Category Archives: Extended Family

Cherry Blossom Baby

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On Thursday morning I put June on the school bus with the instructions, “Have a good last day of school as a five year old,” and she flashed me a brilliant smile.

June is six now.  She was born right before the cherries bloomed on the Tidal Basin. She was six weeks early, and developed a bad case of jaundice so she had to stay at the hospital three days after I was released.  I hated being separated from her, even for those three days. We were constantly shuttling back and forth between the hospital and home, with bottles of pumped milk in tow.

The hospital was just around the corner from the Tidal Basin so one day either on the way to the hospital or on the way home, we made a drive-by visit. Beth dropped me and Noah and YaYa off to walk around a bit while she circled in the car (parking is often impossible when the cherries are in bloom).  We were just a little too early, but we found a couple of blooming trees for a quick photo-op and then we hopped back in the car.

The trees bloomed in earnest soon after and I wanted to go back, but once we got June home, she had to be wrapped in a phototherapy blanket round the clock, allowed out only to nurse, and we just couldn’t make it. Even though we didn’t take her that first year, I still associate the cherry blossoms with the surprising, chaotic days after her birth. We call her our cherry blossom baby, just as Noah is our iris baby.

At 6:35 a.m. on Friday the phone rang.  I wondered if it was a wrong number or an early-rising relative wishing June a happy birthday.  Instead it was Baskin-Robbins, seeking advice of the frosting color of the ice-cream cake we’d ordered for June’s party. The whole cake-buying experience was bizarre.  June had fallen in love with this cake because it had real half-sized ice cream cones on top but Beth had customer service challenges placing and picking up the order and in the end we got a cake that said “Happy June Birthday” instead of “Happy Birthday, June.”  So, just a word of warning if you’re local and you don’t like receiving business calls before dawn or scrambled messages in icing–consider another vendor.

After Beth confirmed that pink frosting was fine, we all went to the living room where June’s wrapped presents were arrayed around her new two-wheeler.  “A bike,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I like the bike.” Then she tore into the other presents.  We got her a cat-themed math game, Rat-a-Tat Cat, partly because her party theme was cats and partly because it looked fun.  Noah got her a bell for her bike and a pair of headphones (she uses headphones to watch television or play on the computer while he’s doing homework and he thought she’d like her own pair). Everything else was clothes.  My aunt Peggy sent Hello Kitty pants, we got her a Hello Kitty t-shirt, a numeral six t-shirt and other summer clothes and pajamas. There were clothes from YaYa, too, including a pair of ladybug rain boots.  It was only after all the presents were opened that June really focused on the bike and decided she wanted to ride it right then.  I told her she needed to eat breakfast and get dressed and ready for school first.  In the end, she had about five minutes practice in the driveway before I put her, clad in her number six t-shirt and new leggings, on the school bus.  “Have a good day, six year old,” I told her. Again, she grinned at me.

When she got off the bus, she was holding a cardboard crown.  Her teacher does not allow birthday treats to be sent in from home, but birthday celebrants get a crown and everyone sings “Feliz cumpleaños” to them.  I’m used to more elaborate school celebrations, both at preschool and in elementary school, but June seemed satisfied.  She wanted to practice riding her bike again–she’d do it three times before the day was out and she got a little better every time.  (By Saturday morning she could pedal up a slight incline and her turns were impeccable.) She said she thought we could take the training wheels off. I counseled her to wait.

My mom arrived for a weekend visit around 4:15, and there were more presents to open.  A pair of summer pajamas with cats on them had arrived during the day (“The cat’s pajamas” I told Beth—how could I resist that joke?), as had a rubber bracelet from Auntie Sara.  It has holes in it and it has letters you can fit into the holes to spell words.  It came bearing the words Junie Dell. (Dell is June’s middle name, and mine, too. I used to call her Junie Dell when she was a baby.  It was one of those baby nicknames that didn’t stick except with Sara, but I like that Sara has a special nickname for her.)  The next day, June changed the words to “I love you.”  Mom brought all kinds of presents—a giant wooden Pinocchio marionette, a tiny vase with a purple ceramic cat attached to it, a paint-your-own tea set kit, and of course, clothes.  June selected the belt from one outfit and decided to wear it with the other outfit (a hot pink t-shirt and leggings to go under a blue sundress with pink flowers) at her party the next day.

I gave June an early bath because we were going out for pizza at Roscoe’s and I wasn’t sure what time we’d be home. It was a warm evening so we sat on the patio, eating wild mushroom crostini, marinated olives (I let June go over her olive quota for the day), salad and pizza.  They were out of gelato because their freezer was broken, so we headed over to Capital City Cheesecake for cheesecake and cannoli.  When we got home, it was June’s bedtime and her big day was over.

But the next day was probably just as exciting because it was her birthday party.  We spent the morning and early afternoon running birthday errands, cleaning the house, assembling gift bags and getting the porch ready for the pin-the-tail-on-the-cat game and the piñata. I’d originally envisioned these as front and back yard games, but rain was predicted, and sure enough it started drizzling around 11:30. Beth and June went out to pick up the “Happy June Birthday” cake and to buy yellow roses and six balloons in varying designs. One has a cat wearing a birthday hat and sunglasses.  Another is the exact Dora balloon June got for her birthday last year. When you tap it, Dora sings “Happy Birthday” in English and Spanish. The sound of the song was still etched deeply into my brain, and Beth’s, too, so she set some strict ground rules about under what circumstances one might tap the balloon to hear the pint-sized bilingual songstress go at it.

The party was at 3:00 and her friends arrived between 2:50 and 3:15.  Maggie, who is June’s only friend who attended both her preschool and her elementary school, made introductions, while the girls selected instruments from the bin and there was an impromptu concert (most of June’s parties seem to start this way).  Once everyone had arrived, we gathered the guests onto the carpet to listen as Mom read them a story The Leprechaun Under the Bed. June remembered Mom reading at her party last year and wanted her to do it again. I’d suggested The Cat in the Hat, but she knew as soon as we checked this book out of the library and read it the first time that it was the one she wanted read at her party. (Spoiler: the leprechaun turns into a cat at the end of the story.)

Next we moved out to the porch for pin-the-tail-on-the-cat.  Last spring June attended a classmate’s birthday party that had classic games as the theme–pin-the-tail-on-the donkey, sack races, etc, and it occurred to me that though you don’t see kids play them much any more, these games are classics for a reason. It was a really fun party.  So I tucked that idea away in the back of my mind, and when June came up with the cat theme for her party I was all ready with pin-the-tail-on-the-cat. June was all over it, especially since she could make the cat and the tails herself.  One by one, I blindfolded the guests and gently spun them around six times each and let them go, sometimes with a subtle correction if they left my hands going in the wrong direction.  The kids laughed hysterically as the tails went onto the cat’s face or the air above its body.  A couple of them got the tail on or pretty close to the cat’s rump—I think Talia’s was the best placed.

Back inside, it was time for games.  We had two and let the girls divide into groups and choose which one they wanted to play.  The first one was The Cat in the Hat, I Can Do That.  In this game, you lay cards together to form instructions for a task to perform with props from the story and you get points if you complete it. June got this game for Christmas and was more interested in playing her new game and most of her guests followed her lead, but I supervised a game between Talia and Megan and then started another round with Talia, when Megan had lost interest and Talia wanted to keep playing.  Beth says she wished she’d thought to get a picture of me trying to wriggle my way under a low foam arch, while balancing the fishbowl in one hand.

Mom and Noah had played Rat-a-Tat Cat with June earlier the in day so they could get the hang of the rules, and Emelia already knew them because she had the same game at home, so the card game went smoothly. Beth said they all seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly and enjoyed it.  When the games were over, we set everyone up with paper and crayons and asked them to draw cats, as a souvenir.  Some of them drew the Cat in the Hat, others drew Hello Kitty and others went with non-branded felines.  Keller divided her paper into three sections and did one of each.

We had cake next.  The kids thought “Happy June Birthday” was hilarious, an improvement on “Happy Birthday June” really, and as Beth divvied up the little cones they were agreeable about not all getting their first choices in ice cream (each cone was a different flavor).  As we ate cake, Mom sat on the couch with Morgan’s mom and baby brother and got acquainted with her, finding out she went to Oberlin—Beth’s and my alma mater. She even lived in Noah Hall, the dorm where Beth and I met, and after which we named Noah.

I gathered up the goody bags so the guests could stash their piñata booty in them and we headed back out to the porch to smash it.  All the kids had at least two turns.  When a hole opened but no candy fell out, Megan tried to tilt the piñata (or maybe enlarge the hole) by poking her stick in the hole.  It was Noah who finally sent the candy cascading to the floor with some mighty whacks.  Morgan’s mom commented that older brothers have their uses.

June wanted to know if we could have some music while we waited for parents to come collect the guests.  When Beth put on Blue Moo, June asked Talia quite formally, “Talia, will you dance with me?” and Talia did. They danced joyfully around the living room as June’s birthday party wound down to a close. It was cute to watch, especially since I am so very fond of Talia, whom I’ve known since she was not quite two.

After the guests left, June opened her presents–a book, three stuffed animals (including a cat of course), a mermaid magnet set, and a Lego café kit.  June wanted to assemble the café right away, but we went out for Indian first, and then she set to work on it. It was hard to tear her away to go to bed. She finished it the next afternoon, following all thirty-three diagrams–less than twenty-four hours after receiving it, and impressing Mom with her small motor skills and her tenacity.

The final adventure of June’s birthday weekend was an expedition to the cherry blossoms and the new MLK memorial.  The peak bloom period is short and notoriously difficult to predict.  Mom has never caught it, though she often visits us around June’s birthday.  For awhile the predicted four-day peak period spanned the weekend and we thought luck was with us, but then a few eighty-plus-degree days accelerated the blooming and the peak period moved back, ending Friday.  I thought if we went Friday it would be too hard to get back by bedtime, and going on Saturday before the party would make for a stressfully jam-packed day, so we waited until Sunday.

Now I will say that given the choice between a few days before the peak period and a few days after I would choose after every time. There are drifts of petals on the ground and blizzards of them in the air with every breeze; there are petals in muddy puddles and on the rippling water of the Tidal Basin, and there are damp petals stuck to every horizontal and vertical surface.  In its way, it’s almost as magic as the classic picture postcard puffy pink and white blooms.  It looks like confetti strewn on the street after a particularly wild party.  So in a way it was a fitting end to June’s birthday celebration, an after party of sorts. She got to christen her new boots in the puddles, eat hot edamame from a stand, admire the trees (solemnly telling us “all trees are beautiful”), run through the paths between the tulip beds at the Floral Library, take pictures with Beth’s phone, joke with her brother, give her grandmother countless hugs, hold hands with everyone and seize the joy and the beauty of the moment and of being six.

Spring Forward

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Maybe it was because had been getting light earlier or maybe it was just one of those random fluctuations in the kids’ sleep patterns, but for a few weeks before the time change they had been waking up early.  Earlier than their usual early, I mean. They are supposed to stay quietly in bed until six a.m. and then Noah is allowed to read and June, until Sunday, was allowed to come snuggle with us in bed.  She’d been doing that with disheartening regularity, right at six o’ clock on the dot, instead varying her entrance time within the 6:00 to 7:00 hour as was her previous habit.

Now when June was three and four years old, she’d usually fall right back asleep between us, and then the three of us would get some more rest, but that hadn’t been happening much recently.  Instead, there was more kicking and pulling off of covers and chatter than slumber once she came to join us.  Coming in at the earliest allowable time also meant that on the all too frequent mornings she woke me up at 5:30 because she’d forgotten to look at the clock or she’d lost her pacifier (yes, she still sleeps with one) or she wanted to tell me about one of her dreams I couldn’t get back to sleep, knowing she’d be back at 6:00.

So some time in February I started thinking about how June was close to the age Noah was when we pushed back his snuggle time to 6:30 on weekdays and 7:10 on weekends (“Welcome to 6:47”). And I started thinking it was time for a change. The late February weekend when June woke me before six on Saturday and Sunday put me over the edge.  I realized that pushing back the time she’s allowed to enter the room would not stop the unauthorized forays to our room (and in the short run might actually increase them) but it would give me more time to fall back asleep when they occurred. When I told Beth I was thinking of changing the morning rules she said, “Please!” so I knew she was on board.

I was only waiting for a good time to break the news to June when I realized switching over to Daylight Saving Time would create the perfect opportunity because it would be easy for her to stay in bed until seven the first day and then we’d just need keep her in the habit.  So on Saturday I told her the new rules—6:30 on weekdays and 7:00 on weekends–stressing it was because she was getting older and these are our rules for older kids. She wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t get as much pushback as I expected. Maybe I did a good job selling the big kid angle.

Day 1: Sunday

As expected, the first day was easy.  We set the clocks forward an hour and also set the time June was allowed into the room forward an hour, so it was a wash, and it felt pretty much like a normal Sunday when she popped into the room at precisely seven a.m.  I asked her how long she’d been up and she said since 6:42, so that was an eighteen-minute sleep bonus for the grownups, I suppose.

She took a brief nap that afternoon so I let her stay up until 8:20 (thirty-five minutes past her no-nap bedtime) and she fell asleep easily.  Noah said he didn’t think he’d fall asleep when I put him to bed, but if he had any trouble he was quiet about it. I didn’t hear any tossing or turning. I fell asleep pretty easily at my normal bedtime as well.

Day 2: Monday

“Mommy, it’s 6:40,” June whispered.  She was standing by my bedside in the dark, the deep, quiet kind of dark that makes anything but sleeping seem like a very poor idea.

“C’mon in,” I mumbled and she climbed in. It felt early, too early, even though I’d gotten about the same amount of sleep as usual. I wasn’t up for reading a story until 7:15, but I then I read it and we got up and everyone got to work and school on time, though it felt like a bit more of a scramble than usual.  For instance, June and I were having a leisurely conversation in the kitchen while I made her lunch when I glanced at the clock on the stove and saw it was 8:12, only eight minutes until we needed to be at the bus stop and I stopped whatever I was saying to urge her to go get dressed.  I went to check on her several minutes later and found her out of her pajamas but wearing only a pair of flowered underpants and apparently not in the process of putting on clothes.  I pulled a shirt over her head and socks onto her feet while she got into a pair of leggings, then I brushed her hair into a sloppy ponytail–“no time for pigtails”– I told her and we were out the door.

At the bus stop I listened to parents of third and fourth graders complain about their kids having to take the MSA (Maryland’s No Child Left Behind tests) on the day after a time change.  Fifth-graders don’t start the tests until Wednesday, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

The kids got into two fierce arguments that evening.  The first one was about the rules of a soccer game they were playing before dinner (longer daylight and a light homework day for Noah facilitated this game) and the second one was over ownership of a candy necklace.  Two squabbles in one evening would not be unusual but they were really mad, crying and screaming at each other and using escalating words like “cheating” and “stealing.”  I wondered if the time change was making them out of sorts.  Once June had calmed down and we were talking about what had happened, she said they’d been “bitten by the argument bug,” quoting a favorite book of hers.  I suggested a make-up hug before June went to bed and they complied, but Noah was half-hearted about it.

Day 3: Tuesday

“It’s 6:30,” June informed me before crawling into bed with me.  Too dark, too early, too dark, too early, my brain was telling me.

Meanwhile, Noah was in the bathroom singing “Fifty Nifty United States” with a good deal of brio.  Then he popped his head into the bedroom and said, as if just noticing, “It seems really dark. It must be the daylight savings time.”

I wasn’t awake enough to respond. I guess it’s going to be this way for a while, but June’s doing a great job sticking to the new rules, and I think when I finally adjust to the new time, I’ll appreciate having a little extra time to sleep in the morning. Three days out, I’m cautiously optimistic.

Meanwhile, other things are springing ahead besides the time.  June will be six in ten days and we’ve been busy planning her party.  The theme is cats and she and I spent a lot of time selecting and ordering cat-themed plates, cups and goody bag loot–pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers, bookmarks and stickers all in either Hello Kitty or Cat in the Hat patterns, plus cat bracelets and cat rubber duckies. June drew her own invitations with pictures of birthday hats and cats and Noah made an insert with the date, time and place info, plus a graphic of the number six and an exclamation point made from Hello Kitty’s face and the Cat in the Hat’s hat. Then June made a large drawing of a cat and seven tails for a homemade pin-the-tail-on-the-cat game and Beth and June purchased a piñata while they were grocery shopping on Sunday.  The party is not until the weekend after next but June’s in a state of high excitement about it.

Spring is also in evidence in the yard, even though it’s still officially winter.  Our crocuses are finished and the daffodils and hyacinth are in bloom, with tulips and even tiger lilies putting up shoots.  We have light and dark purple hyacinth. The dark ones we got last year in a pot as a condolence gift from our friend Megan when Beth’s dad died.  I planted the bulbs and they came up in February and started to bloom in early March right when I hoped they would. On Saturday, the first anniversary of his death, they were in full bloom. I like having a small living memorial there, to let us look back, even as we spring forward.

Queer, Queer Fun

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On Wednesday morning, the morning of the twentieth anniversary of our commitment ceremony, June crawled into bed with us at 6:40 a.m.  We all dozed a bit longer and around 7:00 Beth got out of bed and was walking around my side of the bed on her way out of the bedroom when I put my arms up for a hug.  The cue reminded her. “Happy anniversary,” she said.

The kids went to school and Beth went to work and the day unfolded like a normal weekday.  I read a few chapters of Catch-22, which I’m reading for my book club, and I exercised and cleaned the refrigerator.  I worked on a set of instructions for growing hydroponic green beans, cucumbers and lettuce.  I found out I’d landed a job writing three grants for a group of D.C. public charter schools. Okay, that last part was not so routine.  I haven’t written a grant since 1994, when I worked for Project Vote, so I greeted this development with a mix of excitement and trepidation.  But I can’t even start until I attend a series of meetings with school officials in early February so I can put it out my mind for now.

That morning Beth posted a picture of the two of us at our commitment ceremony on Facebook, along with a copy of a newspaper story from the Philadelphia Gay News, about how our commitment ceremony announcement in the Philadelphia Inquirer was the first one ever for a gay or lesbian couple.  (At the time my father was the managing editor of the Inquirer. He did not participate in the discussions about whether to publish the announcement but I imagine the fact that I was his daughter must have been a factor in people’s minds.  If nepotism did help break down the door for other people behind us, I have no problem with that.)

One of the things I love about Facebook is all the positive feedback you get on milestone posts.  All day long the congratulations poured in on both posts.  It made me cheerful every time I checked it and gave the day a festive feel, even if I was at home alone, writing or doing chores for much of it.

Shortly after June got home I started cooking dinner.  I wanted to get an early start on the eggplant-bulgur casserole because I was also making a cake, the spice cake with lemon glaze I make almost every year on our anniversary. It was our wedding cake.  June helped pour the ingredients in the bowl, mix the batter, consulted with me on what shade of pink to dye the glaze (it was a very deep pink, almost red) and helped spread the glaze on the cake.

While we ate dinner, we listened to one of the three mix tapes we made for our ceremony.  (Our ceremony was a very low-budget, DIY affair so we provided our own music.) I haven’t attempted the play the tapes in years and I wasn’t even sure if the one I’d selected would still play or if it would be warped, but it sounded fine after two decades (or almost two decades- a notation on the case indicated we’d re-made it in 1994. I don’t remember why).  It was the one we played last, the most upbeat one.  It starts with Prince’s “Let Pretend We’re Married” and the Eurhythmics “Would I Lie to You?” and goes on in that vein.  It’s a fun tape and I only had to rush to the tape player to turn down the volume once so the kids would miss some not quite age-appropriate lyrics.

The music, familiar and yet from such a different time in our lives, and the photo of Beth with her early 90s trademark flattop really took me back. Sometimes it seems like it hasn’t been that long since we were in our mid-twenties and childless and new to living in the big city, and sometimes it seems like another life entirely.

After dinner and before cake, we exchanged gifts. Beth got me Stephen King’s latest—11/22/63— and I got her a gift certificate for Giovanni’s Room, a gay bookstore in Philadelphia.  And why would I get her such a thing when we live in suburban Maryland?  We had a kid-free weekend in Philly ahead of us, that’s why.

We drove everyone up to Mom and Jim’s house on Saturday afternoon after June’s basketball game, dropped the kids off and enjoyed two nights and one day to ourselves in the City of Brotherly Love.  We had two very nice dinners at the Kyber Pass Pub and Cuba Libre. If you go to the first, the vegetarian meats (BBQ and fried chicken Po Boys) and the fried vegetables (okra and sweet potato fries) are very good. If you go to the second, you must order the buñuelos con espinaca. We visited Reading Terminal Market and had lunch there.  I got a vegetarian cheesesteak at a stand where the service was so bad it crossed over from aggravating to comic, but the cheesesteak was not half bad once I finally got it. We browsed at Giovanni’s Room and came out with a few books. We spent a lot of time in our hotel room and in a local coffee shop reading. We saw a non-animated, R-rated movie, the lesbian coming-of-age film The Pariah, which was well acted and a good story, though there were some odd things going on with the camera work, probably meant to indicate the protagonist’s emotional state.  Our room had a gas fireplace and a Jacuzzi and we employed them both.

We walked a lot on Sunday and made some serendipitous discoveries, stumbling upon the President’s House where the first two Presidents lived while the Capitol moved to Washington. The building is no longer there, but they have rebuilt parts of it, with low brick walls to show where walls went and some chimneys and doorways recreated.  You can also look down into the ground to see the actual excavated foundations through glass.  There is a lot of information posted on signs about the house and its inhabitants, including the nine slaves who lived there. It seemed a fitting place to visit during MLK weekend and we would have lingered longer and read more if it had not been so very cold (in the twenties most of the day and quite windy).

We also found the block where I lived from the ages of five and half to almost nine, quite by accident, and from there I remembered how to walk to my elementary school a few blocks away, so we did.  I don’t think I’ve seen it since 1976 but other than new playground equipment (and what I believe to be an addition) the soaring one-hundred-year-old red brick building looks just as I remember it.  It was odd, but not unpleasant to be walking around our old neighborhood on Sunday, because it was the second anniversary of my father’s death. As we walked along the blocks where he must have walked so many times, I imagined him in his thirties walking with a little-girl version of me, maybe headed to the playground, maybe going for ice cream or to peek inside antique stores.

On Monday morning we picked up the kids and heard all about their trip to the Franklin Institute. June loved the giant heart and veins you can tour (what kid doesn’t?) and the movie they saw in the planetarium about black holes and Noah liked the city that changed colors depending on environmental choices the citizens made.  June left Mom and Jim’s house laden with necklaces, a jewelry box and a wicker doll high chair.  (Mom is downsizing in preparation for her move).  On our way out of the Philadelphia area, we made one last stop, for soft pretzels, and then we were homeward bound, arriving mid-afternoon, in time for undone homework and weekend chores.  Our anniversary celebration was over.

But I still have one song from the commitment ceremony tape running through my head. It’s “The Queer Song,” by Two Nice Girls.  It makes me think how much has changed, not just over the past twenty years, but maybe the past thirty.  The speaker is re-assuring her love interest, who is still insecure in her sexual identity:

I’m gonna take you to queer bars
I’m gonna drive you in queer cars
You’re gonna meet all my queer friends
Our queer, queer fun it never ends
We’re gonna have a happy life
Both of us are gonna be the wife
I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be
It’s queer queer fun for you and me

(If you don’t know this song, it’s worth knowing that it’s sung partially to the tune of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)  I have to reach far back into my life to remember a time when the idea of my own happiness being possible would have produced a subversive, defiant thrill, but I do remember.  I do.  I would not say my life is a never-ending parade of queer, queer fun—it has as many disappointments and sorrows as anyone else’s—but there is happiness in it, too.

As the Presidential election will no doubt remind me on a more regular basis than I’d like, my family’s happiness is still a hard pill for some people to swallow. That’s why this was a commitment ceremony anniversary and not a wedding anniversary we just celebrated. I have faith we’ll get there, maybe soon. Gay marriage will be on the table again in Maryland this year, as it was last year and a few years before that. I try not to get my hopes up.  I do want to be legally married for both symbolic and practical reasons, but on the deepest level, both of us already are the wife and we have been since that mid-January afternoon when we were twenty-four and twenty-five and stood before our friends and family and dared to imagine living a happy life together.

Occupy Christmas

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Day 1: Christmas Eve

My mom had a full house for Christmas—she and my stepfather, our family of four, my sister Sara, my aunt Peggy and Uncle Darryl, their twenty-something kids Emily and Blake, Emily’s five-year-old son Josiah and her friend Sir. We were nearly the last ones there, arriving in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve day. Everyone was there but Sir, who was taking an evening train, so things were hopping right from the beginning. Peggy and Darryl live in Idaho and Emily, Blake and Josiah recently moved from Boise to Brooklyn so I don’t see them often. Right after we walked in the door I tried to introduce June to everyone, and, despite having seen recent pictures of him, I misidentified my cousin Blake. In my defense, his hair is much shorter than in the pictures. Later I told Beth I was glad to have gotten the most embarrassing moment over right out of the gate. And then my uncle got me and Beth mixed up, so maybe we’re even.

Mom and Jim’s house was beautifully decorated for Christmas, as it always is. There were evergreen garlands and big ribbons on the porch railing and the stairway and mantel. Mom had poinsettias on either side of the fireplace and her Dickens village (http://www.department56.com/content.aspx?cid=VLDV&ms=PRD&msi=58999) was on display, as was her Santa collection. Because she and my stepfather are planning to move to Oregon some time in the next year and she wants to lighten her load, she let Sara and the kids pick a few Santas to take home when we left. (June, who knows a thing or two about grandmothers, talked Mom up from two to four. Noah initially declined the offer and then changed his mind and picked two.)

We spent the afternoon getting re-acquainted (or in some cases acquainted). The adults talked and wrapped presents. June and Josiah drew on a big tablet Mom gave them (a superhero for him, a nutcracker and elephant and assorted other things for her). Then they chased each other around the house pretending to be zombies, because nothing says Christmas like five year olds shouting, “I’ve already eaten your brain!” and “No, you haven’t!” June showed off for Emily and Blake by counting to one hundred in Spanish. (There was a repeat performance for a larger audience on Christmas day and then Sara counted to twenty in Italian.) Sara asked if Noah was too old for her to read to him and he said no and produced a 39 Clues book. At one point I rounded up the kids and we rolled out the gingerbread dough we’d brought and cut cookies. Josiah was quite skilled at it and turned out perfect cookie after perfect cookie. I didn’t cut too many cookies myself because the kids kept me busy with requests for greased cookie sheets and more dough and help transferring cookies to sheets. I credit Lesley with giving me the confidence to take on a messy project with my kids plus a boy I’d just met.

We had chili for dinner (Sir arrived while we were eating) and put a very tired June to bed. Then after more wrapping, stocking stuffing and note-from-Santa writing (Noah helped me with this chore) we went to bed, too, a bit past our bedtimes.

Day 2: Christmas Day

It’s hard to sleep in a house with thirteen people. There were people still up and conversing at 1:20 a.m. and people up for the day at 5:30 a.m. (that would be our crew). There were people sleeping on under-inflated air mattresses and sofa cushions on the floor. I actually slept in a bed so it would be churlish to complain about my night’s sleep, but it was an awfully early start to the day. Noah crept downstairs at 6:00 a.m. (when he was allowed out of bed) and came back up to report Blake was sleeping on the living room floor, at which point we realized we’d need to wait for him to wake up before the kids could open their stockings. Sara was sleeping in the sunroom, which was separated from our room only by a pair of French doors so we needed to keep the kids both quiet and in the dark. There was nowhere we could speak above a whisper or turn on a light. People were sleeping everywhere. Technology, in the form of Beth’s iPhone and Noah’s iPod, came to the rescue and the kids were amazingly quiet until we heard Josiah downstairs at 7:30 and present-opening commenced.

Mom and I had talked ahead of time about how to open presents. We usually open gifts one at a time, taking turns in a pre-set order, youngest to oldest. I’ve always liked the ceremonial aspect of this, and being able to see people’s responses to gifts. But with so many people and so many presents we knew it wouldn’t work this year. This pleased Beth because her family has a more free-for-all style and our way sometimes makes her antsy. We put Noah in charge of handing out presents and people opened them as they got them and mine all piled up at my feet as I tried not to miss anything, but of course I did and for days afterward I was still finding out what people got from each other. (This in my mind illustrates the superiority of the traditional method.) But even in the accelerated version, it still took until nine a.m. to finish. The kids got too many gifts to list, but Santa came through with the mermaid doll for June and Noah got the headphones he wanted. I got a refurbished iPod nano, some Starbucks gift cards and candy and a book (http://classiclit.about.com/od/poeedgarallan/fr/aa_poeshadow.htm) and other nice things. Beth and I got and a mixer and a cutting board and I got her a shoe rack because the shoes that are always in a jumbled heap in the hallway get on her nerves. At one point during the present opening, Mom looked out the window and noticed frost on the grass. “It’s a white Christmas,” she concluded, but Beth said frost didn’t count.

We had brunch around ten—scrambled eggs, English muffins, bacon, veggie sausage and grapefruit. Mom and Jim’s dining room gets a lot of late morning light in the winter, and during the meal, she leaned back in her chair and said, “I’m feeling happy now in the sun with all you here and my dining room walls.” (They are newly painted gold.) The rest of the day passed pleasantly. June got a lot of art kits for Christmas. She assembled the picture of the princess and the winged unicorn you construct out of glittery puffy stickers on a wooden frame. Sara helped her with the magnetic mosaic kit while I cracked hazelnuts for Christmas dinner stuffing. Then Beth, Emily, Noah and I played Forbidden Island (http://gamewright.com/gamewright/index.php?section=games&page=game&show=245), one of Noah’s gifts from Mom, a very fun and complicated co-operative game. Afterward June and I took a much-needed nap, and then I read You Have to Stop This (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10757817-you-have-to-stop-this) to Noah. (This was one of his gifts from me). He was starting to feel sick and about forty minutes into the book he went to the bathroom and threw up. He spent the rest of the day in bed, listening to an audio book, and falling asleep early. He missed Christmas dinner, but we saved him some cranberry sauce and a roll, since those are his favorite parts of the meal. We listened to some of Sir’s original music and had pie (two kinds- apple and mixed berry) before Sir had to catch a train back to New York. And then we were twelve.

Day 3

The next morning Noah had made a complete recovery. He ate a big breakfast and before he was finished, June was hard at work on more art kits. She painted the paint-by-numbers butterfly (eschewing the numbers and making her own design). Before some of the late risers we up, she’d finished this and started on a mask from the mask kit—a queen, with red glasses, blond hair, red hair ribbons and a gold crown with green jewels (she used up almost all the jewels on her first mask).

As Peggy, Darryl, Emily and I sat at the breakfast table in the next room, Darryl looked up from the newspaper and asked the table at large to guess the official word of the year. We all stared back at him silently. “If you think about it you’ll guess,” he predicted encouragingly.

Suddenly it came to me. “Occupy,” I answered, knowing I was right and I was. We’d been discussing the Occupy movement the night before so it was in the front of my mind, but I think spending Christmas in such a fully occupied house might have helped, too.

The house gradually emptied. The day after Christmas was quieter because people spun off on separate expeditions. Mom and Peggy took June and Josiah to the Please Touch Museum (http://www.pleasetouchmuseum.org/), where it was reported they had fun and got along very well. Beth and Noah went out to lunch, as did Sara with a friend from high school and her husband, leaving me to read one hundred pages of my new book in a single day (something which would not have been unusual, say eleven years ago, but is now). When Sara returned, she and I went for a walk down by the creek and through Mom’s neighborhood, talking about work, and life in general. I haven’t seen her in a year and a half so it was really nice to have a long chat with her. When we got back to the house, Noah, Blake and Beth were playing another game of Forbidden Island and then Beth, Emily and Blake played Q-bitz (http://www.mindware.com/p/Q-bitz/44002), another Christmas present. Noah elected to play with own side game with the pieces because he didn’t want the time pressure of needing to race against other players.

We all came back together for a stir-fry dinner. While Mom and her helpers were cooking, I gave June a bath and Josiah made a mask for June, “a girl mask,” he specified. As I set the table, I kept inventing errands for June (take this toy upstairs, find out what people want to drink) because I was trying to keep her out of the family room, where a war movie was playing on television. Finally I ran out of ideas and had to tell her to stay out of the room. She was not pleased, and neither was Josiah when Emily took similar action shortly afterward. Fortunately, dinner was ready soon after and then it was June’s bedtime.

Day 4

Two days after Christmas, Sara and Peggy’s branch of the family left for parts North and West. That morning was nearly as challenging as Christmas morning, though without the need to distract children awaiting presents. They woke nearly as early as they did on Christmas and other people slept later, so I was shushing them from 6:00 a.m. until 8:45 when Beth and I gave up on keeping them quiet and went out breakfast, leaving the kids in Emily’s capable hands. Shortly before we left, I put my hand on Noah’s back and said, “A little quieter, please.”

“Sorry,” he answered. “I’m not a quiet person.”

While June and Josiah made yet more masks, Beth and I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and a nice talk at the Regency Café (http://www.regencycafe.com/). One of the advantages of a houseful of relatives is abundant babysitting.

When we returned the kids were playing June’s new Cat in the Hat game (http://www.icandothatgames.com/cat/), which segued into Hexbugs (http://www.hexbug.com/). When Peggy’s crew left, the house felt strangely quiet and empty, considering there were still seven of us in it. Mom sank into a chair, looking done in and said, “It was a good Christmas.” Sara gave June a parting gift of French braids and left for the airport. And then we were six.

We spent a quiet afternoon and evening. While June and I napped, Mom played Forbidden Island with Noah (I’m thinking he likes this game) and afterward we watched Frosty the Snowman and Frosty Returns on Mom and Jim’s big-screen television, which gave us the opportunity to compare the detail work on the animation (the older one is better, especially the snowflake effects). The irony of watching programs about snow while rain pelted the roof was not lost on me.

Day 5

Three days after Christmas the last of the occupiers left Mom and Jim’s house, leaving it calmer, quieter, and tidier no doubt, but perhaps a bit lonelier. Mom has always told me she’s dreamed about having a full house at Christmas (often in the context of wanting more grandchildren) so I’m glad she got her wish. I think it was a Christmas we’ll all remember.

p.s. If you were at my Mom’s house and you’re reading this, please feel free to Occupy the comments section. I would love to hear from you (and also those of you who weren’t there).

Rain or Shine

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Sunday
“I’m sorry,” Beth said. We were embracing on the screened porch of our rental house early Sunday morning. “You have no idea how much.”

She had driven us to the beach the day before and she was heading straight back home. The Verizon strike that had started a week prior and caused her to work long hours and late nights ever since meant she had to skip our vacation. YaYa had elected not to come this year and my sister cancelled when she found out right before the trip that her cat had inoperable cancer so it was just me and Mom and the kids.

Now it would be unseemly to complain too much about a week at the beach with a grandmother to help, but it was still a sharp disappointment to find out within a few days of each other and right beforehand, that neither my partner nor my sister was coming. And to make matters worse, rain was predicted all week, after a very dry summer.

But the beach is the beach, rain or shine, and I was glad to be there. The kids and I had already made the best of a week without seeing much of Beth. We’d gone for a long creek walk, been to the pool, made chocolate-marshmallow candies from a kit, hosted two play dates and been to two drum lessons. We’d make the best of this week, too.

Beth drove away at 8:45, after taking June to play on the beach for a little while Noah and I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the screened porch. I watched the car go with a pang and kept on reading.

Later Mom and I worked out a set of menus and a grocery list. Both kids wanted to go shopping with her so I hit the beach. It was cloudy but not uniformly so. There were thick bands of dark clouds in the West but in the East there was just about every kind of sky you could imagine: patches of blue, puffy white clouds and big rapidly moving dark gray ones, scuttling in front of the lighter ones. I thought my swim could be cut short by a thunderstorm so I got in the water right away. I swam for an hour, until my fingers were wrinkly and I was all over gooseflesh.

I got home shortly before Mom and the kids, helped unpack the groceries and made lunch. Then June and I, who had been up for an hour and a half in the middle of the night because she could not sleep in an unfamiliar place, collapsed and slept for two hours. Every now and then I half-woke to hear Noah laughing as he and Grandmom played Roundabouts, but it was a pretty solid nap.

Afterward, I was energized enough to take the kids to Funland. Noah tried some new rides this year—the Freefall (which is one of those tower-like rides with seats that just take you up and drop you) and the Paratrooper (which looks like a Ferris Wheel except it tilts in addition to spinning). June stuck to her old standbys, but insisted on going on the mini-Ferris wheel alone, not with Noah and definitely not with me. She wanted to ride the Freefall, and she is tall enough, but I wasn’t quite ready to put her on it, and I also didn’t want to take away from Noah’s pride at riding it for the first time by having his little sister do it the very same year, so I told her next year. She’s the daredevil, if you hadn’t figured it out already, and he’s the cautious one.

It had started to rain hard while we were in Funland and it didn’t look like it was going to stop any time soon so we walked home in it. Even with umbrellas and June in a rain jacket we got soaked so when we got home Mom and the kids changed into pajamas and called it a pajama party. Noah even found the song “Pajama Time” on his iPod and played it while we cooked dinner.

After dinner it had cleared and the kids wanted to go to Candy Kitchen so I took them to the boardwalk in their pajamas (Noah pulled on a pair of shorts over his pajama bottoms). Before we were halfway there it started to rain again but the sun was still shining so we saw possibly the most amazing rainbow I have ever seen. It was huge, 180 degrees, right over the ocean. Everyone was taking pictures and I tried to take one with my phone but I couldn’t get the whole thing in the frame. Beth called while we were looking at it. It was hard to talk much because of the noise of the rain and the crowds, but she sounded sad.

We got fudge and a wide variety of gummy products (worms, frogs and teeth). On the way home it started to rain harder and we got soaked again. June needed a second pair of pajamas. We played Hex and checkers until bedtime and our first full day at the beach was over.

Monday
I’d wondered if my long nap would keep me up but I went right to sleep Sunday night and slept eight and a half hours, waking before June who slept until 7:25. The kids were sleeping upstairs in the attic bedroom and I was in a downstairs bedroom and I slept magnificently. The room was dark and quiet. I was not able to hear all their little sleep movements as I do when they are just next door to me at home. The kids and I played a hand of Go Fish after breakfast and were on the beach by 9:10.

We proceeded to spend the longest chunk of time I think I’ve ever had on the beach with both kids—over three hours. I was the one who had to make them come home for lunch. They were in the water before I could even get sun block on them and I had to call them back to the towel. They jumped in the waves, made dribble castles and regular castles and dug a very deep moat around one of them. We watched a large pod of dolphins (the first of many we’d see that week). Noah buried his legs in the sand down to the knees and seemed to enjoy sitting and watching the ocean thus weighted down. June played in the water until she was shivering and her lips were blue. And even then she resisted coming up onto the sand for warming-up breaks. I snuck in a five-minute swim while they were building things in the sand, but I came out in a hurry when I saw them approach the water. The waves were better than the day before so I was sorry not to have a real swim, but it was a fun morning nonetheless. I think I could have even read or written a little if I had brought a book or writing supplies because they played independently for long stretches of time. It’s been a long time—a decade—since I’ve been able to read on the beach without getting someone to watch the kids. It was tantalizing to think it might be almost within my grasp again.

That afternoon, post-nap (June’s—I read to Noah while she slept as I did most days that week) we returned to Funland. Noah got bored quickly because his new favorite rides are not under the roof and kept getting shut down by the intermittent rain. He did get to ride the Freefall once more but he got drenched because it started to rain during the ride. June wanted to ride the helicopters, which are also outside and she waited in the line twice, only to have them shut down when she would have been in the next group. So we mostly stuck to the kiddie rides under the pavilion. Once again, we walked home in the rain and the kids ate dinner in their pajamas. We considered going to the boardwalk that evening but we decided to stay inside and dry. We talked to Beth on the phone, Noah played games on his iPod and read a 39 Clues book (http://www.the39clues.com/). Meanwhile June showed off her new mouse skills for Mom, playing phonics games on the Between the Lions web site. June went to bed at 8:45 and Noah at 9:15, but they were up talking until 9:45.

Tuesday
June slept in until 6:55 and when she woke me I saw my first glimpses of sun since we’d arrived. After two consecutive nights’ good sleep I was ambitious enough to make veggie bacon, eggs, toast and cantaloupe for my breakfast and June’s (Noah opted for cereal).

After the breakfast dishes were done and I’d started a load of laundry, I took the kids for a scooter ride on the boardwalk. Scooters are permitted on the boardwalk before 10 a.m. in the summer, or so I thought. Once we were on the boardwalk, I noticed the sign that said bikes are permitted before 10 a.m. but scooters are prohibited from May 15 to September 15. Why the distinction, I have no idea, but we turned off the boardwalk at Rehoboth Avenue (not before passing a police officer, but she didn’t seem to care about our lawless ways). We fortified ourselves with raspberry latte, chocolate milk, juice and a bagel with cream cheese (for June who was already in need of a second breakfast) before returning home via a non-boardwalk route, as much as that pained me.

At home June wanted to stay behind and act out medical dramas with Grandmom while Noah and I went to the beach. On the way I told him, “I’m glad you decided to come.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I always enjoy your company,’ I said.

“You do?”

“I do.”

“I thought so,” he said cheerfully.

We waded into the water together but the waves were breaking too close to shore so it was too rough at the depth where he’d normally play, plus the water was full of swirling sand and tiny pebbles so that the waves were really kind of unpleasant. I tried to coax him deeper into the water where the waves would be gentler and less gritty, but he wouldn’t come. So he went back to the shore to pile wet sand on his legs again while I swam. The waves were unsatisfying, so I floated on my back, feeling the coolness of the water around me and the warmth of the sun on my face. With my ears underwater the shouts of nearby swimmers were softer and the soothing sounds of the waves were more audible.

After fifteen minutes or so, I joined Noah on the sand and helped him bury the parts of his legs he couldn’t reach. Every so often the water rushed over him and washed away our work. Rebuilding it was a pleasant, mindless sort of task. A few times I asked him if he was comfortable—did he have too much sand in his suit, was the sand too heavy on his legs where it had eroded away under his calf and left it unsupported? He answered he was fine. We did this until it was time for lunch.

After lunch we read Harry Potter on the porch while June napped and we watched as for the second day in a row Mom set out for the beach around three, only to come right back because it had started to rain. When June woke, we returned to Funland for the third time in three days, where we met up with the Ground Beetle and her family (which we’d planned—I knew they were staying in nearby Lewes) and with the Field Mouse and his family (which was a happy accident). The Beetle and the Mouse have younger brothers so at one point there were five Purple School students or alumni riding in a row on the motorcycles. June and the Beetle were so happy to see each other they did not stop talking the entire time they were together. When they rode the carousel, they named their horses. The Beetle presented June with a small seashell with June’s name written on it in marker. The Beetle has been moving steadily up the wait list for the Spanish immersion program at June’s elementary school. Her parents are hoping she will get in sometime this school year. We do, too.

Noah had originally decided against another trip to Funland but he changed his mind so Mom brought him. He was rewarded with clear skies and working rides. He rode the Freefall twice and the Paratroopers once.

After Funland we went out to dinner. We intended to go out for Mexican but there was a 35-45 minute wait so we went looking for other options and ended up at a café where we ate crepes (me and Noah), grilled cheese (June) and fajitas (Mom). I tried to call the Mexican place to cancel our table, but the #7 on my phone was malfunctioning and there was a 7 in the number so I couldn’t call. We had some downtime waiting for our food so we called Beth. Noah had the brilliant idea of having her call the restaurant to cancel our seating. Dinner was followed by frozen custard for the womenfolk and a chocolate-dipped frozen banana for Noah. We at them on the beach while admiring the sunset. June and I waded too deep into the water (at her continual urging to go “a little deeper”). On the way home, June, in a sleeveless dress, sopping wet to the waist and having just eaten a frozen custard, was freezing. (It had been not just rainy but cool all week.) We hurried the kids home and off to bed and our beach week was half over.

Wednesday
Wednesday was another sunny morning and I had good news in my email. Beth, who had been planning to drive out on Friday evening, now thought she might be able to come Thursday night instead. This was exciting news.

Mom took the kids to Jungle Jim’s water park (http://www.funatjunglejims.com/) and I had a few hours of long-awaited alone time. Thanks, Mom! I puttered around the house a bit, finishing the breakfast dishes and then set off on some errands. We needed sun block and while I was along a commercial stretch I ended buying a caramel latte and a secret stash of chocolate crabs for myself and a t-shirt for June. I was drawn to it right away when I saw it in the store window. It’s pink with a skull-and-crossbones wearing a heart-shaped eye patch and a bow on top of the skull. It says “Pirate Girl.”

Next it was time for the beach. I decided to stay near the food establishments on the boardwalk so I could have lunch. It was more crowded than our regular stretch of beach, but I found a place for my towel. I swam and read a few chapters of the Agatha Christie novel I started at Chadd’s Ford (and hadn’t picked up since then). I watched dolphins and swam again. Around 12:45, I went up to the boardwalk and stood in an extremely slow-moving line for fried clams for ten minutes before giving up and getting fries elsewhere. Then I headed back to the house, where Mom and the kids had just returned. Mom said the kids liked the river ride best and did it six or seven times. June went with Mom first and then alone. This was not exactly on purpose as they got separated. June found this a very satisfactory outcome, but Mom was more than a little scared by the experience.

June’s nap started later than usual so I had to wake her around 3:40. Mom was at the beach for the first time and we were supposed to meet her there but neither of the kids felt like going so I decided to get a jump on dinner. I made a pasta sauce from fresh tomatoes, garlic, Portobello mushrooms, basil (from our garden), and black olives. Then I told June she had to go to the beach (we left Noah to practice his drums and read) and we left.

Once we were there, June made a beeline for the water and was soon jumping up and down in the water yelling, “I love the beach! I love the beach!” After fifteen minutes the lifeguard blew the five o’ clock whistle, meaning everyone had to get out of the water while they go off duty. On our way out of the water, June and I spied an enormous sand sculpture of a lobster we’d somehow missed on our way into the water. She went right to work building her own miniature replica while I went back into the water. The waves were not big (there were no big waves all week, alas) but they were rolling in a pleasant rhythm out beyond the breakers so I stayed there. As I bobbed in the water, I could see Mom in her chair and June huddled over her sand creation and the big lobster and a big sand castle that ascended in a spiral pattern and the iconic orange Dolles sign far down the boardwalk. I had to wrench myself away to go home for dinner.

I wanted to finish dinner in time for another boardwalk jaunt because Noah had decided early in the week that this was the year he was going to try to Haunted Mansion and we hadn’t yet been to Funland in the evening when it’s open. As it happened, we didn’t get there until 7:15, which was later than I’d hoped (though we had a nice walk, seeing both a rabbit and more dolphins). By 7:20 I’d purchased tickets and Noah and I were in line. My original plan was to take a test ride by myself because Noah had a really bad experience in a haunted house when he was seven (see my 11/05/08 post) but when I saw the line, I knew we’d have to take the plunge together. Based on the ages of the kids in line (many younger than Noah and a few not much older than June) I thought it would be fine. And it was. Noah was keyed up throughout the entire forty-minute wait, but in a happy way. He kept noting our progress through the line and pointing our details on the exterior (a vulture I’d missed, a severed arm over the sign that says to keep your arms in the car) and when were seated, he said, “We’re really going in the Haunted Mansion!”

It was quite tame. There were a great many skeletons popping out at you—the one that came out of the picture frame actually startled me—Frankenstein’s monster, and some big spiders, but no gore. I kept my hand resting lightly on his thigh, but he never took it. Afterward he said it was “nice,” which I thought was a funny description of a haunted house, but it was nice, scary enough to make him feel brave, but not traumatized, which is after all what we want from scary things.

We tried to call Beth from the boardwalk so he could tell her all about it but now my phone was inserting random 7s into any number I tried to dial, so I had to write her an email about it when we got home.

Thursday
Thursday morning I took the kids for a walk on the boardwalk and down Rehoboth Avenue to get Noah his annual t-shirt from the T-shirt Factory. I knew it would take him a long time to select a shirt and a design to have applied to it, given the sheer number of choices, so to keep June occupied (and because we’d left her backpack full of toys at home) I let her pick one toy. I thought she’d go for the set of four plastic mermaids with different colored hair (pink, purple, red and blue) and a tiny brush and comb, but she picked a fuchsia and white striped stuffed rodent of an undetermined species. (June thought it was a squirrel.) She named it Fruity. Finally Noah selected a design of two bare footprints and the words, “Rehoboth Beach, Delaware” and had them applied to a white t-shirt. We celebrated a successful shopping trip with a café con leche, two chocolate milks, a muffin and a bagel at Café a GoGo, where the coffee is heavenly but where I normally won’t even take the kids because we have gotten too many dark looks from the stern Mexican owner when they’ve been too boisterous. But they had been well behaved all week so I chanced it. They sat down immediately, gave me their orders and wouldn’t even come to the counter to look at the pastries because they were a bit intimidated by previous experience.

We went home, got changed and headed to the beach. After playing in the water, we built a pool for June that filled with water whenever a big wave rolled up on the shore. I decorated the back wall with dribble castles. It was quite an elaborate production.

After nap and Harry Potter, I made a tostada filling out of zucchini, yellow squash and tomatoes for dinner and we all joined Mom at the beach. It was the first time all four of us had been down there at the same time. The kids and I played in the water until June decided she wanted to look for crabs, shells and pebbles with Grandmom. They found no crabs and not a whole lot of shells but a lot of pretty pebbles, which June collected in a pail to decorate her sandbox at home. Noah was befriended by a younger boy who attached himself to him. I couldn’t tell if Noah wanted the attention or not. He seemed a bit puzzled as to why the boy was talking to him at first but then he relaxed and they played in the waves together. With both kids occupied I was free to take a brief swim. Coming out of the water, I noticed another sand sculpture, this one a swordfish.

We went home, had dinner and then went out for ice cream. On the way we stopped at a shop on the boardwalk that sold the same mermaid set June saw in the t-shirt shop. She’d had buyers’ remorse about the stuffed animal because she “really, really” wanted the mermaids now. I suggested she use her own money. June’s been getting an allowance since she turned five in March but she had yet to spend any of it. I don’t think she realized she could. And I still don’t think she gets it because even after I purchased the mermaids, saying she could pay me back at home, she kept asking why I got them when I said she could only have one toy.

On the way home we walked on the beach. We admired elaborate sand castles and the kids jumped into a big pit someone had dug and climbed on the lifeguards’ chair. Noah leapt off it and after some consideration, June did too. It was a big jump for her and she was pleased with herself.

We got home to an email from Beth saying she was on her way, so I stayed up late (for me), talking to Mom and waiting for Beth. She arrived just before eleven and we had a lot of catching up to do so we’d only just fallen asleep around midnight when there was a thump from the other side of the big attic bedroom. We thought it was June because she’d been sleeping horizontally across the bed with her legs hanging over the side, but it was Noah. I found him sitting on the floor, so disoriented he didn’t know what to do so I helped him back into bed. In the morning he had no memory of this.

Friday
At one a.m. I gave up trying to sleep in the upstairs double bed with Beth (we’re used to sleeping in a queen) and went downstairs to my bedroom. I heard movement upstairs at 6:30 and by 7:00, the kids were piled in bed with Beth and I was sitting on the edge of the bed as Beth combed mermaid hair and we planned out our last full day at the beach. She’d work in the morning, and in the afternoon, we’d make a final trip to Funland (where the kids would use up the last of the 88 tickets we bought over the course of the week and Noah would ride the Freefall with Beth watching) and we’d have pizza at Grotto’s. Beth couldn’t stop smiling at us. It was good to have her back. She’s the one that I want with me, rain or shine.

My Father’s Office

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A guest blog entry by Beth.

My father died unexpectedly earlier this month. There is so much to say about his life and the complex feelings that his death brings that it is impossible to say it. My brother’s eulogy was just about right: He wasn’t the best dad and he wasn’t the worst dad. He was our dad. We will miss him.

My father and his work were somewhat inseparable. He practiced law with the same firm for over 40 years. He would bring home stacks of used paper so we could draw on the blank sides. Sometimes he’d bring home his Dictaphone with its state-of-the-art cassette tape technology and let my brother and me record our voices. It was awesome when he did that.

When I arrived in my home town after learning of dad’s death, I had a strong urge to see his office. He’d sometimes take my brother or me in with him on a Saturday when we were young and I loved going there. I hadn’t been there for ages. I finally had time to go the day after the memorial service.

The law library, with its smell of old books and tobacco, was now a conference room but otherwise not much about the building had changed. Dad’s actual office space had moved a few times over the years, from an upstairs room to the first floor then closer to the front of the building. One of his law partners showed us into his office, which was filled with the things you’d expect to see if someone left work thinking they’d be back the next day – a table piled with files and maps of a local mine he was working with, a jacket draped over a chair, umbrellas in the closet.

There were two things there I was particularly glad to see. The first was a letter opener, shaped like a sword, that rested in a crystalline glass base, Excalibur-like. I was fascinated by it as a child, watching dad as he sliced open the mail we had picked up from the firm’s post office box, thinking it sharp and dangerous and, perhaps, a little magical.

The other item was a clock, an odd clock, really, though it had never seemed odd to me. It was made of a square wooden plaque with coins embedded in it to mark the hours. The coins were from 1964, two years before I was born and the last year that U.S. dimes, quarters and half dollars were made primarily of silver.

My brother and I spent several hours in dad’s office that afternoon as his colleague went through my father’s personal effects so we could decide what to do with them. He’d gone to law school with dad and was instrumental in bringing him to the firm. I think it was hard for him to believe that my father was suddenly no longer there.

Some things we looked at were mundane, like car repair receipts for vehicles dad hadn’t owned for years. Some came with great stories, like the certificate of admission to the bar of the Supreme Court that he had obtained early in his career when he had a conscientious objector case that might have gone that far (though it ultimately didn’t). Some were mysterious, like the dozens of empty cigarette lighters that he kept in drawers at the office and at the house. They were bits and pieces of my dad’s life but, like my words, the picture they create is incomplete.

Dad’s clock is now in my office. My kids will see it there when they come in with me on a snow day or a weekend. It’s not always easy or convenient to bring them to work with me. But when they ask, I often say yes, remembering how special it felt whenever I got a glimpse of my dad’s work world, where he spent so many hours, with his clock of silver and the sword in the stone.

Anniversaries, Part 2

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When my father died it was like a whole library
Had burned down. World without end remember me.

From “World Without End” by Laurie Anderson

This is a picture of my father and me at a block party in Brooklyn during the summer of 1971 or 1972. I was four or five. He was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I think he looks a little like Cat Stevens and that I look a lot like a certain almost-five year old I know. I have a foggy memory of this party. I remember running around in the street with my friend, a neighbor boy whose father took the picture (and sent it to me last summer) and I remember thinking it was very funny that we were all in the middle of the street because under normal circumstances that’s exactly where your parents are always telling you not to be when you are a small child. It felt delightfully transgressive. I also remember drinking a can of grape soda and just being able to handle the full can by myself and feeling very grown up holding it. Undoubtedly if my father was alive and I could ask him what he remembered about this party, he would have an entirely different set of associations. I wish I knew what they were.

Our memories of the dead are how they live on, but those memories are so frustratingly partial and particular to our own point of view. I asked Noah what he remembered about Dad the other day and he said, “Going out to dinner.” It wasn’t a surprising response. Dad loved good food and he loved going out to eat. I asked Noah whether he remembered going out to eat in New York, when we were visiting Dad or in Maryland, when he was visiting us. He said in New York, which made sense because that was the last time Noah saw Dad, in New York when Noah was six and a half. The last time Dad came to see us was in May 2006, when Noah was five and Dad and my stepmother Ann had come to meet the new granddaughter.

The second picture is from that visit. It was taken in Downtown Silver Spring. I don’t remember precisely what we were doing there. It’s possible we went to get a picture of the silver turtle. There were turtle statues all over suburban Maryland that spring and summer as a public art project. (The terrapin is the mascot of the University of Maryland.) Noah loved them and we took his photograph with around twenty of them. So maybe we went to get the picture, but more likely we were going out to eat and we happened upon it.

I like these pictures together not only because Noah and I are close to the same age in them, but because they were taken in my father’s twenties and sixties, the bookends of his adult life. So much happened in between: most of my life and my sister’s, much of his first and second marriages, the births of his two grandchildren, his whole tenure at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time and its associated magazines and the website Campaign Desk. That list of relationships and jobs is one way to fill in the middle. Another is to consider how even though he’s gone, in the year since his death there has been a lot in our everyday life that would be familiar to him:

He loved old houses.

And ice cream.

And vacationing at the beach.

And walking in the woods.

He was funny.

And well read.

For a while I was dreading today, the first anniversary of his death, and as it got closer I found I was impatient for it to come, so I could get past it. But a few days ago I decided I could try to make the day a testament to him. Beth joked we should go to the track because that was one of my father’s passions and I actually did some research and found that Laurel Park (http://www.laurelpark.com/) is open this time of year, but on thinking it over I decided an experience that would be new for the kids and possibly over-stimulating wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a quiet, reflexive day. I thought it should include reading, writing, some alone time for me, coffee,chocolate and a meal out. So that’s what we did.

In the morning I read to both kids (nothing unusual there) and I took a solitary walk by Long Branch creek. We’ve had an unusually cold week and the creek is covered in places with a layer of ice that looks a half-inch thick. The path was snowy and there were brown leaves on the ground. It was suitable locale for elegiac thoughts. It also reminded me of the landscape around the vacation cottage Dad and Ann had on French Creek in Chester County, Pennsylvania when I was in my teens and twenties. From there I went to Starbucks and read the Washington Post magazine while I sipped my latte. (The barista wanted to know where my “little one” was. I am so seldom out and about without her.) We had lunch at Plato’s Diner (http://www.platosdiner.com/) and I got a big slice of chocolate cake for dessert. After lunch, I finished writing this.

I am going to give my sister Sara the last word in this post, or close to it. This is an excerpt from eulogy she gave at his memorial service in April. It was in the section about how he showed his love for us:

You could tell he loved us by his use of pet names. He called me princess. He called my sister angel. I don’t think he ever knew how special that made us feel.

You could tell by the ridiculous little jig he used to perform for Steph and me every other weekend after not having seen us for two weeks. As we descended from the train into the lobby of 30th Street Station, he’d do a funny little dance where he’d shuffle his feet and occasionally kick out his leg, maintaining a completely serious look on his face. When we’d cry “Dad!” in mock embarrassment, he’d look puzzled, and say “What? It’s my happy-to-see-you dance.”

You could tell by the masterful rainbow he painted on the wall of the bedroom that I shared with Steph. As any child knows, you don’t paint a rainbow on a wall for someone unless you love them very, very much.

We loved him, too. And we remember him, each in our own partial and particular way, but no less for that.

Fear Not

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Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

Luke 2:10

On Saturday afternoon, around 3:45, Beth and I were walking along the boardwalk; Noah and June raced ahead. Every now and then he would tug on her arm or grab her coat to slow her down, telling her she couldn’t go inside Santa’s house until the adults caught up with them.

“Let go of her hood,” I yelled as Beth yelled almost identical words. It’s not like she’d actually go inside without any of us, we joked to each other. June’s always been shy around Santa. In years past it has taken all the courage she can muster to walk into the little house with Noah at her side and stand in Santa’s general proximity while Noah relays her requests. We weren’t expecting anything different this year.

But before we got to the house, a woman dressed as an elf peered around the corner and asked if it was okay for the kids to come in. We indicated it was and hurried up a little.

When we got to the doorway, June was already sitting on Santa’s lap and he was asking her what she wanted for Christmas. She had her answer all ready: “A princess book and a princess doll.” Santa told her to go to bed early on Christmas Eve so he would have time to deliver her gifts. We barely had time to snap a picture before it was Noah’s turn. As the kids came out, admiring their flashing necklaces–hers was in the shape of a stocking and his was a Christmas tree- Beth and kept looking at each other and exclaiming over June’s unexpected bravery.

I’ve been somewhat afraid of Christmas this year, or rather I’ve been afraid of the emotions it might stir up, as my father died in mid-January last year and my last visit to him started on the day after Christmas. But so far, it hasn’t been too bad. I mean, I’m thinking about him a lot, and I even had a dream recently about going to visit him but being unable to find him because I was supposed to meet him at his new office, which was on a street with completely random street numbers. But Christmas music and decorations and sweets seem the same as ever, more comforting than sad. When I am hit with sadness it comes unexpectedly. A few weeks ago the kids and I went to a marionette show at a nearby community college with the Toad and her mother. One of the puppeteers looked a bit like my father. It wasn’t even a very close resemblance, but it was still hard to watch him up there on stage. I think grief is like that–you don’t get to decide or even predict when it will come to you. So I’ve realized it does me no good to go in fear of eggnog lattes or Christmas carols.

And the Christmas story itself is, at least in part, about overcoming fear. How would the shepherds have felt, seeing the angels swoop down on their field at night? How would Mary have received the news about her impending unwed motherhood? I imagine they all would have been sore afraid indeed, at least at first.

After we left Santa, we did some Christmas shopping (this being the ostensible reason for our annual December weekend in Rehoboth—but if you know me at all you know the real reason). Beth and I split up and bought many of June’s Christmas gifts right under her nose, including a princess book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Bag_Princess) and a princess doll. I will not say what, if anything, we bought for Noah because he reads my blog now. Sorry, Noah Bear.

Then we headed to Grotto’s to order a pizza to take back to our hotel room. June had slept poorly the night before and then skipped her nap that afternoon and she was clearly exhausted so our evening plan was pizza and a movie in the room. I was expecting her to conk out on the bed pretty early in the feature presentation so we bathed both kids and got them into their pajamas before starting the movie.

We were watching Christmas Is Here Again (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUpxgaH4F4g&feature=related), which is one of the stranger Christmas films I’ve ever seen. We found it at a video store two Christmases ago and it’s become one of the movies in our regular Christmas rotation. It’s a rather dark tale about an orphan girl who sets out to find Santa’s stolen sack, which has been missing for over thirty years and without which Christmas can no longer celebrated. The girl is accompanied by an elf, a baby reindeer, a polar bear and a fox, one of whom is a double agent, but I won’t give away that part. They have to journey down into the mines of the devilish villain where child slaves toil to extract coal and precious stones. And it goes on like that. The villain, Crad, is very creepy, a shrouded fellow with crooked teeth and red eyes. He scares the pants off June every time. In fact, sometimes Noah only has to sing “I stole Santa’s sack/The sack he carried on his back./I stole Santa’s sack/And I’ll never give it back!” to send June running out of the room.

Nevertheless, she insists on watching this movie, and we let her. I struggle a lot with what’s too scary for the kids to watch, especially June because she’s both younger and more sensitive to on-screen scariness than Noah was at her age. (Interestingly, some of the books that spooked him when he was a preschooler do nothing for her.) But if it’s rated G, I will usually let her watch it, as long as we’re not at a movie theater where the screens are bigger and her habit of running of the room at the scary parts would be more inconvenient for everyone involved.

And she did run out of the room at least twice, even though she declared several times before we started watching that “This is not a scary movie for me.” I accompanied her to the bathroom and we waited for her to be ready to come back. After a while she decided she could just hide under the covers whenever Crad came on screen, and that’s what she did. Much to my surprise, she did not fall asleep during the hour and fifteen minute film, though when I put her to bed soon after, she fell asleep quickly and slept an impressive ten fours and forty minutes (from 8:05 to 6:45). She may not have made it through the entire movie without hiding, but some year she will. She’d already overcome one long-standing fear and that’s plenty for one day.

Once June was asleep, I took Noah down to the hotel lobby where we could read and then I brought him back up and put him to bed at 8:45. Beth had gone to bed herself and seemed to be asleep. I sat on the bathroom floor with the light on and read for twenty minutes until Noah was asleep and then I got into my warm socks, rubber boots, coat and woolen scarf. It was raining out but it’s not every evening I have the chance to walk on the beach and I’m not afraid of a little rain.

Everything We Have

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At Thanksgiving dinner my mom asked everyone to go around the table and say what made us feel thankful. Noah said computers, being at his new school, and “Mommy and Beth.” June’s answer was simpler: “Everything I have,” she said. When Mom pressed her for specifics she said her toys, but I liked her first answer better.

We drove to my mom and stepfather’s house on Thanksgiving so on that day we pretty much traveled and ate and went to bed. Friday was an eventful, or in June’s words “a giant day.” Beth and the kids and I drove out to the Main Line, where we lived when I was in high school, and had lunch at Hymie’s deli (http://www.hymies.com/hymiesMarion.html), an important hangout spot during my eleventh grade year and the establishment where I learned to appreciate cheese fries. It also has a “World Famous Pickle Bar” and given that pickles are one of June’s favorite foods, it seemed like a natural choice. In fact, I wondered why I had never suggested we go before. We didn’t count on the Black Friday lunch crowds, however, and had to wait a half hour for a table in a crowded waiting area. Service was fast after that, though, and from our first course of pickles to the black and white cookies and poppy seed hamantash we picked up for later in the carryout bakery corner, everyone was satisfied. (And yes, I did have cheese fries, with a salad.) As we left the restaurant, I thought I saw snowflakes swirling in the wind, but no one else did.

We came home and June and I napped. (She’d been up during the night and awakened for the day at 5:45 so we were both done in.) While we slept, Mom and Beth and Noah played Monopoly. When I woke June at close to four and carried her half-asleep and scowling downstairs, Mom was nearly bankrupt, Beth was rolling in money and properties, and Noah was somewhere in the middle. They suspended the game so we could leave for the Christmas light show (http://www.wanamakerorgan.com/xmas.php) at the Wannamaker’s building, which now houses a Macy’s. This show is a Philadelphia tradition I find somewhat daunting to describe, but imagine yourself seated on a red carpet in an atrium, craning your neck to look upward at a screen, several stories high, consisting of light bulbs (an enormous Lite-Brite, if you will) with a big lighted Christmas tree and an ornate organ in front of it. As the organ plays Christmas music and Julie Andrews’ recorded voice narrates, the lights come on in different patterns to depict scenes from The Nutcracker, Frosty the Snowman, etc. Noah liked it, but June loved it. She was rapt the whole time, a few times laughing out loud with pleasure. She must be exactly the right age to receive it all with wonder and delight.

From here, we proceeded to the Dickens Christmas village on the third floor of Macy’s (http://philadelphia.about.com/od/photo_galleries/ig/dickens_village/). You walk through a winding passageway lined with little houses and outdoor scenes from A Christmas Carol. The figures were mechanized mannequins of the sort one used to see in department store display windows at Christmastime, about half life-size. The first one stood at a podium reading the opening passage of the novella. On the walls were plaques with more passages, at least one for each scene. Some of the mannequins moved and some spoke. We made our way through the display very slowly because Noah was reading all the text. (His interest made me wonder if we could read this book together sometime next month.) Noah’s slow progress wasn’t much of a problem because June wanted to linger in some rooms. She loved the ghost of Jacob Marley and concluded it was a leftover Halloween decoration. When we encountered the ghost of Christmas Future, however, she exclaimed, “Too scary! Too scary!” and fled the room. A few minutes later, though, she was tugging on my hand, wanting to go back, so we did.

After we’d had our fill of Dickens we went out for a very tasty dinner at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant and got home well past the kids’ bedtime. Beth says I did a very good job pretending not be panicking about how late we were out.

The next morning Mom, Beth and Noah finished their Monopoly game. (As expected, Beth won.) In the afternoon we met up with a friend of mine from high school at the Tyler Arboretum in Media (http://www.tylerarboretum.org/). What I haven’t mentioned up to now is that my twenty-fifth high school reunion was Friday night and I skipped it. I’ve actually never been to any of my high school reunions. In fact, until recently I wasn’t even sure if my high school had them—I have Facebook to thank for learning it does. Now that I knew, it felt strange to know it was happening, so close, and I wasn’t there. High school was not a very good time for me, especially the first two years and a lot of the friends I did make when I was in eleventh grade were seniors so there didn’t seem to be much point in going. Facebook has brought me back in touch with a lot of acquaintances from my class and I have gotten to know a few of them better than I did back in the day, which has been rewarding. Maybe in another five years I’ll be up for mingling with them in person, but this year it just seemed too overwhelming.

I did want to make an effort to reconnect, though, so I contacted two friends from the class ahead of mine, John, who still lives in the area and Pam, who is back for a year. Only John was free. We decided to meet at the arboretum so the kids (his two and our two) could run around while the adults talked. What we didn’t know and what made the place magical was that there was a series of tree houses and child-sized cottages scattered along the path. Many had plaques explaining what kind of creatures lived there (fairies, pixies, wizards, green men, etc.). There was a sand sculpture of an ogre leaning against a castle with pumpkins at his feet, slowly eroding away. There was a meadow maze, its grass brown but still mowed into shape with several huge straw people in the center. I said it looked like something people who were planning on making a sacrifice to the harvest gods might make. There was a door set into a hill with the question “What Lies Beneath?” posted. Visitors were invited to write a story about it and submit it to the arboretum’s web site. Some houses were too small to enter, but the kids clambered up every ladder they saw and explored every kid-sized building. (June got stuck in one particularly tall tree house when she lost her nerve about coming back down the ladder so John went up and carried her down.)

I think what the kids liked best, though, was the amphitheater. There was a dress-up area with a costume bin and pretty soon John’s nine-year-old daughter and Noah and June were putting on a show for the grownups and John’s just turned four-year-old son, who was too shy to perform. June was a fairy who had gotten lost, John’s daughter was a knight and Noah started off as a wizard but suffered an allergic reaction that turned him into an alligator. Attempts to kill the alligator failed so the knight adopted it instead and then they helped the fairy find her way home. It was a cloudy, chilly day and we had the arboretum nearly to ourselves. It was like our own enchanted kingdom.

As we walked through the woods and fields with the kids racing ahead to find out what came next, the four grownups talked. The feeling was friendly and relaxed; conversation felt easy. John was just as I remembered him, except decades older and with a family if that makes sense. We agreed we should get together again. About an hour into the visit, around 4:40, we told the kids we needed to turn around because the gates closed at 5:00 and as we’d been walking in a circuitous path we weren’t sure how far we were from the exit. The two older kids wanted to keep going, because we hadn’t seen everything, but we persuaded them they didn’t want to get locked into the arboretum for the night (it really was quite cold).

As it turned out the gates did shut while we were still in the parking lot but they’re motion-activated from the inside, so we were able to drive out. (When Beth told this story to my mother and stepfather over pizza that night she said she rammed the car through the gate and my mom almost believed her.)

Sunday we drove home, stopping at the Starbucks closest to my mom’s house for the traditional first holiday drinks of the season. I got an eggnog latte; Beth got gingerbread. We listened to The Austere Academy (Series of Unfortunate Events #5) on the way home. I was glad June slept through a good bit of it, as it’s not really age-appropriate.

Today we’re back in our regular routine–Beth went to work; the kids went to school. Beth was unenthused about going back to her office and I can’t blame her, but I’ve been happy today and full of thankfulness for time with my family and an old friend met anew and deli food and low-tech light displays and Charles Dickens and eggnog lattes and the timeless story of everything we have.

Days of the Dead

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Halloween has come and gone. Today is the Day of the Dead, and I am thinking more about the dead than usual, for obvious reasons. I’m wondering if Halloween will be the last of the fall and winter holidays I really enjoy this year since the closer we get to winter, the more I feel my grief for my father returning. My mom and I were talking about this on Saturday. I told her how I feel it approaching, a presentiment of sorrow.

She’d come to visit for the weekend. When she arrived on Saturday afternoon, Beth, Noah and June were at a potluck for the two fourth-grade gifted classes at his school so Mom and I went to Capital Cheesecake (http://www.capitalcitycheesecakes.com/) where she had lunch and I had iced tea and a mini pumpkin cheesecake. We got to have a more leisurely conversation than is usually possible with the kids vying for her attention. She brought me up to date on relatives and told me about the European river tour she and my stepfather are planning. I told her it was good she was doing the things she wanted to do. I was thinking of my father, who surely had things he wanted to do before cancer took him so ferociously and so suddenly last winter.

Mom and I came back to the house and we got the kids into their costumes for the Halloween parade. I thought June would protest against having to wear leggings and a long-sleeve t-shirt under her sleeveless Tiana gown, plus a cardigan over it, but she didn’t. Mom snapped pictures of Tiana and the question mark and we were off.

As we had last year, we ran into the White-Tailed Deer, who was dressed like a witch, and we marched with her in the first short loop of the parade, when the judging takes place. I took a picture of the two girls together and the Deer’s mom said she could tell this was going to be a Halloween tradition for them. There was a big turnout from June’s class. Over the course of the evening we also saw the Red Fox (dressed as a bat), the Racoon (dressed very creatively as a S’more) and the Field Cricket (dressed as a police officer). This last one was no surprise as there were several months last year when the Cricket came to school dressed as a police officer every day. He even had a set of handcuffs he wore at his waist. I used to joke it was like going to preschool with the Village People. This year his mom got into the spirit and was also dressed as a police officer and his baby sister was a Hell’s Angel.

After the 3-4 year olds had marched the judging route but before the 8-10 year olds did, June announced, “I have to go potty,” so we ducked into a nearby video store. June’s doing really well on the potty recently. As of about a week and a half ago, she’s completely trained for pee. She’s still having a lot of the other kind of accident, but we are using so few diapers, I thought it made sense to use the few cloth diapers we bought for night use when Noah was at this stage, wash them myself and cancel the service. So today, I did just that.

Along the long part of the route, from downtown to the elementary school where the party is held, other marchers and people on the sidelines kept calling out to Noah, saying either, “What’s the question?” or “What’s the answer?” My favorite question, though, came from the mom of one of his old nursery school classmates: “Are you questioning authority?” The reasoning behind his costume, by the way, is that the unknown is the scariest thing. The question mark is “the scariest punctuation,” he told us earnestly.

There was a vivid, deep pink sunset as we approached the school. Once inside, we ate cookies and drank apple juice and listened to Noah’s favorite local band, The Grandsons (http://www.grandsons.com/gigs/), play live. He saw them at the folk festival in September and liked them so much that Beth bought their CD. We talked to more people we knew and finally, the kids collected their goody bags and we got into the car to drive home.

When June came into our room at 5:55 a.m. the next morning I thought she was too excited about it being Halloween to sleep, as she usually sleeps until 6:30 or later. I sent her back to her room, but she was back at 6:05 and I let her crawl into bed with us. She didn’t go back to sleep and neither did I, what with all the tossing and turning, but she was quiet at least. When Beth woke around seven, and said, “Happy Halloween!” June sucked in her breath and exclaimed, “It’s Halloween!” So, I guess I was wrong about the reason for the early wake-up.

June wanted to go trick-or-treating right away, but Beth explained she had to wait until dark or people would not be ready with their candy. This argument seemed to work, as it had about a week ago when June said she had “made a plan” to be “the Halloween maker” so she could decide for herself when Halloween would be. The specter of closed doors and empty candy bowls was effective in putting the kibosh on that plan.

June’s impatience was soon forgotten, though, because she had Grandmom’s undivided attention for much of the morning. They played out in the backyard—tag, soccer, imaginative games about going to the beach and berry-picking. June made a bouquet of fall leaves and brought it inside. Then Mom took both kids to the playground (after a long and convoluted negotiation about which playground). I love grandmother visits.

Sunday afternoon, after Mom had left, we ate popcorn as we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and carved replacement pumpkins. We’d had unusually warm weather the past week, with highs in the seventies three days, and one by one, our pumpkins succumbed to mold and began to collapse. When I carried the last of them out to the compost on the afternoon of Halloween, they were soft and dripping and a beetle even scuttled out of one of them when I lifted it. We couldn’t be without jack-o-lanterns on Halloween, so Beth bought pumpkins we made two more. June wanted a cat, and Noah did a face. He designed it himself. Instead of carving out the eyes, he carved the outline of them. “Instead of carving the eyes out, I carved them in!” he declared. June reminded everyone that when it got dark and “creepy” out (here she held out her hands and wiggled her fingers), it would be time for trick-or-treating. She mentioned this in case anyone was tempted to leave before then, I suppose.

Beth made chili for the grownups’ dinner and noodles and broccoli and cheese for the kids and then we put the finishing touches on our porch and yard. Beth lit the pumpkins, and then placed another votive candle in front of the cement gargoyle to illuminate it. She turned on the light in the skull of the skeleton and hung the ghost lights over the door and got the coffin-fog machine running. Noah set the cawing, red-eyed raven on the porch column opposite the gargoyle and June filled the Frankenstein’s monster head bowl with candy.

Finally, it was time to go. June was in her costume in no time, and kept haranguing Noah to get into his. Since I’ve gone out trick or treating with the kids the past couple years, I offered to stay home and give out candy instead so Beth could go. I was busier re-lighting candles and refilling the fog machine with water than handing out treats. We got about a half dozen groups over the course of the evening, but most of them came after the kids returned at 8:00. We rarely get big crowds coming to the door, but we’re always prepared.

It’s a good thing, too. As we walked through our neighborhood this week, on our way to school or the library or drama class, June would appraise each house. “Those people are ready for Halloween,” she would say approvingly at the more decorated ones. “Those people are not ready for Halloween,” she’d declare scornfully at the undecorated ones. If there was some token effort, say an uncarved pumpkin or a wreath of fall leaves, she’d say, “Those people are almost ready for Halloween” in the tone of one attempting to be generous and encouraging. Lucky for us, we were among the ready.

Beth and the kids got back after an hour of trick-or-treating. They covered more ground than they usually do, including our block and two nearby streets that intersect it. Several people remembered Noah, commenting on his creativity with costumes. (Some even recalled his rain cloud costume of three years ago.) Beth said June skipped along the sidewalk between each house saying, ‘I’m trick-or-treating!” or “Let’s go to the next house!” At the houses where people opened the door but had no candy, she exclaimed loudly, “I don’t know that could have happened!” At one house they told Noah to take two candies and then told June to take three because she was “so cute.” Even our easy-going boy was annoyed by that, although he didn’t grumble until the door was closed. Beth said both kids were polite and said thank you at each house.

We let the kids choose three candies each to eat and got them off to bed. We continued to watch for trick-or-treaters and to check on the water level in the coffin and the flames on all of our candles until around 9:35, when we brought in the candy and called it a night.

Underneath the black turtleneck I wore on Halloween, I wore a t-shirt from a restaurant in Key West. It used to belong to my father. I’m not Mexican, so I don’t celebrate the Day of the Dead by visiting cemeteries or eating sugar skulls to honor my deceased relatives. I’m not a pagan or a Wiccan either. I don’t believe the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is any thinner in these few days when the lingering warmth of October slips away into November’s chill. Sometimes, though, I wish I did.