Category Archives: Flashbacks

Two! Four! Six! Eight!

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On Friday morning I flipped the calendar page to May. “Hey, it’s my birthday cake!” Noah said, looking at the picture. For Christmas Noah and Beth made me a calendar out of family photos using iPhoto. The picture for May is of Noah’s birthday cake from his fifth birthday. He was really into the Magic School Bus (http://www.scholastic.com/magicschoolbus/) books and videos back then and he was on the verge of starting kindergarten so it had a school bus on it. It was also the first year Noah expressed an opinion about the design of his cake, ushering Beth into the job of custom cake decorator. For Noah’s sixth birthday, she made a cloud cake (he was at the height of his meteorology phase then). On his seventh birthday it was a Club Penguin cake.

This year Noah put the theme of his birthday party up to a vote. He gave his guests two options: the human body or pirates. So in advance of invitations, I sent a save-the-date and please-vote-on-the-party-theme email to the parents of Noah’s guests. Pirates won by a large margin, though Noah had been hoping for human body. (He said he would vote only to break the tie if there was one.) I myself had a pirate chest birthday cake when I was ten so I suggested that to Noah. I was thinking it would be pretty easy—a rectangular cake with chocolate frosting and licorice bands across it and maybe a sprinkling of chocolate coins in gold foil. He was having none of it. He wanted his cake to look like a diamond, not only diamond-shaped, but also sparkly. Beth was a bit intimidated by the idea so she was glad when he changed his mind and settled on cupcakes with gold-colored frosting. They were to evoke gold coins. At one point he wanted her to carve faces into the frosting (he’d settled on some obscure nineteenth-century President—I can’t remember which one) but that idea fell by the wayside, much to Beth’s relief.

Like Noah, I’d been hoping for a human body victory. Who knows what kind of cake ideas he would have had for that one, but I’m not the birthday cake baker. I was thinking more of party activities. When Noah was in nursery school half his class was obsessed with pirates and it was all-pirates-all-the-time on the playground that year. I was often troubled by the violent nature of the play. I brainstormed with Noah about non-violent pirate games they could play at his party. (Is that an oxymoron? I think maybe it is.) He seemed most interested in a treasure hunt anyway so I was relieved about that.

Friday Beth stayed home from work to prepare for the party. She went out and bought black goody bags and a silver pen Noah could use to write his guests’ names on them. She got cardboard pirate hats and hooks for the guests to wear and pirate plates and napkins and a couple of skull-and-crossbones garlands for the fence and pirate chest-shaped containers of bubble soap with little pirate bubble wands. She even found a pirate-chest piñata. To fill the piñata she bought chocolate coins and gold Mardi-Gras beads. She also brought home blue cotton candy ice cream from Cold Stone (http://www.coldstonecreamery.com/), which Noah requested. The color was meant to suggest the ocean, Noah said.

After Noah got home from school, they baked the cupcakes. They were coconut, one of Noah’s favorite flavors. I don’t know if he had a tropical angle in mind or not. Beth was a little afraid his guests wouldn’t like them since a lot of kids don’t like coconut, but she went ahead and made them.

Meanwhile, I worked on an article for Sara, poured buckets of water onto the porch floor and swabbed the yellow-green film of pollen off of it, watched June and took her shopping at Now and Then so she could select a gift for Noah. She picked out a blue plastic fish, a small foam globe, and a candy necklace. “I would like one, too,” she said politely, so I bought two.

Friday night I let Noah open one present, a number eight t-shirt like June’s beloved number three shirt, in case he wanted to wear it at his party the next day. I also reminded him he does have a t-shirt with a dog dressed as a pirate on it that would also be appropriate for the occasion. In the end he decided on one of his Hawaiian shirts instead. He often wears these to spring and summer parties. (In fact when he was five he impressed my mom by telling her he liked Hawaiian shirts because they were “festive.”)

Saturday morning and early afternoon Beth and I cleaned house. I washed the dirt of the picnic table and chairs and Beth frosted the cupcakes and sprayed yellow coloring mist on them. (June was particularly interested in this part of the operation.) Beth hung the garlands and the piñata. Rain was forecast and it was overcast, but so far it had not rained. We crossed our fingers that it would hold off until five, the party’s ending time.

Noah stayed in pajamas for much of the day but when it was time to get dressed he decided the weather was too cool for his Hawaiian shirt. Much deliberation about which of his long-sleeved shirts was most pirate-like ensued. I suggested that his largest button-down shirt might create a rakish billowy effect. He paired it with jeans ripped out at one knee.

Sasha arrived at 2:55. Beth gave Noah and Sasha hats and hooks to play with. The hats kept falling off and were soon abandoned, but the hooks were a big hit. Within minutes of Sasha’s arrival, the two boys were dueling on the lawn. I considered my no-violent-play-at-the-pirate-party policy and almost immediately abandoned it as impossible to enforce. Even though it was intended as a duel, the way they had their hooks linked together made it look more like a dance. Or maybe that was just what I told myself.

The rest of the pirate lads and the one pirate lass arrived soon after Sasha did. Do any of you who are parents get Cookie magazine? It has this kids’ party feature with all menus and activities and everything planned out in fifteen-minute increments and all extremely organized. Have a look: (http://www.cookiemag.com/food/birthday_party. Our parties have never been remotely like these. After we took Noah’s guests on the D.C. Duck last year I thought that was it, our simple backyard parties were over, at least for Noah, but that’s exactly what Noah wanted this year: to invite five friends over (we told him he could have up to eight but he only wanted his close friends), to have a treasure hunt and a piñata and cupcakes and ice cream in the yard. Even with the complicated clues Noah wrote for the treasure hunt, the planned activities wouldn’t take even close to two hours so we let the pirates spend the first fifty minutes of the party tearing around the yard, leaping off the porch walls and staging intrigue. They divided into two teams of three and much to my relief, espionage turned out to be a bigger draw than battle. The pirates chased each other around the yard; they hid and spied on each other. Players occasionally switched teams and their new teammates had to decide if the new pirate was actually a double agent. I should have predicted this turn of events. Most of these kids are involved in a running spy game at recess. (Whenever I call it a game, Noah gets exasperated with me. “It’s not a game, Mommy” he will insist. “We’re really spies.”) We did put a stop to some swordplay with sticks. (You’re not really a parent until you’ve warned children about putting an eye out, right?) But overall, all Beth and I needed to do was watch and reassure June, who was a bit overwhelmed by the screaming horde of pirates tearing through her yard.

The piñata required a little more supervision. I asked Noah to let June have a turn and he agreed she could go first. Then he got the idea of going youngest to oldest and all the kids chimed in with their birthdays so they could figure out the order. They thought it was funny that the youngest of Noah’s friends was the second tallest and the oldest was the shortest. It took quite a few rounds to demolish the piñata, even though Sean and Maura both play baseball and have good swings. A container of bubble soap broke inside it and got the chocolate coins soapy. If you unwrapped the foil carefully it was possible to extract the candy soap-free, but not everyone was careful and some soap was consumed along with the chocolate. While Elias talked Beth into letting him taking home the smashed piñata for his collection of broken piñatas, the rest of the pirates sat on the porch and ate the booty until we called them to the treasure hunt. Noah had written a set of clues in the forms of riddles whose answers were colors. Colors corresponded to different areas in the house and yard, all given nautical names. The kitchen was the galley, the bathroom was the head, his room was the crew’s quarters, etc. As the group solved the riddles co-operatively they’d head off to room in question to find the next clue. The last clue led them to the study, where the gold coin/cupcakes were hidden.

Beth needn’t have worried about the cupcakes. Only one child didn’t care for coconut and the blue ice cream was a hit, too. Conversation around the picnic table centered on the how toxic the bubble soap might be and whether or not the pirates who ate the chocolate coins from the piñata might have been poisoned. Then Elias told a story, true, he insisted, about a butcher who killed homeless people and then sold them as meat. After he finished, there was a long considering silence and Maura said she didn’t think it was true. People would notice the disappearances, she said. People don’t care about the homeless, someone said. No, she said, she cared and if she did, others must, too. I knew I liked Maura. Noah followed up with a story from one of his ghost story books, about a set of old-fashioned cabin motor courts that had burned to the ground but re-appeared when travelers in need arrived.

As they finished eating, the pirates drifted away from the table until only Noah and June were still eating. (Peter was polite enough to stay until the end of Noah’s story.) The pirate spy game resumed pretty seamlessly. Soon all the big kids were tearing around the yard again. When their parents came, they hid. Elias’s mom seemed less than thrilled that he was bringing home a new piñata. Sasha’s dad wanted to know if they had raided any oil rigs. At last only Maura was left. Noah invited her to swing on the sky chair until her folks arrived.

When the guests had left we went out for Thai, a birthday eve tradition since the last meal I ate before giving birth to Noah was at a Thai restaurant. Then Noah came home and opened his gifts from his friends, many of them pirate-themed (a book about shipwrecks, a pirate Lego set, etc.). One of his friends got him a remote-control flying toy (imagine a helicopter without the part you ride in) which he enjoyed flying around the house and another friend got him Battleship (http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-4730-Battleship/dp/B00000DMBB). He and Beth played a game before bed, which I made them set aside to finish the next day because it was getting late. Beth was almost as reluctant to quit as Noah was. Then while I got Noah ready for bed Beth set up another present, the home planetarium that projects the constellations onto his ceiling, and he went to bed, but not to sleep for a long while. It had been an exciting day.

Noah’s actual birthday was Sunday. When he came into our room at 7:15, he announced, “I’m eight. I’m four plus four. I’m two times four.” I waited to see if he would say he was two the third power, but he didn’t. I guess they haven’t gotten up to exponents in his accelerated math class. (Although at the rate they are going it should be any day now. They’re already doing long division.) Later he decided he wouldn’t really be eight until 6:05 p.m. since that’s when he was born.

We had a much more relaxed day, waiting for 6:05 p.m.. We had leftover cupcakes for breakfast. He opened gifts from us and from family, read, played and did homework. We let him choose dinner and he decided to go out for Indian at Udupi Palace (http://www.udupipalace.com/). He doesn’t actually like most Indian food but he loves mango lassis and paratha so we let him have bread, rice and a beverage for dinner. (It’s not as bad as it sounds. The bread is whole-wheat and the drink has fruit and yogurt in it.) We didn’t actually notice when 6:05 came. It might have been while we were waiting for our food and Noah and Beth were making up a story about a knight and a frost dragon–it breathes ice instead of fire– making their way through a maze toward a cache of golden pearls. It might have been while we were eating or it might have when we were asking the waiter for a match to light Noah’s number eight candle. He had wanted to save it for his real birthday and since there was no cake at this meal he wanted to put it on the bread. The waiter surprised us with a complimentary dish of Indian sweets. The mango burfee was the best, Noah and I agreed. It’s like a bright yellow, fruity fudge. Beth opined that all three desserts were “okay but not chocolate.”

This morning Beth, June and I delivered Swedish fish to Noah’s classroom this for his class party, so now another birthday is behind us. Our boy is eight. It seems like yesterday he was two years old, playing in his new sandbox, or four and flashing me that angelic smile of his, or six and starting to navigate the shifting alliances of elementary school friendships. But I don’t mourn the passage of time or wish it would stand still. I appreciate so many things about my vibrant, creative son as he is now and I’m eager to see what kind of ten year old he will be.

A Is For Alphabet

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On Wednesday morning I was toweling June off after a bath and she noticed my shirt in the bathroom mirror. “You have letters on your shirt,” she observed.

The shirt said, “Feel the Power: VOTE.” I got it back in the early 90s when I worked for Project Vote (http://projectvote.org/?gclid=COWA_PW90JkCFR4hnAodPEgwvQ). “VOTE” is the largest word on it.

“Do you see a V?” I asked June. She pointed to the V. “How about an E?” She pointed to the E. We went through all the letters in “VOTE” and she got them all right. In the past several weeks June has become intensely interested in letters. She doesn’t know all of them yet (maybe 75%), but she’s learning more all the time and she can recognize her own name. She is always asking us what letters begin various words and what sounds they make. The wooden alphabet puzzle she inherited from Noah has become a favorite toy. She’s taking the first wobbly steps of literacy and it’s exciting to watch.

So I read a lot of alphabet books to her these days. Luckily we have quite a few, though ABC: A Family Alphabet Book (http://www.proudparenting.com/node/309) is a favorite. Reading these books over and over (and reaching the twenty-six month anniversary of this blog) has inspired me to make an alphabet of our lives over the past twenty-six months. Most of the pictures have appeared in the blog already, but a few are new. A lot has changed since I started writing here, both for our family and for our country. June has turned one, two and three. She’s learned to walk and talk and started school. Noah has turned six and seven and he seems bound and determined to turn eight next month, despite my protests that he can’t possibly be that old. He overcame a difficult kindergarten year, learned to read and stopped believing in Santa Claus. He’s now thriving in second grade. Since I started writing a woman came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic nomination for President and an African-American won the Presidency (and the world economy imploded, but let’s not dwell on that).

Here are some snapshots of our lives during these times:

A is for Alphabet

Here’s June playing with her alphabet puzzle on Saturday morning.

B is for Baby

She and I were at a coffee house and she was cruising around and around a low table, eating bits of Fig Newton I handed her every time she passed by. She paused every now and then to remove the sugar packets from their container and scatter them across the table and floor and then she replaced them. As she reached the corner of the table closest to me, she let go and stood, swiveled on her feet to face me and smiled, as if she was going to do something dramatic. I waited, holding my breath, thinking this was the moment. Then she chickened out, dropped to her knees and crawled to me. I don’t know when she will walk any more than when Noah will start having an easier time in school. It could be months from now or right around the corner. (April 25, 2007).

June took her first steps about a week later. Noah’s school troubles cleared up when he started first grade with more sympathetic teachers.

C is for Cherry Blossoms

We went to see the cherry blossoms on Friday and it was…challenging. June had been very cranky for almost a week. She’d been sick the weekend before and at first we thought that was the reason but by Friday she’d been better for several days so I’m not sure what was up with her. Anyway, she wailed in the car, she whimpered in the stroller and when she was walking she kept tugging on my arm, wanting me to go in another direction. At one point she darted under a chain and headed straight for the Tidal Basin before Beth dashed off to capture her. Anyway, the blossoms were gorgeous and afterwards we went out for really excellent pizza in the city that made me wish we still lived there. June threw fits in the restaurant, too.

D is for Duck

Once we were back on land, the guide let Noah pass out the souvenir quackers (duck-bill shaped noisemakers) and instructed everyone to quack “Happy Birthday” to him. It wasn’t quite recognizable as “Happy Birthday” but it was impressively noisy. (May 4, 2008)


E is for Election

The transition from Obama-land to McCain-land was not subtle. Either that or I missed it while I dozed briefly as June napped in her car seat and Noah watched downloaded episodes of his favorite shows on Beth’s phone. Before I closed my eyes there were Obama-Biden signs everywhere. When I opened them it was nothing but McCain-Palin as far as the eye could see, including those annoying ones that say “Country First.”

When I commented on the shift, Noah looked out the window long enough to spot one. “That’s the first McCain sign I’ve seen in my whole life,” he noted.(November 5, 2008)

F is for Friends

Jim is one of a handful of people in my life who bridge past and present. We lived down the hall from each other our first year of college and we were roommates the next year. We were living in a student-run co-operative dorm where co-ed rooms were possible with a little administrative subterfuge. The summer after sophomore year, when I fell in love with Beth, Jim and I were living together again and he was the one who urged me to kiss her while I was agonizing over the decision. Even if we had no more history than that together, I’d be forever in his debt. (February 26, 2009)

G is for Gabriel

Gabriel is usually known as the Caterpillar on this blog. He’s a sweet, affectionate, well-loved boy, who will be three in July. His moms are hoping to adopt a younger sibling for him. They are looking for an African-American or biracial baby. Here is their webiste: www.emmyandbethadopt.com. Please visit if you think you can help.

H is for Hug

As we were getting ready to leave the house to go vote later that morning, I found Noah and June in a spontaneous embrace. “Hug!” June announced.

“Take a picture, Mommy!” Noah suggested.

I went for the camera, thinking it likely June would have wriggled out of his arms before I got back. But when I returned, they were still at it.(February 14, 2008)

I is for Ice Cream

It wasn’t a perfect day, but fairy tales aren’t perfect either. They just have happy endings. Here’s ours: And then the queen and the prince and the princess had ice cream. The End. (July 18, 2008)

 

J is for Jump

At 5:30, I could hear Noah singing out in the yard as I poured orange jack-o-lantern lollipops into a bowl….I brought the bowl outside and set it down on the round table on the porch. Noah and June were playing in a pile of leaves under the dogwood while Beth watched. (October 31, 2007)

 

K is for King

This was the first headshot of Noah that appeared on the blog. It was taken in December 2006 at the Children’s Museum in Wheeling, West Virginia.

L is for Liberty

We caught the last ferry of the day, the 3:40, and sat on the top level, for the view and so I wouldn’t get seasick. After a scenic (and very windy) ride we arrived at the statue. She’s impressively large in person and really quite beautiful. We admired her and walked around the island. We paid a quarter for Noah to look through the telescope at the harbor, and then we got back in line for the 4:45 ferry. On the way back we opted for the heated lower level. We shared a warm soft pretzel, and Noah got a pair of Statue of Liberty sunglasses, much coveted by a little boy sitting near us. (December 27. 2007)

M is for Moms

Clearly he was paying attention at Kids’ Camp because he knew exactly what to put on such a sign. He instructed me to write, “I Heart My Moms!” and to fill in the heart with rainbow stripes. As a finishing touch, he decided the point of the exclamation point should be heart-shaped. (June 9, 2007)

N is for Nest
It turns out four adults to two children is about the right ratio for me to spend an almost perfect day at the beach. Noah and I arrived around nine, and had built just enough sand castles and played just long enough in the water to be looking at each other and wondering “what next?” when my mom arrived and he had a fresh playmate. He found a hole someone else had dug and spent a lot of time jumping into it. Later it was a nest and Mom was a bird laying eggs they made out of balls of wet sand. (August 25, 2007)

O is for Ocean

He’d been quite taken with the idea that he was “the only one in the whole world” who knew both my “versary” gift to her and hers to me. He kept the secrets faithfully, only letting slip that he thought Beth’s gift to me was better. “But they’re both good,” he added diplomatically. This piqued my curiosity since Beth had hinted she would make up for her absence on the actual day of our anniversary through the gift. Inside a store bought card with a picture of a falling star on it was a card she and Noah made on the computer. It had a photo of the house where I lived during the summer of 1987 on the front and the Rehoboth boardwalk on the inside. “We’re leaving Friday afternoon for Rehoboth Beach,” it said. (July 22, 2007)

P is for Princess
June wore a dress with a black velvet top and a puffy, gold satin skirt that a friend of Ya Ya’s bought for her. Ya Ya said she looked just like a doll. Beth’s brother Johnny and I both said, independently of each other, that she looked like the Infanta Margarita in this painting (http://www.artchive.com/meninas.htm). In either case, doll or princess, it was a new look for her. (November 23, 2007)

Q is for Queer

We went to our favorite Mexican restaurant that night to celebrate twenty years with spinach enchiladas and virgin mango daiquiris. (July 22, 2007)

R is for Redhead
The snow was dry and powdery, useless for snowballs or snowmen, and just barely serviceable for sledding. He went down the hill a few more times, then bored of it. We took turns dragging June around the yard. She was tranquil, but not as enamored with it as the last time. (February 7, 2007)

This is from my very first blog entry. June’s hair turned blonde the following summer.

S is for Santa

Noah seemed happy and satisfied with his visit to Santa. But as soon as we left the little house, he asked if it was possible that the person he’d seen was just someone in costume pretending to be Santa. We allowed that this might be the case. Beth pointed out that Santa couldn’t be everywhere at once so maybe he needed some helpers to visit with children and find out what they wanted. Probably, they would send an email to Santa with the requests. “But he just asked my name. Why didn’t he ask my address?” Noah was suddenly alarmed at the possibility that his information would be incompletely conveyed to Santa. (December 10, 2007)

T is for Train
Just around the time I reached the tricky part of the operation, spooning the batter onto the griddle and making sure none of the pancakes burned while I was distracted by something else, they both wanted my attention at once.

Noah had tired of his magazine and said, “What should I do?”

June wanted to know if I could “play train tracks?”

“Maybe Noah can play train tracks with you,” I suggested. I only gave this idea about a 25% chance of succeeding, but you have to try. Much to my surprise, Noah took June’s hand and they walked into the living room. He repaired a track I had built earlier in the day and they took turns running the trains over it, looking startlingly like two full-fledged kids playing together.(March 23, 2008)

U is for Underpants

This was the headshot of Noah when he was in first grade. If you remember the photo and thought he was wearing a bandana on his head, those are underpants. Beth took it on their mother-son camping trip in September 2007.

V is for Valentine
Noah dug around in his bag and pulled out a card. “Here,” he said, handing me the funniest valentine I’ve ever received. There’s a snowman lying on its side on the front with the words “Love you to death!” written in crayon. Inside it says, “OOPS! I guess I loved you to much!” Like mother, like son is all I have to say about that. Also this– it was the perfect Friday the 13th valentine. (February 13, 2009)

W is for Wizard

The last day of spirit week was “Put on Your Thinking Cap” day so after some careful consideration, he put on his wizard hat. (March 9, 2007)

X is for Xylophone

You were expecting something else? I took this picture on Thursday.

Y is for Yard

After Noah ate breakfast, brushed his teeth and got dressed, it was time to bounce. Along with the hopping ball, we bought Noah his own personal bouncy castle for vestibular stimulation, deep pressure on his joints, oh, and fun, too. He loves it. We’ll see if it helps organize and focus him the way the occupational therapist says it will, but in the meantime he’s using it several times a day. When possible, we try for a bouncing session before Beth takes him to camp. (July 10, 2007)

Z is for Zeitgeist

Next we moved inside to carve our jack o’ lanterns, or in Beth’s and my case, our Barack o’ lanterns (http://yeswecarve.com). (October 26, 2008)

I can’t claim this blog consistently captures the national zeitgeist, but if you have or once had elementary-school or preschool-age kids, or if you live in Takoma Park or its environs, or if you’re gay, lesbian or bisexual, I hope you sometimes find a little of yourself reflected in it. Thanks for reading.

What’s Past is Prologue

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What’s past is prologue.
The Tempest, William Shakespeare

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley

So, which quote is right? Is the past something that sets the stage for the feature attraction—that is, the present? Or is it a haunting force you can never escape, more powerful that the present can ever be? Or is it almost completely inaccessible to us since we are not now who we were then?

I’ve been thinking about this since I started using Facebook in earnest last week. I created the account last fall because I wanted to see the comments to something Beth posted on her Facebook account (Noah’s Presidential stump speech, I think) and I needed an account to do that. I had no intention of actually using it for its intended purpose–social networking– but then the friend requests starting trickling in and I was kind of intrigued and within the space of a week I found myself with a rudimentary page and almost thirty friends. (I know this is a pittance in the world of Facebook, but it was still surprising to me.)

Except that a lot of them are friends in only the loosest sense. They’re friendly acquaintances or friends of friends, or siblings of friends. (A couple of them are people from high school whom I don’t, strictly speaking, remember, but who sent me friend requests.) I think I had the idea that if I started poking around I might rediscover a long-lost friend, someone who touched my life in a profound way. This isn’t meant to discount any of the connections I now have the chance to renew. I’m grateful for the opportunity and it’s interesting, mesmerizing even, to find out who’s living where, the work they do, who’s married or single, who has children, etc. It can cause a little cognitive dissonance, though, to know someone’s weekend plans when you really don’t know much else that has happened in her life since ninth grade. You have the feeling you are corresponding with an entirely different person than the one you knew because of the gap of decades between you. Was Hartley right? Did we know each other in another country?

My Facebook interactions with people I actually know in my current life (mostly Purple School parents) seem more natural and less fraught, because they are just extensions of things we might share in the school parking lot at pickup time or during a playdate.

It’s not exactly true that the people I’ve found from my high school and college years on Facebook have all been minor players in my life. When you log on to Facebook, it gives you three suggestions of “People You May Know,” using your school attendance information and the friend lists of your official Facebook friends. The very first time I logged on one of the three faces it showed me was possibly the one person from my past whom I least want to contact. It left me so shaken I didn’t go back to Facebook for several weeks, even though I think the chance that this person would send me a friend request is extremely slim. For a little while it seemed like Faulkner was right.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I have been trying to combat my tendency to sink into isolation with a concerted campaign to socialize more often. June had her very first playdate (at the Dragonfly’s house) several weeks ago and since then we’ve had three of her classmates over to our house with one more scheduled tomorrow morning. Last Friday I was even bold enough to host a double playdate. Both Noah and June had a friend over at the same time. Our house has been filled with preschoolers and second-graders and the mothers of the little ones. It’s been fun.

Then last Saturday we went to dinner at the house of our friends Jim and Kevin. Jim is one of a handful of people in my life who bridge past and present. We lived down the hall from each other our first year of college and we were roommates the next year. We were living in a student-run co-operative dorm (http://osca.csr.oberlin.edu/about/coops/keep) where co-ed rooms were possible with a little administrative subterfuge. The summer after sophomore year, when I fell in love with Beth, Jim and I were living together again and he was the one who urged me to kiss her while I was agonizing over the decision. Even if we had no more history than that together, I’d be forever in his debt.

Jim and Kevin are avid gardeners so the visit began with a tour of their garden. Beth and Noah played hide-and-seek in the yard while Jim showed us around. Mostly, he was showing us what will be coming up where in warmer weather, but he had started some plants under plastic bottles stuck into the ground like tiny greenhouses. They also have a little greenhouse consisting of a plastic cover that zips over shelves. There are plans in the offing to build a real greenhouse onto the back of the house and grow a lemon tree there. I told him about our considerably more modest gardening plans and when I mentioned how much June loved the cucumbers we grew last summer he offered me some cucumber seeds he won at a garden club raffle. (We forgot to get them from him before we left, but he was nice enough to drop them off, along with some broccoli seeds, Sunday morning while he and Kevin were en route to the Takoma Park farmers’ market.)

Inside the house are Kevin’s orchids. There are a few picked for display in the dining room and in an alcove near the staircase, but there are others all over the house. Noah loved the lighting system they’ve rigged up in the basement where they keep the plants that are not yet in bloom. Two lights run back and forth on tracks along the ceiling, ensuring that all the orchids receive an equal amount of light. “Your own suns!” Noah exclaimed.

Later on, Jim showed us the upstairs orchids and Noah found a computer with two keyboards hooked up to it at once. Jim attached a third one, to show him it could be done, I suppose, and Noah was in awe. (He talked about it a lot on the way home.) As I watched them standing next to each other I was struck by their physical resemblance. They both have curly light brown hair, and they were standing in a similar position, looking at the computer. They were even both wearing blue button-down shirts, though Jim had a sweater on over his. It’s not so surprising Noah looks a bit like Jim because Jim and I have similar hair. It looked more alike when we were in college and we both wore it shoulder-length. (Jim and I were once asked if we were brother and sister or lovers. Neither, we answered cheerfully.) Anyway, he wears his hair short now, shorter than Noah’s but close enough. Jim’s green eyes are also a little like Noah’s hazel ones. And then there’s the math genius thing. In college Jim took the most advanced math classes with the other handful of students capable of that level of work and he used to do his homework problems on the board while the rest of the class was copying theirs out of their notebooks onto the board. If I may be permitted a small and relevant brag, recently Señora C sent home a testing report that indicated Noah has “complete understanding” of the fourth-grade math he’s working on at school.

In case you’re wondering if I’m going reveal now that Jim is Noah’s biological father, he’s not. We used an unknown donor and I know enough about the donor to know it wasn’t Jim. (I also don’t think Jim has ever donated sperm, but I’ve never asked.)

Jim and I have a lot of history together. There was the time I went to the grocery store and bought his cat the kind of food she liked (calling it a Christmas present) because Jim was too stubborn to buy cat food when the cat already had perfectly good food and the cat was too stubborn to eat what was in her bowl. (He thanked me for engineering him out of this face off with the cat later.) And there was the tragedy of the sweet potato pies we baked for our eighty-person dining co-op that took so long to bake no-one besides us was around to eat them when they came out of the oven. We listened with sympathy to each other’s romantic woes and when he spent a semester in London we wrote each other every week. (Remember when people wrote letters? On paper?) When Beth and I moved to Iowa for two years for grad school, he was the only person who came to visit me. There was a stretch of years when we lost touch with each other, but we re-connected when Noah was about a year old. I think we have a future, too. It’s different, of course, now that we’re adults with partners and busy lives and now that we live a half hour apart instead of down the hall. I only see him once or twice a year. But it’s always fun and I think it’s good for Noah to interact with a man who shares his interest in computers and math. When he gets older and he’s doing math over Beth’s and my heads, it could be even better.

So I have to go with Shakespeare. What’s past is prologue. It’s what has happened already and what influences what comes next but it doesn’t have to overwhelm us with its power over us and it’s not always what’s irreparably lost that matters most. Sometimes the past serves you pesto pizza made with basil from last year’s garden and sometimes the past shows you little seedlings in plastic-jug homes that will be strong, healthy plants come summer.

Tag, You’re It, Part 2: Christmas is Coming

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Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.

Traditional Christmas Carol
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Is_Coming)

We’ve been watching a lot of Christmas specials these days—Frosty, the Snowman; Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer; How the Grinch Stole Christmas; The Year Without a Santa Claus and A Charlie Brown Christmas so far. As you can see, we mainly stick to the classics from our childhood. Beth, Noah and June did watch Frosty Returns, but I opted out to fold laundry during that one. Why should Frosty return? The original is perfect as is.

This is hardly an original observation, but watching these specials so close together always brings back to me how, aside from Frosty, they all have the same plot. Something endangers Christmas—a big snowstorm, a green monster whose heart is two sizes too small, the indifference of the world’s children and Santa’s bad cold, materialism and the ennui of small children who talk like adults. Something saves Christmas—Rudolph’s shiny nose, the green monster’s redemption on hearing Christmas music, the children’s discovery of the power of faith and generosity, Bible verses and a scrawny Christmas tree that magically grows healthy branches once decorated. But all this begs the question, why does Christmas need so much saving in the first place? Why is it so perennially endangered?

The easy answer is that it creates a problem to solve, and that creates a story to tell. But why is it always the same story? Why is it so often Christmas itself that teeters on the brink? I can’t really say, but to me it feels like there’s some emotional truth in it. Expectations are so high for Christmas, that if you don’t feel joyous for whatever reason, it can be easy to end up feeling let down. And even though I love Christmas, it’s often hard for me to get into the spirit.

This year it would be easy to blame the economy, but I don’t think that’s it, even though like most people, we probably should be cutting back. We’ve lost a good bit of the money we’d invested to build an addition to the house so that June can have her own room someday. But other than that, we’re not really feeling the pinch. Others have it much worse. So, as I said, it’s not really money. Partly it’s being so worn down from being sick. Shopping, decorating, and baking all seem like extra work and it’s hard to get interested in extra work right now. I’m even thinking of skipping or scaling back the annual Christmas letter I write. I’ve done a little shopping. I have Beth’s present taken care of and a few days ago I ordered The Complete Adventures of Curious George for June since she has fallen so completely in love with the little monkey over the past few months. I was spurred to do this by my mom calling for gift ideas for June last week. “Christmas is coming,” she reminded me on the answering machine.

It is, I know. We’ve been listening to Christmas music and watching our Christmas specials, as I mentioned. We have a nice wreath on the door that Noah picked out at the farmers’ market yesterday. I’m just not feeling enthusiastic about Christmas. It’s not really a surprise either. It’s been this way a long time.

One possibility is that even though I’m in my fourth year out of academia I still miss the rhythm of the academic calendar that I used to measure time for most of my adult life. It just doesn’t seem like Christmas without the adrenaline rush of papers and exams to write or grade beforehand. I miss being surrounded by eighteen and nineteen year olds proud of their semester’s accomplishments and excited by the upcoming break. (What I don’t miss is the inevitable outbreak of end-of-semester plagiarism cases.) I’ve even wondered if I should re-read The Hobbit this time of year since it was the last book on my fall semester Genre Fiction syllabus for the last few years I was teaching. I don’t think it would help, though, unless I could coax a local teenager to come to the house and discuss it with me several times for fifty minutes and then write me a five to seven page paper on the quest motif in it. This doesn’t seem very likely.

But even while I was teaching, a lot of Christmases got spoiled by the fact that the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (http://www.mla.org/), a huge gathering of academics in English and foreign languages, is held right after Christmas. The convention is where many colleges and universities hold their first-round interviews for jobs. More years than I care to admit during my long, fruitless job search I spent Christmas mourning the fact that I hadn’t gotten any interviews or nervous about interviews I did have.

So, the Christmas spirit is often elusive for me. Yet it almost always comes. It might be while making gingerbread with my sister or the kids, or helping decorate the tree, or watching someone’s face light up as he or she opens the perfect gift.

Last year it was on Christmas Eve. We were at my mother and stepfather’s house. Home renovations had filled their living room with yet-to-be installed kitchen cabinets and there wasn’t much room for Mom’s traditional decorations. We thought we could squeeze a tree into one corner, but in the end we decided against it. Mom was upset about the lack of Christmas feeling in the house. And then we went to Longwood Gardens (http://www.longwoodgardens.org/) on Christmas Eve to see the lights and fountain display and the elaborately decorated greenhouses. It was a lovely, magical evening. We think we might make it a tradition.

I know that feeling will come sooner or later. On Friday I’ll be tutoring at Noah’s school, watching his class’s holiday program and dropping off June’s outgrown buntings at his school’s winter coat drive. When he gets out of school we’re leaving on our annual weekend Christmas shopping trip to Rehoboth. Service, seven and eight year olds singing songs and reciting speeches in Spanish, some family time away from the distractions of home and a chance to take a long walk on the beach sounds like a good way to get in the spirit to me.

Meanwhile, Tyfanny of Come What May (http://www.btmommy.blogspot.com/) tagged me with this Christmas quiz so I have filled it out. Here goes.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Usually paper, sometimes bags.
2. Real tree or Artificial? We never have our own tree because we always travel to the grandparents’ houses, but I prefer real trees.
3. When do you put up the tree? See above.
4. When do you take the tree down? See above.
5. Do you like eggnog? Yes, and I love eggnog lattes.
6. Favorite gift received as a child? A bike, when I was nine. I loved it because I could ride all over town by myself, so it represented freedom to me.
7. Hardest person to buy for? My stepfather.
8. Easiest person to buy for? Beth and the kids.
9. Do you have a nativity scene? No.
10. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? Leg warmers from my grandmother when I was a kid. They were in style then, but I was never into them. My sister and I each got a pair and we ended up using them to block the drafts in our bedroom window at my dad’s house, so I guess they did come in handy.
11. Favorite Christmas Movie? I like the Christmas specials I watched as a kid, especially Frosty and The Grinch, but as for real films—It’s Wonderful Life. In my twenties and early thirties I watched it every year on television, but I’ve gotten out of the habit.
12. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Too late usually. I’ve barely started now.
13. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? I don’t think so.
14. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Just one? Hard to narrow it down between gingerbread, fudge, buckeyes and ribbon candy.
15. Lights on the tree? Yes.
16. Favorite Christmas song? “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” which is kind of an odd choice because it’s religious and I’m not and there‘s plenty of secular Christmas music. I just think it’s pretty, though.
17. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Travel to my mother and stepfather’s or Beth’s parents’ houses on alternate years. This is Beth’s folks’ year.
18. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeers? Let’s try: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen. (And Rudolph.) I probably couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been reading “The Night Before Christmas” to June today.
19. Angel on the tree top or a star? Angels at both grandparents’ houses.
20. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? We usually open presents from the grandparents we aren’t visiting early so we don’t have to pack them. We either do it on the night before we leave or on the Solstice. The rest we open on Christmas morning.
21. Most annoying thing about this time of the year? Decorations up too early in stores. This drives me crazy.
22. Favorite ornament theme or color? I like a mix of things.
23. Favorite for Christmas dinner? Sweet potatoes, cranberries and pumpkin pie.
24. What do you want for Christmas this year? For my kids to have a magical day. For Beth to have a white Christmas. To have a good book and time to read it. To enjoy the company of loved ones. For none of us to be sick.

I think that would be enough for any year.

Tag, You’re It, Part 1: Climbing to the Top

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I stood with my hands on the stroller handles at the bottom on the hill, sizing it up. I climb this hill every Wednesday morning on our way to Kindermusik. It’s long and steep, but I’m used to it. Unless I have a backpack full of hardback library books to return on the way home, or unless it’s a sweltering summer day and I have fifteen-month old in the front pack as I often did when Noah had music camp in the same building the summer before last, climbing it is routine.

But nothing is routine these days. I’ve been sick for about three weeks with a killer upper respiratory infection. I have a cough like no other I’ve ever had in my life. When a bad fit is upon me any of the following things might happen: I could gag, or wet myself, or feel shooting pains in my head or see stars, or any combination of these things.

I am also very short of breath. At the worst point, about a week ago, I could barely climb a flight of stairs without getting winded. During Thanksgiving weekend at my mom’s house, I was trying to carry June out of the bathroom after a bath and my mom said my breathing sounded like I was in labor. (She took my naked, towel-wrapped daughter from me and carried her upstairs.) I’m getting better. Yesterday I rode the exercise bike in the basement (albeit very slowly) for ten minutes and I raked leaves for another ten. Partly I was testing myself to see if going to music class this morning was even feasible. I thought it was.

There are speed bumps about one-third and two-thirds of the way up the hill. I told myself I’d stop at those spots and rest. I made it to the one-third mark, but the evil thing about this hill is it gets steeper as you go up it, so I ended up having to rest again well before the two-thirds mark. I lost track of how many times I stopped; I think it was at least a half dozen. I breathed hard; I coughed a lot. About three-quarters of the way up I stared at the last, steepest part of the hill in despair, wondering how hard June would cry if I gave up and we just went home. Pretty hard, I thought. We once tried to attend a make-up class that had been cancelled (unbeknownst to us) and when we got to the dark and empty little building in the park and then had to turn around to go home, June cried for fifteen minutes straight. So, remembering that, I pressed on.

And then I was at the top of the hill. I was so tired, I wasn’t even happy. I wondered grumpily why people climb mountains anyway. Why put yourself through something like this?

Soon we were inside. The familiar songs played. We danced and rang jingle bells. (I made sure to sanitize my and June’s hands before we touched the instruments.) I got to talk to grownups during class and afterward on the playground. It turns out a large proportion of the kids and adults present have the exact same cough. The teacher said her doctor says half of Takoma Park has it and that it lasts six weeks on average. We commiserated and swapped home remedies. It was nice. It was worth it.

Last month I was tagged twice by other bloggers, which means they invited me to write on a given prompt. Dana, of Luca Has Two Mommies (http://www.lucahas2mommies.blogspot.com), tagged me to post the fourth photo in the fourth photo folder on my computer and then tag four more bloggers. We have two computers with photos on them so I got to cherry-pick but I chose this one. It’s of Noah the summer he was five, inside the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (http://www.nps.gov/caha/).

Noah has loved lighthouses since he was three. He had a coloring book called Lighthouses of the Mid-Atlantic States and he memorized the names, locations and heights of the lighthouses in it before he could color inside the lines. He sat through a long multi-part documentary series about lighthouses with us and was probably the only preschooler in Takoma Park who knew what a Fresnel lens and could tell you all about how they work.

Noah’s interest in lighthouses has waned somewhat in recent years, but as a result of his fixation, we’ve climbed lighthouses up and down the East Coast, from Massachusetts to Florida. Some were easy climbs; others were more difficult. Noah’s a sturdy kid and always climbed uncomplainingly to the top even when he was very small (unless the stairs weren’t solid—if he could see through them sometimes he got scared).

On this occasion I stayed below. June was five months old and I didn’t want to lug her to the top. When I have climbed to the top, though, which has been almost every other time, I’ve never questioned if it was worth it. The view from a lighthouse is always sensational. You can see the ocean and the land for miles around. You are up in the sky. It’s a good reminder that there’s often a very good reason for pushing on to the top.

I tag: Tami, of On A Quiet Street (http://onaquietstreet.blogspot.com/), Tyfanny of Come What May (http://btmommy.blogspot.com/), Swistle of her own eponymous blog (http://www.swistle.blogspot.com/) and Holly of The Post Party (http://pushontildawn.blogspot.com/). Holly’s my cousin and the mother of Annabelle, who’s just about the most photogenic four-month-old baby on the planet. Annabelle also has spina bifida, so Holly and her husband Matt know more than most people about climbing to the top even when the hill gets steep.

To recap: Your mission, if you choose to accept it:

1) Choose the fourth picture folder on your computer
2) Choose the fourth picture
3) Explain the picture
4) Tag four other people

I look forward to seeing your pictures and hearing your stories.

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

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“I might be going to the co-op today. Do you want anything?” I asked Beth. We were standing in the bathroom, snatching a brief conversation in between the everyday crises of a weekday morning. Noah was dragging his feet about getting ready for school. We were out of eggs. Our internet connection had gone missing.

“Eggs,” she replied, naming my second reason for going.

“I’m after yogurt,” I told her. “I’m going to measure what we have and see if there’s enough.”

“What do you need it for?” Beth asked.

“The cake,” I answered, smiling a little. The cookbook had been on the kitchen counter open to the recipe since the day before.

“Oh, the cake!” Beth said, sudden realization showing on her face. “Happy Anniversary!” she said. We exchanged a quick kiss. Our grown-up celebration, when we leave June with a paid sitter for the first time ever and have brunch at Savory, will be Sunday so it had slipped her mind that the actual day was today.

Now if you’re scratching your head and thinking, “Wasn’t there an anniversary post on this blog not six months ago?” we celebrate two, the dating anniversary in July and the commitment ceremony anniversary in January. I guess we do it for the same reason we celebrate the kids’ half-birthdays. We like celebrations and we like cake.

The cake is a moist, dense spice cake with a lemon glaze. It was our wedding cake and I’ve made it almost every January 11 since 1992, the year of our commitment ceremony.

Our commitment ceremony was largely a homemade affair. We were just months out of grad school (the first round for me). Beth had a part-time job at ERIC (www.eric.ed.gov/) and for most of the time between my proposal in July and the ceremony in January I was unemployed. I started working at Project Vote (www.projectvote.org/) in mid-December. Our parents were less supportive of our relationship than they are now, so we were on our own when it came to planning and financing the ceremony.

Except we weren’t, not really. A friend with bakery experience decorated the cake. Another friend helped us track down all the pink and purple potted violets and purple eucalyptus branches available at local florists and one of my college advisors paid for them. Guests brought food and made speeches and wrote touching notes in the guest book. Although we were pinched for cash (we had a thousand dollar budget), it ended up being just what we wanted, small and personal and meaningful. Better still, it served as a turning point in our parents’ acceptance of us as a couple. Five of the six parents and stepparents attended and after the ceremony the two who were having the hardest time letting go of their vision of how their daughters’ lives would unfold started to come around, one quickly and the other gradually.

We didn’t have enough yogurt so after Beth and Noah were gone, June was bathed and a load of laundry was started, we ventured out into a cold and drizzly morning, headed for the co-op where I purchased yogurt, eggs and an anniversary card.

I made the cake in the afternoon, shortly before Noah’s bus came. I managed to get most of the ingredients into the bowl while June was in the high chair eating a late lunch of vegetarian hot dogs and succotash, so I only had the add the last few, mix them up and pour the batter into the greased pan while she clung to my legs and screamed. This is the hallmark of a successful baking experience by my current standards. I had a moment’s hesitation before pouring out the batter. It seemed thin. I wondered if I’d only put in one cup of flour instead of two. I was almost sure I’d put in two, though, so I slid the pan into the oven and hoped for the best.

When Noah got home, the clouds were clearing so we played outside a bit, and then the focus of the day shifted to getting him undressed, into his bathing suit and back into his clothes by 4:00 p.m.. He had a swimming lesson at 5:30 and he watches television from 4:00 to 5:00 most weekdays. June usually watches with him so I used most of the hour to work on an editing project I’m doing for Word Girl (www.wordgirl.biz), interrupted every five or ten minutes or so by June coming in with her little cup held out Oliver Twist-style while she pleaded “Mir ov?” (Translation: “More olives.” Sliced black olives are one of June’s favorite afternoon snacks and she can really put them away.) When only fifteen minutes remained, I checked to see if the cake was cool and I poured the glaze over it. Then I outlined it with a ring of red frosting from a can (leftover from Beth’s Buzz cake) and drew a sixteen in the middle. Finally I sprinkled pink and purple sparkles (meant to evoke the pink and purple violets) liberally over the whole creation. Noah came in to see it when his television was over and he declared it “beautiful.”

Beth was home by 5:05 and we hurried to get everyone’s shoes and jackets on and to get out the door. We were going out for pizza after Noah’s lesson and it seemed quickest for everyone to leave together. June, who had been trying to organize the expedition–“Shoes on! Mommy jacket on! Where Baf?”—now trotted happily down the driveway, holding my hand. Despite the fact that she usually has no idea where we are going, she is always up for a trip. We got everyone buckled in. Beth turned the key in the ignition. And the car didn’t start.

Beth closed her eyes in frustration. Just the night before she’d come home early to attend Math Night at Noah’s school when they got in the car, the battery wouldn’t start. They’d walked to school instead and afterward her auto service came to jump-start the car. She’d driven around a while and we thought it was fixed. Everyone got out of the car. June’s face crumpled and she began to cry when I took her out of her seat and she was snatched from the brink an outing.

“I think we should still go out,” Beth said. “We should do the fun part, go out for pizza.” So she called the Y and rescheduled Noah’s lesson for Sunday afternoon, then we all trooped out to the bus stop. As we waited for a bus, she said, “I’m glad we’re a hardy family and can change plans like this.”

Once we were on a bus, we called to order ahead and once we arrived at zpizza (zpizza.com/), there was a small pineapple pizza for the kids and a pesto, eggplant and pine nut one for the grownups ready and waiting. The eggplant slices were cut into a flower pattern and they were so pretty against the green background of the pesto that I almost didn’t want to take a slice until Beth, who was waiting in a long line for drinks, had a chance to see the whole effect. But it seemed foolish not to eat when the kids were eating because who knew when they’d been tearing around the restaurant like maniacs, so after I cut June’s slice into pieces and slipped Beth’s card onto her plate, I ate.

The pizza was delicious, the kids did not descend into any truly uncivilized behavior (though June did deconstruct a stack of booster seats so she could sit in each one in turn) and we left the restaurant happy.

As we approached the bus stop we noticed a 17, the bus we needed, pulling away. They come every twenty minutes so we were in for a wait. As we got closer to the stop we noticed there was a line of buses (all different routes) standing at the stop and not moving. This was because traffic wasn’t moving. At all. We might be in for an even longer wait than we thought. I took June out of the stroller prematurely when I thought I saw a 17 approaching the stop (it was a 16). This was a grave error, because once unrestrained she wanted to run. She did not want to sit next to me on the bench. She did not want to be held (my mind flashed back to the afternoon when I had been trying to mix cake batter and it had been imperative that she be held). She squirmed and cried and twisted through a very long wait. Once we got on a bus, it limped along until the traffic cleared a couple blocks from the stop and we were on our way home.

We got home around 7:45, much later than we expected, so we couldn’t watch Fraggle Rock and we decided to skip Noah’s bath. We sat around the table to eat cake. I was a bit nervous slicing into it–had I really put two cups’ flour in? And it was fine, a moist, dense spicy cake, deeply familiar, and deeply comforting. Because even though it was rainy and cold and Noah missed his swim lesson, the important things still turned out fine. We had each other’s company, hot pizza waiting for us, a beautiful cake at home. And no matter what the weather or what plans go awry on it, January 11 will always be a beautiful day.

Seven Snapshots from My Past

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Beth and Noah were reading this poem, alternating lines, with breaks for him to recover from helpless, hysterical laughter:

“One Winter Night in August”
By X.J. Kennedy

One winter night in August
While the larks sang in their eggs,
A barefoot boy with shoes on
Stood kneeling on his legs.

At ninety miles an hour
He slowly strolled to town
And parked atop a tower
That had just fallen down.

He asked a kind old policeman
Who bit small boys in half
“Officer, have you seen my pet
Invisible Giraffe?”

“Why sure I haven’t seen him.”
The cop smiled with a sneer
“He was just here tomorrow
And he rushed right back next year…”

The poem goes on, but this is where Noah really lost it. He loves nonsense. Alice and Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are among his favorite books and we have read them both countless times. I keep meaning to get The Phantom Tollbooth for him from the library, but we haven’t read it yet. What cracks him up most about this poem are the contradictory references to time, the winter night in August, actions described in the past tense which are said to take place in the future. “Next year is in the future,” he insisted, giggling.

As silly as the poem is, it does hint at an essential truth. The past, present and future are hopelessly entangled with each other in all of our lives. We are who we are now because of our pasts, and we try to imagine or make sense of the future, based on both the past and the present.

I was tagged recently, which means another blogger, Not the Mama, (http://notthemama.wordpress.com/) nominated me to write a blog containing “seven random or weird” facts about myself. I wanted to do it, but struggled with what to write. Surely, there are an ample number of weird facts about me, or at least facts that put me outside the mainstream of American society. Seven would be a conservative figure. Here are some I could have used for starters: I’m a bisexual, a vegetarian, and an atheist. I don’t have a driver’s license and I haven’t had a hair cut in twenty-five years. I have a PhD, and I know more about vampires than a normal person should. Somehow, though, none of this inspired me. It didn’t hang together; I didn’t know how to make sense of it. And yes, I know that’s what “random” means and randomness certainly has its place in life, but when possible I like things to have a narrative. So instead of isolated facts, I decided to give a brief account of what was going on in my life thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten and five years ago. The arbitrariness of the dates should impart a certain level of randomness while keeping the narrative arc going. Here goes:

1) November 1972: I was five and a half and living in Brooklyn with my mother, father, and nineteen-month old sister, and attending kindergarten at a Montessori school. The following month we would move to Philadelphia, when my father left his job at The Wall Street Journal to take a job as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

2) November 1977: I was ten and a half and living in Newtown, Pennsylvania with my mother, father and sister. My parents had decided to move out of the city and to a small town within commuting distance, partly in hopes of getting a fresh start on their struggling marriage, not that I knew that at the time. They would separate the following March. I liked the small town atmosphere, being able to ride my bike anywhere I wanted and I had a close-knit group of three best friends. I think I was pretty happy.

3) November 1982: I was fifteen and a half and living in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania with my mother and sister. We’d moved there after the divorce to be closer to my mother’s work and school two years earlier. Since the move, she had finished a Master’s degree in nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, was working as a psychiatric nurse and she’d just begun dating the man who would become my stepfather. The previous spring I had fallen in love with my best friend and I was coming to terms with the fact that I was either lesbian or bisexual. The friend had suddenly and mysteriously dropped me at the end of the summer. She said she would explain later and I waited, heartbroken and confused, for months for that explanation, but she never supplied it. I suspect she’d realized the nature of my feelings for her. I spent most of that fall completely miserable, mooning over her, sure I would never find anyone who would ever love me.

4) November 1987: I was twenty and a half, spending a semester in Córdoba, Spain. The summer before I’d had my first lesbian kiss, which quickly led to my first lesbian relationship. (With a young woman named Beth. I’ve mentioned her before, right?) Despite this, I was engaging in an ill-advised flirtation with a Spaniard. (See my July 22 entry for details if you want them.) I wish I’d had more sense, but I was young and foolish.

5) November 1992: I was twenty-five and a half, living in Washington, DC with Beth and a friend of ours from college, Kris. It was ten months after our commitment ceremony. I was working as a grant-writer for Project Vote (http://www.projectvote.org/), a non-profit organization that registers low-income African-Americans to vote. The organization is non-partisan, but I wasn’t, so I was pretty euphoric about the election of Bill Clinton. Beth was working at HRC (www.hrc.org/) and we’d both been putting in long hours in the months leading up to the election, so we took a vacation and went to visit my sister in Santa Cruz. We rented a convertible and drove to Big Sur. We traveled a lot, pre-kids, but this stands out in my mind as a particularly happy, carefree trip.

6) November 1997: I was thirty and a half, and still living in Washington, DC, with Beth and Kris. (Beth and I lived in that apartment eleven years, eight of them with Kris. It’s the longest I have ever lived anywhere.) I was four years into my PhD program at the University of Maryland, with two to go. My financial aid had run out so I was teaching as a part-time adjunct at George Washington University. It was my first semester there and I was delighted with the students who were both more serious-minded and more fun than any I’d taught at either The University of Iowa or Maryland. Teaching was a fulfilling and welcome diversion from the morass that was my dissertation.

7) November 2002: I was thirty-five and a half, living in Takoma Park, Maryland with Beth and Noah, who was eighteen months old. We’d bought our house six months earlier and I was in my second year of full-time teaching at GW. I was teaching a class on genre fiction for the first time that semester. I’d designed it to complement the horror class I’d been teaching for a few years and I was really enjoying it. Noah was in daycare for the first time that fall and it was a hard adjustment for all of us. (Beth had been working part-time to care for him while I was teaching before this.) After a couple months, with the help of a warm and loving teacher, he got used to daycare and was happy there. He stayed at that center for three years, until I lost my job.

That takes us up to now. If you’ve been reading this space, you know all about that, and as for five years from now, as Noah says, that’s in the future. I do know I’ll have a first-grader (again!) and (even more shocking) a middle-schooler. Having both kids in school will no doubt change my life in ways I can’t even imagine now. The future is unseeable, but here nonetheless, like an Invisible Giraffe. I can reach for her, feel her outlines, but I can’t quite make her out.

Note: Now I’m supposed to tag seven more people. I don’t think I can. I read a lot of blogs, but not too many on a regular basis. Since Not the Mama only tagged four, I will finish up her seven by tagging three, one each who remind me of my past, present and future.

The Ghost of Bloggers Past: Kath (http://www.momsworld.com/portal.php?blog=2). This blog is defunct, so the point of tagging it is not to get the author to participate, but just to direct new readers to her blog archive, which is still available online. In the late 90s and early 00s, Kath wrote an online parenting column with message board attached (it was a blog before the word existed really) on the Moms Online Forum she founded. It was called the Daily Alexander. After the birth of her second child she renamed it Life in Progress and after a long hiatus it was reinvented as the Mom in Progress blog, where the link above will take you. I have been reading about Kath’s family since her oldest was a toddler (she has four kids now). Her writing is touching and down to earth and it was the inspiration for my own blog. So even though she’s not writing now, I can’t help paying tribute to her.

The Ghost of Bloggers Present: Chris (http://www.silverspringvoice.com/apparently/). Chris lives here in Takoma Park. We met when our older kids were in a drama class together last winter and spring. He’s a stay-at-home dad with kids close in age to mine (his oldest is a year older than Noah and his youngest is a year and a half older than June) so we go through a lot of the same things. He’s a cool guy. I recommend his recent post on giving thanks. Most of the time the comment function on his blog doesn’t work so if you visit and try to comment it might not show up.

The Ghost of Bloggers Future: Liza (http://lizawashere.com/). Liza is the founder and administrator of Lesbianfamily.org. I have only begun to explore this website but I hope to find some good reading material and community there. Liza has a son about June’s age who is named Noah. This tickles me.

Rules
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

That’s all folks!

Happy Anniversary, Baby

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20070722-01

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Years ago I asked Beth if she could identify the moment she became a woman. It probably had something to do with my dissertation. I wrote it on female coming-of-age stories. For myself I had tentatively chosen the moment my mother and stepfather drove off, leaving me at college. Beth had no doubts. “It was when you first kissed me,” she said sweetly. It was the kind of answer that made me want to go back and revise mine.

That kiss was twenty years and a week ago. Well, twenty years and six days, technically, since it took place after midnight, but we’ve always celebrated it on the fifteenth because that’s when the date started. We had to discuss the kiss in an oblique, roundabout way for hours before we did it. But it did lead to two kids and a mortgage, so perhaps our caution was not misplaced.

Even after our long, tortured conversation, I jumped in blind, since Beth, who had wished on a star for me to fall in love with her, never got around to coming out to me, even after I came out to her and confessed my attraction. The whole thing was perplexing. We’d been friends for two years (she was the very first person I met at college) and our friendship had become more intense since the spring. I asked my friends the Jims, with whom I was living that summer, if they thought she was flirting with me or not. Jim K said yes. Jim B said no. In a way, their answers were not surprising since Jim K was not so secretly in love with Jim B, who did not return his feelings. In the end, the only way to find out was to kiss her and see if she kissed back. She did.

If I was the one brave enough to make the first move, Beth was the one clear-sighted enough to see the relationship for what it was, from the very beginning. When I left for a semester in Spain a month and a half later, she wrote me every day, mailed me Oreos, and bought a double futon, despite the fact that I was coming back to a boyfriend (he spent the summer at home and we’d decided to see other people until I got back from Spain in January) as well as to her and I hadn’t decided exactly what to do about that. Then there was the Spaniard who told me I had “la cara de un ángel” (the face of an angel) and tried to convince me to stay in Córdoba through the spring semester. The turning point was the November morning I found a bouquet of roses on my dorm room desk and I realized with a feeling approaching dread that I didn’t know who they were from. They were from the Spaniard and my instant disappointment that they weren’t from Beth pointed me in the right direction and showed me the way home.

Meanwhile, Beth, who was midway through her senior year in college, was making plans to stay in Oberlin an extra year until I graduated. She got a job at the campus computing center and then she followed me (to Iowa of all places) for grad school. It was shortly after our second move together (to D.C. two years later) that I proposed. We were twenty-four years old, with newly minted Masters degrees in impractical fields. Beth had a part-time job and I was unemployed. We were celebrating the fourth anniversary of our first kiss with a midweek trip to Rehoboth Beach we couldn’t really afford. I presented her with gifts made of paper, cotton, leather, and fruit and flowers (the materials associated with first through fourth anniversaries) and had her open them in backwards order, ending with the card. In the card, I asked her to be my life partner. This time I had no doubt about her answer. She had made it clear for years she was ready for this. Our commitment ceremony was the following January.

Over the years I’ve kept up the tradition of the anniversary materials, with the occasional adjustment. The fifteenth anniversary is crystal and I bought a set of glasses with endearments painted on them since we are not real crystal kind of people. (Noah was a year old that summer and let me tell you, shopping for items made of glass with a toddler in tow is more than a little stressful.) The twentieth anniversary is china. I decided anything ceramic would do and settled on a very pretty set of cobalt and sage green ice cream dishes made by a West Virginian potter.

I didn’t get to give them to Beth on our actual anniversary, however, because she was on a three and a half day business trip to Toronto. We decided to celebrate on her return rather than before she left because I was pretty cranky about her leaving and I thought it would be a happier occasion if we waited.

I was sad while she was gone, but we muddled through. The kids got fed and bathed. Dishes and laundry got done. I was even ambitious enough to take the kids to Air and Space and to mow the lawn. (One of the advantages of using a push-mower is that you can safely mow with a toddler playing in the yard.) I took a vacation from cooking anything more complicated than mac and cheese from a box and pancakes, much to Noah’s delight. June’s naps were disrupted because I was taking Noah to and from camp instead of just picking him up and she kept falling asleep in the stroller. The hardest part turned out to be getting her settled at night. She’s used to falling asleep in Beth’s arms after I nurse her. I use this time to shower and do small chores around the house. After two nights of skipping the cat box, I finally had to clean it with June standing right there, wanting to sample their food and play in that fun sand box where Mommy was playing.

Late Tuesday night, Beth returned, bringing tales of exotic restaurants and the theater. She went to a play! I figured out that at the exact time the curtain rose, I must have been trying to stop June from engaging in texture play in the litter box. I am trying very hard not to begrudge Beth this experience.

Wednesday morning, we opened presents. We’d waited so Noah could watch. He’d been quite taken with the idea that he was “the only one in the whole world” who knew both my “versary” gift to her and hers to me. He kept the secrets faithfully, only letting slip that he thought Beth’s gift to me was better. “But they’re both good,” he added diplomatically. This piqued my curiosity since Beth had hinted she would make up for her absence on the actual day of our anniversary through the gift. Inside a store bought card with a picture of a falling star on it was a card she and Noah made on the computer. It had a photo of the house where I lived during the summer of 1987 on the front and the Rehoboth boardwalk on the inside. “We’re leaving Friday afternoon for Rehoboth Beach,” it said. It also said, “I can’t think of a better way to spend half my life.” Neither can I.

We went to our favorite Mexican restaurant that night to celebrate twenty years with spinach enchiladas and virgin mango daiquiris. At home we ate coffee and vanilla ice cream out of the new ice cream dishes.

The weekend at the beach raced by, as beach weekends do. This was our first summertime trip to the beach since June was a little baby and the first time she was able to really enjoy it. She fell head over heels in love with the sand, the surf, the whole experience. Noah and I spent hours making sand castles and pretending Jack and Annie from the Magic Tree House series (www.randomhouse.com/kids/magictreehouse/) were having adventures in them. This morning as we were headed to breakfast, we passed the guesthouse where I proposed to Beth. She was telling Noah for the umpteenth time to stay on the sidewalk and off the chemically treated lawns. I was a bit ahead, pushing June in the stroller and retrieving her sneakers as she repeatedly removed them and pitched them out onto the sidewalk. I stopped in front of the guesthouse and waited for Beth to catch up. I put my arms around her neck and kissed her. “Will you marry me?” I said.

She smiled and said yes, again.