Believing

We spent the day touring our own city, first adoring the skaters etching Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library, then up Fifth Ave. past the Saks windows to Rockefeller Center and the giant tree and still more skaters. The cold overtook the kids, and we headed east towards Grand Central, a snack, and the subway home.

On the way, just across Fifth, my lovely wife suggested we warm and rest ourselves for just a moment in St. Patrick's Cathedral. We haven't gone to church all that much, and Q and The Boy found themselves awed by the space, just like they're supposed to. (Q said, "I wonder who could touch the ceiling!") We picked a pew, and watched hundreds of people flow in and out. "They have books here," The Boy said. Q had just made a stained-glass-type artwork in school, and she was particularly drawn to the windows. "The windows are beautiful," I whispered to her. "They tell stories" — stories that I don't remember probably as well as I should.

Q and The Boy sleep now; we finish wrapping the last of their gifts. I don't think I believe much in divinities any more, and perhaps never did. I do, though, believe in belief. Watching those lighting candles in transepts for the loved or carting boxes under the constellations in Grand Central or the kids struggling to wait for a myth, I see what believing can do. For me, that is the greater wonder.

Happy Holidays, all.

Saints and thanks

October came to the door costumed and asking for candy, and it seems that I wasn't all that ready. School started, and Q and The Boy held our hands across the streets and rode on our shoulders to their new classrooms. Then we started to make those trips in long sleeves, then jackets, and then the classrooms weren't new. We've even unhangered the heavy coats a few times, left little of our faces for the wind to bother. I went back to work, part-time, here in the city, started over if not upward. And there were lessons in tennis and gymnastics and ballet and chess (which I'll no doubt have something to say about all of that at some point). We gained an hour. Somehow I lost a month.

Much happened, of course. We planned and re-planned costumes: Q went as the witch Kiki from the Miyazaki movie Kiki's Delivery Service, and she was a ringer for the role. The Boy, after no small amount of anguish, settled upon a traditional skeleton with a mask scary enough to make him lift it at the first mirror — just to check, I suppose, that he was still flesh under that menacing bone. The old costumes — like the old fears — usually prove the best. I'd say he made all those inevitable Jedis jealous.

We also fetched pumpkins and cut heads, and the day we did it rained cold. We first went out to a nearby restaurant to meet some old friends in town for the morning, and my lovely wife stayed and caught up while the kids and I went to a local market. We looked over the pumpkins while under our umbrellas. Q and The Boy each went with squat and round, while I picked an especially thick-stemmed one. The thirty pounds of pumpkin didn't go home easily, but we made it.

We've always loved Halloween, as most kids and parents do, and fall in New York tends to remind us why we put up with this city. But October is a tough month now, one I found myself wanting to let lie unwrapped in the bottom of my trick bag. I like to pretend, and I don't mind the company of ghosts. But sometimes it's enough to work the carving knife, to clear seeds and pulp, to make room for a candle.

With October behind us, here's to the month of saints and the week of thanks.

On hiding

Though the evenings, with their low-slung suns and softening shadows, approach something like perfection, Q and The Boy wanted to be inside to hide things. We'd each take turns concealing something (one of many stuffed animals, a wallet, a butterfly clip) in their room while the other two waited in the kitchen eating chips. (Okay, so the chips were my idea.) The two would then hunt for whatever it was, while the hider coached the lookers with "warmer" or "colder." We did this for nearly an hour and a half, and would have kept going if it weren't for the calling beds.

Why do children love to hide?

For fun, I asked Q why she liked this game, and, in true Q fashion, she said that she really didn't find it that fun after all.* The Boy, too busy for the question, just offered an "I don't know" as an explanation.

But Q did say that she liked to hide herself, and I think that answer reveals a lot. It's not the hiding itself that makes the game so enjoyable — after all, it's a persistent nightmare that you'll hide so well that no one will ever find you. Instead, whether hiding themselves or their things, I think it's the knowing something that others don't. Q really starts to giggle when I come near her or to what she's hidden, as if to say "How can he not see me? He's so close but doesn't know that I'm right here."

Perhaps, then, it's that edge between knowing and not knowing — between hidden and found — that triggers the delight. Where did that delight go? When does hiding turn into wanting to disappear?

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*Note: I do not, not for one second, believe this.

Not quite done with 9/11, I suppose

I suppose I'm getting better about the September 11th attacks. I no longer pay much attention to low-banking planes overhead, and we didn't feel like braving the rain for the still-arresting Tribute in Light. I likely wasn't going to say anything about it here either; I've already turned things over in my head here, here, and here.

It's not that we've forgotten. We still think about the kids of the dead, the ones we knew and the ones we didn't. We still live in one big construction site that, from the looks of it, will always be one. We still see the parades — shorter every year — of fire trucks and hallowed slag. The memories are just more distant now, and with Q and The Boy growing right before our eyes, it's hard to look at much else.

But then Facebook (of all things) kicked me back. Last Friday morning, among all the quiz results and posted photos, I saw a status update from a childhood friend of mine that he was in Kuwait waiting to deploy to Iraq. We haven't been all that close for a while now, but we knew each other for many of the years that a lot of books call formative. He's an Army physician with seminary and philosophy training as well, and in the picture he stands in fatigues in a sun-blasted background, huge buses over his shoulder perhaps ready to take him somewhere that I can't quite fathom.

Yes, the wars are still going on, particularly the one that had nothing to do with the hole in this city. May it all end soon and safely, for him and for others. May there be fewer holes in lives.

Washed away

As I recently said, nothing much came of this past* summer, but my hope in September was not misplaced. Just one early September day at the Jersey shore was enough to scrub and buff us back to a healthy shine. Q and The Boy spent nearly four solid hours testing themselves against the waves, with the waves winning more than once.

Standing in the edge of a thing that might as well not have an end, we didn't have to think of anything but how our bodies made an edge with the world.

Tomorrow, it's back to school.

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*!