The yard signs and shirts are ordered.
The donation is in.
The car magnet is coming.
We found ourselves at a drive-thru last night behind a car sporting a sticker declaring,
“I love my country more than I hate John McCain.
McCain 2008“
I love my country more than I respect, admire, and support Barack Obama. And that is not damning with faint praise.
I swear to god I’ve been percolating on a post all day, and the write a post screen loaded and it fled my brain. Totally. Cue boring ass post.
Certain long simmering things slog towards resolution. The private daycare and preschool we love will, in fact, have a full day option next year, and damn the cost, we’re taking it. Truth be told, it’s only $100 more a month than the afternoon ‘kindergarten enrichment’ program. The peace of mind of being able to keep him in a smaller group setting, with teachers who know el kid and his foibles, is totally worth it. Also, this keeps us from having to:
- Figure out how to get Sean from public school to private half day program when I’m out of town.
- Ram lunch into him during that car ride.
- Do a gifted assessment and get into a throwdown right off the bat with the new school.
Unfortunately, we had already done Kindergarten Round Up and Sean had already met the two turtles in one of the classrooms. The Lad, when gently reminded Sean was looking forward to not only no naps in Kindergarten, but also turtles, allowed as how we could consider getting one for a pet. What the hell! I have been on the guinea pig bandwagon, maybe a hamster, look they’re cute and cuddly and furry, extolling the virtues of pet ownership to the mental and emotional development of a child, and the resistance to Anything Pet was like unto reasoning with a cinderblock wall. The mere thought of Sean being distressed at the lack of reptiles in his life next year, and suddenly we’re considering getting a turtle. Clearly my powers of cajoling are NOTHING in the face of the 5 year old, who through long distance MIND CONTROL made those bizarro words come out of his dad’s mouth. The only thing I can think of is that the Lad might have quietly promised Sean a pet if he’d quit pestering him to play another round of Wii Tennis with him, and this is his cover story for it.
(Also, shout out to the publishers of the M@gic Tr33house books: you arseholes, that’s like a gateway drug for small children. AT $3.99 THE POP, I’LL ADD.)
We have nothing to do this summer. No formal swim lessons, no t-ball team. No soccer camp, no drama class, no Spanish immersion. Time whips by fast enough as it is, leaving me gasping in its wake. Deliverables to clients and RFQs, business trips and up to see the great grandparents as their health grows increasingly fragile. And so we wake up, and hack about on the Wii, and roll into day camp at a leisurely 10 am. He is shooed out into the backyard when the weather is good, on our arrival home, armed with sidewalk chalk and bubbles and a tin box for found treasures and a magnifier and the only admonition of ‘Stay where I can see you from the back windows’.
The welcome to school ice cream social at the local public school is precisely 9 weeks from today. We have 9 weeks to blow bubbles and romp in the sprinkler. 9 weeks to go swimming with Daddy in the fading sunlight. 9 weeks to stay up late playing at a friend’s house, 9 weeks to lie sticky hot in bed and read books, 9 weeks to abruptly play hooky from work and camp and go to the zoo, the farm, the art museum. 9 weeks of having the time to say ‘why sure, let’s just go’, instead of having to cross reference it against a Byzantine schedule of games and practices and lessons.
My heart aches when I stand back and look at him, the baby gone, the toddler a hazy memory, the preschooler slipping away. I am beginning to understand why normally sane women lose it sobbing on the first day of Kindergarten. And so I beat myself up when I waste a moment leaving him alone, playing, while I finish up some work, but relish the moments I do remember to grab. And perhaps it was a little selfish, not scheduling him up this summer, or perhaps it was borne of ass-laziness and missing the deadlines. But either way, we have nothing to do this summer. Because we have everything to do this summer.
It is that glorious time
When spring slams into summer
A mere glance in the fridge affirms
Quarts of strawberries
Tiny and jewel bright
Spring onions
Garlic scapes pried off
Of skinny wrists belonging to
A shrieking imp
Pak choy, no bigger than my hand
Bags of lettuces
Beets the size of golf balls
Radishes like my thumb
Sharp like ice
Green garlic, snap peas
Tiny heads of broccoli and cauliflower
Dinner a riot of green
In a bowl which seemed impossibly large
And which is now
Improbably empty
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio
I’m alive. No truly. I merely went off to revel in a month- a whole, blessed month!- with no travel. Off enjoying things like houseguests, and birthdays, and freshly redone offices (pictures forthcoming- no point hanging the art until the roof- and house quake- is over) and coordinating insurance agencies and roofers, and a whole lot of work, and a slow, creeping change of heart.
It is so strange to feel this way, after so long. Hope. Tiny, thready, but there. Hope that maybe, maybe, maybe things won’t be mired in injustice, and lies, and fear as a weapon. I have always been an Obama backer, but Hillary completely and fully lost me with the hard-working white Americans thing in WV. And the longer it dragged on, the angrier I got- as the tenor of the campaign and the politicking slid farther and farther away from what it could be, and closer to being just the same old shit with a donkey instead of an elephant. The graciousness of her speech yesterday coupled with the power of Obama’s speech in St. Paul lit a thrill in my heart like I’ve not felt in ages.
Powerlessness- overwhelming, bowing, dark powerlessness- is slipping away from me. Sean hugs the farmer from the CSA and we talk about how the restaurant business is brightening, even as the economy tanks. We eat with a family we met through school, and arrange to put in a big order to the Obama campaign together, talk about how on earth to teach children of such privilege- such enormous privilege we have- to care for others. We go through closets and shed what we do not need, paring down, simplifying, stripping away, giving to others who need it more. My hands plunge into the soil in the back vegetable beds, and the years we’ve spent cultivating have paid off in a wealth of earthworms and healthy soil devoid of toxic chemicals. We do not buy what we do not need; we stuff the reusable bags in the car and reduce our plastic bag consumption so sharply I cannot find one when I need it for a project at school.
So I was gone, for a month, and I got hope back such as I have not felt in years. That it is worth these small gestures- the soil, the bags, the signs, the shedding of things- because yes we can. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can remake this world. And I am finally loosened from the grip of overwhelming misery as perpetuated by our current administration that I can lift my head and do so, and show my child the wonderful place this planet can be, and teach him that it is worth every drop of our time and effort to make it that, rather than simply treading water to stay sane and afloat in a world gone crazily off its axis.
Certain to confuse my grandmother
You know, Target photography studio is like american cheese slices: sometime it fulfills exactly what you need, but it’s cheap and kinda plasticky and afterwards you feel just a little bit dirty, and sometimes you really need a good aged goat cheese, or a triple creme brie. American cheese slices: okay, but every so often, you’ve got to go bigger.
So it was with the mother’s day presents this year for assorted and sundry grandmother and great grandmother (and father’s day for my grandfather). Enter, stage left, pursued not by a bear but by a tornado (no joke, the session wound up half the usual length as we did this on May Day, of the now infamous May 1 storms here), Anne Dillon Photography. To her eternal credit, after Anne saw Sean at school she emailed me and delicately broached the issue of where to do the shoot: we could meet up in a local park and get some totally satisfactory cute kid amongst the flowers shots, or how did I feel about doing something a little bit more in line with Sean’s rock star hair, unbridled personality, and collection of funky t-shirts?
(Image copyright Anne Dillon Photography, all rights reserved.)
And so if you’re in the KC area and need awesome rockstar photos of your kid, your fam, or even you, get yourself on over to Anne’s site. And if you have a brilliant way of explaining to my 90 year old grandmother why precisely we let our child play near abandoned tires and trash dumpsters, please email me post haste, as I expect my very Jewish grandmother to be on the phone to me any second now demanding to know if he’s had his tetanus booster.
(Yes Nana, he has.)
Dear C,
Right now, you really can’t read this. Right now, you really can’t focus more than 4-6 inches past the end of your nose, but that’s okay, you have ages and ages to develop that vaunted visual acuity and learn to read.
Your dad was beside himself when he called us last night, and no wonder. Before I released him to go deal with niceties such as the rest of a very long phone call list, and tending to your (poor, beleagured, you owe her big time young lady) mother, he said to me “we need to make sure she and her Cousin Sean get together soon.” But not too soon, natch, you and your parents need all manner of time to bond and settle and not deal and wear scuzzy yoga pants and eat take out and learn that a Fisher Price infant swing can in fact rip through that many D cell batteries in a week. It was thrilling and warming to hear him say that, and it summed up so neatly so much of what you should know and always carry with you.
There’s two kinds of family in this world: the one you’re born with, and the one you choose. Your mom has one of the most amazing families I’ve ever met, sprawling and snarky and rambunctious and bonded together like they were dipped in crazy glue. Your dad’s extended family is even snarkier, if such a thing were possible, and sprawls in the opposite direction: you are truly loved pole to pole, from New Zealand to Canada and back again. But your mom has siblings of blood- and choice, in the case of your uncle T and now your aunt L- and your dad has made and chosen his band of brothers and sisters. A year and three days ago we stood for them, and the night before at the rehearsal it had been all I could do not to laugh. The easy shorthand, the knowing which buttons to push and which jokes to tell, the eyerolling and hugging- your mom’s attendants so perfectly groomed and dressed so nicely. And then there were your dad’s attendants, the traveling band of freaks, cracking inappropriate pop culture references, sporting funky sweaters and loud Hawaiian type print shirts and singing the Proclaimers from time to time. And the thing is, these 9 aunts and uncles of yours, by blood or by choice, we’re all there for you, just as much if not more so than we’re there for your parents. Your auntie Matilda and uncle Zombie King, uncle BS Dinobaby and auntie Wench, we have been brothers and sisters to your dad now for a frightening percentage of our lives. We have been through breakups and marriages and fights and drinks on the balcony under the stars and bad movies and good movies and opera and wine and school and jobs and burlap lined elevators and horrible storms at the 3rd of July and moves halfway cross country. We know each other’s childhood stories perhaps almost as well as your mom’s sister and brothers. I certainly know how to make your Auntie Matilda threaten me with bodily harm, merely by mentioning a ‘caboodles’ and ‘forcible lipstick’. We might not share blood with you, but we love you as fiercely as if you were our own.
Some time shortly after your cousin Sean was born, a friend of mine asked me what I would have him know. I would have him always know how to dream, I replied, and I wish that for you though my larger wish is different. Ours is not an equal society, sad to say, though trust me your mom and your auntie B and your Aunt Matilda and me and countless other women and men are doing our level best to even the playing field. But there are things to worry about for you that I don’t need to with your cousin. That people will encourage you to take the shallow way, to embrace princesses and learned helplessness and not think to instill in you that ‘princesses are good at math’. That they’ll objectify you, bombard you with images to make you feel bad about yourself, your body, your brains, your choices. That they’ll instill in you that good girls behave and don’t make waves. That they will try to make you give up your power before you even realize you have it, that they will gnaw away at your underpinnings so that you ever have a sense of unease, of shifting, of uncertainty, so that you will never feel truly independent and confident.
And so my wish for you, little C, is different than my wish for Sean. Yes, I hope you always dream. I hope you always dream big, as big as the sky, the moon, the stars. I hope for you strength, and confidence. I hope for you beauty inside and out and the wisdom to always see it. I hope for you wit, and verve. I hope for you intelligence, and the compassion to always use it for the betterment of yourself and others. But most of all, my wish is that you always remember- so that at your darkest, lowest, scariest moment, you will know in your bones that there is a river of people around this planet who loved you long before you were born, and that love quintupled the moment your dad dialed his cell phone with the much anticipated news. That whatever you need, no matter how big or how trivial, there are people there for you. That there are women who adore you and who have gone before you, and when your head is bowed with the scorn society seems to eager to dish onto young girls, your aunts will gather round you fierce as lionesses, and you will know you are neither alone nor wrong. And, that you will never grow so old in your heart and your spirit that you feel you cannot reach out to us. Hold onto being young, little C, because that will let you do so much. It will let you dream, it will let you be kind with the innocence of a child, it will let you always be open to learning, and it will always let you be willing to find comfort and aid in the heart and mind of another.
Just 5 years ago, your dad stood with Aunt Matilda and Uncle Zombie King, along with Aunt Ada and Uncle E and Aunt R and grandparents, as Aunt R lead the ceremony to welcome Sean into my faith. And I give back to you now the words we blessed your cousin with.
May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young.
May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young.
-Bob Dylan/Joan Baez
Welcome to the world, little C. We’ve got your back.
“Children, beloved childhood objects are EASY to purge,” Matilda said as I bemoaned the act of deaccessioning- and I, as a museum wonk, do not use that term lightly- part of my library. My fingers dance along dusty spines. Yesterday’s comparitively pain free purging- hated required reading from college, books which I had 3 different translations of all relatively close to one another- has given way to a far more agonizing process. A few shelves are now open, others only half or three quarters filled. They look raw and gaping, like wounds, comrades falling over to take the place of missing soldiers.
I sort and sift. The walls of words in my office have been like armaments from a life that ended a while ago: Lacan and Foucault, endless translations and godwrestling over women in Jewish life, obscure Victorian novels and classics of the Western canon. But I loved this book, I cannot get rid of it, I think time and time again, cracking it open only to feel the words rise up in mockery, the rust and grit in my brain making the wheels lock up. Was that in mishnah or gemara? Was that Derrida or Irigaray?
One box for donation, one to the basement, as I cannot bear to give up the 4 or 6 times a year I curl up with a book that was so easy, so comforting so long ago and now makes my brain ache and my eyes burn. I ever had the chops for this? I think, tossing a tractate on the laws of the rabbinic class into a box. I cannot get rid of this, Sean will want it, and off to the basement goes a book of middle Irish faerie tales and mythology, unread for a dozen years and now doomed to wait for a few more. It feels like a surrendering or a loss on the battlefield: I am not that person anymore. I am not that studious, not that well read, not that heady.
My office is nothing short of a disaster now, with cartons of books and shelves unsorted. The two largest swaths of my collection that remain are the beasts, the space hogs. Already I’ve reduced my cookbook collection by 30, between donations and condemnation to the dark recesses of the basement. But what I euphemistically call ‘visual reference’ remains untouched, the whim and whimsy of a collection started when I was a teenager, which has miraculously turned into something useful. “Books should challenge the mind,” a professor in college thundered at us, but these challenge the heart, the soul, swooping glass forms and fantasy lands, records of a country’s history and maps from the 17th century, information architecture and maps of places that never were.
The philosophy is boxed up and sent down, my stock in trade now not the inner why but the outer dream, the amazing made real, the story made flesh. And so I shed an old skin, painful though it is, and set it away to be visited from time to time, like an object hidden away in collections, instead of clung to, stunting growth.
My mom is getting me, in essence, my little pipe dream for my birthday: my office will be well and truly my own, of furniture I seek out and choose, all new to me (except the desk chair that I am keeping), and I have already scouted it out and know what I’m getting. I am springing for the paint and will take a personal day towards the end of this month to OBLITERATE THE BEIGE YAY YAY YAY.
This, uh, necessitates reducing the amount of crap in my office prodigiously.
Bring sausages! we can bbq over my burning files!
Please forgive my hubris in my last post. Clearly, we are at your mercy and whim, and I should not even consider setting foot outside, no matter how sunny and bright it is at this moment, as you could decide we should not be anticipating spring with joy, and instead will deliver hurricane force winds, hail, torrents of rain, and a tornado or 18 to our locale.
My bad, so sorry!