of "re-membering" against the dismemberment of experience, as Jacob must do when he discovers Joseph to be alive. "There is, it seems, a painful law that obtains in this world -- particularly painful for the righteous who would like to retain memory intact, to be loyal to all of life as it was experienced." (278) And in her final triumph (for me!), Zornberg draws on a 19th c. Hasidic writer, the Ishbitzer, to conclude that "Jacob's desire for a stable, coherent reading of his own experience, based on cognitive certainty and moral scrupulousness (which the Ishbitzer calls 'fear' and 'humility,' respectively), is countered by God's insistence on the tragic nature of existence in this world... In this world, what is most needed is not fear, which deprives man of initiative beneath the sleepless eyes of God, but love -- the capacity to act in a world where absolute clarity is not obtainable." And shortly thereafter, "God turns Jacob's quest away from philosophy, from the search for certainties, to the world of poetry. Poetic language is the loving act of the human being, who seeks to redescribe his reality, in the midst of, and against, teruf." (279)
Got that? I'm not sure I understand one bit of it. But I love it nonetheless, and her interpretations somehow imbue our little journey with a hint of cosmic relevance, or at least resonance.
The other day the boys and I read Eric Carle's A Home for Hermit Crab in which the protagonist discovers he's grown too big to return to his shell. He seeks a new, bigger one, but finds it drab, so he wanders the ocean floor inviting sea anemones, starfish, barnacles and sea grass to help decorate his home. By the time he's done, he has grown not only a home but a neighborhood. In the meanwhile, however, he has outgrown his shell yet again. He is bereft until he finds a sweet little hermit crab who promises to take good care of both his shell and his friends. ("Mommy, why are you crying?" my boys ask at this point in the story.) In the end, the hermit crab finds a bigger drab shell and sets off once again to re-decorate with new friends discovered on the way.
Maybe this is going according to plan, just not my plan. I think I'm down with that, if it qualifies me for the human project. Just let me know if you hear of any bigger shells going on the market...
Thursday, August 29, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, July 1, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, April 29, 2013
(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!"
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!"
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Packing Up the Rickety Ladder
The puppies and I were running through the woods above the Top of the World yesterday when a thought unrelated to anything arose that it...
