the dorsal stream

Memorial

2012-01-20T07:07:00.001-05:00

We go up Liberty Street (this choice perhaps deliberate, something America would totally do) to Greenwich, through sluices of concrete blocks to slow movement, to where a surprisingly small number of people point cameras at the construction. The entrance to the 9/11 memorial is laid out to process large crowds, but it’s cold and just after the holidays, and once we present our passes we’re directed past a nearly block-long zig and zag of ropes instead of through it. Everyone and everything tells us to KEEP PASSES OUT, which we do, and they are repeatedly checked. We follow the arrows down a tunnel made from white concrete barricades topped with blue-netted fence to a glass building. A young guard dual wielding hand-held lasers scans our passes. The building turns out to be an airport-style security checkpoint, so we squish our hats and puffy coats into the bins on top of our cameras and phones. We don’t have to remove our shoes, which is good because mine happen to be complicated. The detectors don’t find us or our stuff suspicious (no one really seems to be watching that closely anyway), and we spend an equal amount of time on the other side gearing back up. To exit we must show our passes, which we do, and then we follow more barricades and arrows pointing and making the path up to Ground Zero, this time right along the West Side Highway with New York in a hurry. A guard at the entrance to the memorial proper asks for our passes and, once satisfied that we belong there, waves us into the site.

Most of the area is still a promise, an idea slowly unfolding. The museum, looking like a chipped box sinking on one end, isn’t open yet, and cupping our hands on the glass reveals a deep and broad space with a long way to go. The new swamp oaks stand in place, but they have given up for the season. We all take pictures — The Boy already has his mother’s eye — and the wind searches for our bones through our clothes. I loved to look straight up at a twin tower from its base, the way eyes work bending the top back toward me. You would swear they were built on a dare. But the new main building, now thankfully referred to simply as 1 World Trade Center, doesn’t have a precarious thing about it. Its heavy base leads the eye to compress it, to hold it down. Perhaps when I can stand close in the finished plaza I will see things differently.

The waterfalls, however, are complete. I remember the fraught memorial design competition, and of the finalists, this one was not my choice.* I thought the emphasis on the tower footprints was too literal and heavy-handed, dwelling on the holes blown in lives and not the healing. Still, realized, they do make a powerful impression. Each is a sunk black box with water falling geometrically for about forty feet then pooling into a smaller square in the center. Lights run around the base edge of the pool, and the water coming down carries the light up into it, multiplying it in interesting ways. The names of the dead, so many names, have been cut into the black metal that frames the waterfalls. I pull out my phone and use the memorial’s web app to look up my wife’s law-school roommate. We locate his name near a corner of the north waterfall, and as the evening comes on we can see it glow from below. I have read that the sound of the water was designed to muffle the city and to promote contemplation. But when I close my eyes, the evenness of the roar conjures up airliners in flight — cruising, though, not accelerating, not approaching on a violent angle. Still, I assume this was not intended.

And contemplation does not bring comfort. Memorials can provide places to offload grief, but so much remains unfinished even now, ten years out from 9/11. My thoughts about the attacks, ruminated into neater shapes over the years, have begun to show their original ragged edges. The war in Afghanistan, becoming medieval in its duration and destruction, is somehow older than Q and The Boy. I remain mostly proud of my city, less so of my country that became a wildly flung fist. I don’t know what to do or to think about any of it.

After only a little while, the cold wins, and we go back through the barricades and out into New York to eat. Always go back to the body. We order burgers and fries just a few blocks over at a place we’ve been wanting to try, and we crack peanuts from their shells while we wait for the food to arrive. Construction and change are everywhere; this neighborhood can’t become itself fast enough.

Remember, but don’t let memories get in the way. Write down the names where they can be touched and traced. Yes, a pool, too, but a small one with its own shape. And leave the surface still so that it can borrow the blue of the sky, can reflect the rising buildings and the office workers on their lunch. Make the place easy to enter and cross. Invite the whole loud, living city here, on foot and by train. Remember why we dig graves so deep and cover them with earth.

Most of all, make people look up.

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*I am, of course, precisely nobody.

Giving season

2012-01-05T06:40:00.000-05:00

My lovely wife and I have promised ourselves bigger gifts for some time now, but that promise has had a fair amount of give in it. We’ve talked about moving for a few years, either to a larger apartment in the city or to somewhere altogether different, perhaps even to a place with yards and cars and weeds thriving in the sidewalk cracks. But this giving season we finally made good: My wife, who tracks nearly every apartment in the city, saw a three-bedroom open up in our building (and price range). The rents drop in the winter, mainly because people don’t like to move in the cold and the middle of the school year. Neither the cold nor school presented issues for us, and the third bedroom presented opportunities.

It was all rather sudden. We looked at the apartment the Saturday night before Thanksgiving and decided the next day to take it. This year, unlike most, we had booked travel to Southern California to spend the holiday with my sister-in-law and her family. Our work and school schedules makes holiday travel tough, but they just moved into a new big house with lots of room for us and for new memories. We know what it’s like to have small kids while far from family, and there aren’t many opportunities to get my wife’s family together. We found ourselves packing what we could of everything else along with our suitcases before flying out on Monday.

Thanksgiving on the opposite coast, though quick, was just how it was supposed to be. We all made bits of the feast, the shared work in their large open kitchen the sweetest part of the meal. Q crafted most of the name cards, including one for my brother-in-law’s father who came for part of the time without telling his wife.* (After saying his thanks and goodbyes, he left the table, then came back to quickly slip the name card into his pocket.) We went to Sea World, and the kids eventually agreed to pose for pictures in a giant snow globe. Since we traveled both ways off-peak, the planes were empty enough for us each to have our own row. I give thanks for the visit.

We returned late Friday just after Thanksgiving to a half-boxed house. The new place had become ours while we were away, and we started taking things up, small cart by small cart, all weekend. The Boy began mourning the old place in earnest, which is understandable given it’s where we’ve spent the last eight-and-a-half years, including all of Q’s life and most of his.** My wrist was still fixing itself in a cast, and I wasn’t much help with the heavier stuff — we have an absurd number of books — but our building’s maintenance staff muscled the big items*** (and most of the small) up the padded service elevator into the new place. No moving truck, no layers of subcontractors between us and our destination. My wife spent moving day on the new floor unpacking and helping place the big things as they came in. Which meant that Q and The Boy left their shared space for school and came home to separate rooms that each looked as if they had been lived in for years.

We unpacked our traditions in the new place just as quickly. We determined the apartment’s natural spot for a Christmas tree (in the corner joint where the big windows meet), and strung our lights across the limbs and the jambs. My wife and I found fresh hiding places for the kids’ presents until they appeared under the tree disguised to be hefted and shook. We like to dedicate a good part of December to connecting with people, and we kept up with that, too. We spent Christmas Eve with our good friends and their daughters gloriously failing to build gingerbread houses, as we have for the past several Christmas Eves. We had new friends and their daughters over for my wife’s crème brûlée French toast, which is as French and good as it sounds. Q and the boy were like squatters in their friends’ home across the street.

The kids didn’t ask for much for Christmas, never do, and they deserve lots. We strove (like always) to find a rough mean between asking and deserving, and grandparents and aunts and uncles generously helped fill out our tree to the deserving point. Both Q and The Boy loved their new LEGO sets (Hagrid’s Hut and LEGO Architecture Falling Water respectively), the magnets maneuverable into surprising lattices, the books (including another volume of Calvin and Hobbes), the kits for making and spying, the obligatory but necessary winter clothes, and many other wonderful things. My parents gave my wife and I a box of Kansas barbecue, which we, reluctantly, shared with the kids. And we appreciated the familiar park and river from new directions and heights.

To give a gift is to entertain another’s beliefs and desires. We as a species do this so often and so well just making our way everyday, though, that I think we tend to forget the magic of it, and the difficulty. To give well — to give, as we say, a thoughtful gift — is to inhabit a whole mind as it is in motion and not as one pictures it. Now and again I still see Q and The Boy as they were when they fit easily on my shoulders and lap, even though these days The Boy and my wife can share shirts. I like to think of myself as still better described by what I have yet to do than by what I have done. All of these ideas have had to give.

My wife and I always find it difficult to give to ourselves, but with the new apartment we have more than promises this year. We live in the same building, but everything seems new enough to give us the change we needed. We’ve made a few promises, too, of course. We want to take the kids somewhere new, perhaps to Paris or London, or to where you can see right through the ocean to the sand. We could also use a new mattress and fewer broken bones. And I want to finally let go of at least one book and see where it lands. Might as well give it all a try.

Happy and Merry, everyone.

_________________________

*Long story.

**His mourning consisted mainly of crying quietly in his old room’s closet with the accordion door closed. My lovely wife and I decided to take these moments as indicative of how much he enjoyed the place. And further confirmation that the boy is as subject to sentimentality as his father. He still hasn’t quite run to the end of his grief — or so he says while ensconced in his own room behind a sign reading “Boys Only: Enter & DIE!”

**Piano!

Another break

2011-12-02T15:31:00.001-05:00

The days start and end dark now, even after falling back. When the light comes up strong, it still slides in from a fall sun that seems already on its way back down into evening. October and November were mainly a sum of routines (apart from a few wonderful occasions that I'll return to some other time), the new ones from September now old and idling in the lower part of out brains.

Here's a non-routine thing that happened, though. As I mentioned a while back, my son broke his arm for the third time over the summer. Turns out he wasn't the only one with a bone that needed fixing.

I starting playing basketball again last winter after something like a twenty-year hiatus. These were solid pickup games with some other dads around the same age as me. Back in May, I went up for a shot, got undercut in the air, and took a hard fall. I caught myself with my hands and, as it turned out, made the shot but popped a small bone* in my left wrist.

Like nearly everyone (the Internet now tells me), I thought I sprained my hand, and after a few weeks of wrapping and icing, I didn't think much about it. We went to the beach, traveled a bit, had as normal of a summer as we could with a broken-armed son. I even kept playing basketball.

I don't like going to doctors — never have — but after another, smaller fall, three months of persistent pain, and insistence by my usually correct wife, I decided to see a wrist guy. My appointment was on a Wednesday. After looking over my bones, he suggested surgery the Friday just two days away, which I agreed to and underwent.

I could tell you about the early morning check-in for surgery that began with an Applebee's-style beeper, or about how weeks later the doctor pulled the two pins from my wrist with a regulation pair of pliers, the red-rubber-handled kind that could've come from a truck-bed toolbox. I could mention how the ligament he also fixed in surgery has slipped a bit out of alignment, which may mean new cuts and screws and casts later on. I could tell you about how I have seen myself as doctors do, as a body to which consciousness is remotely and tenuously fixed, even though I know better.

But I find myself unsure why I make a show of telling you anything. Perhaps seeing a crease in one's own bone — in my hand, my main hinge with the world — is just the kind of thing people find themselves talking about. Or perhaps I've gotten used to telling strangers quick stories when they ask about my cast and tell me back their memories of injury, ostensibly as a comfort.

Most likely in even this short telling I can convert an explanation of silence into an excuse for not writing, for no longer being young.

___________________________

*More precisely and in doctor talk, that would be my left scaphoid.

Fine dining

2011-09-30T14:07:00.000-04:00

Recently, my lovely wife and I were invited to a friend's birthday party. A real adult thing. Sure, we know the honoree and her husband because of our kids (their eldest son and daughter have roughly the same ages, interests, and locations as The Boy and Q), but this night out was kid free.

The 16-person dinner was held at the restaurant Blue Hill, a city satellite of a full-on farm, 30 miles upstate in Pocantico Hills, that grows its own everything. Blue Hill New York lounges in the garden level of an old row house near Washington Square, a space once occupied by a speakeasy.* The couple had reserved the restaurant’s "Garden Room," a remote, lovely space just back of the compact kitchen and a row of waitstaff queued like planes waiting for the runway at LaGuardia. When we arrived, a slight (thoroughly non-farmer) waiter butlered hors d'oeuvres of raw and remarkably sweet grape tomatoes from a white bowl, and rows of lettuces, vivid miniature squashes, and carrots sprouting greens from a line of nails in a foot of barnwood. They were obviously proud of their ingredients, and rightly so.

The rest of the tasting menu didn't disappoint either. Each dish (beets, poached eggs, lamb — they kept coming) reacquainted us with how good food in New York can be, with the possibilities of gustation when really talented people dedicate themselves to it. The time itself was just as delectable. We all knew each other in different degrees and ways, and in between bites and wine sips, everyone talked around their kids as much as about them, working instead on the unknown and forgotten. One of the party was off to her 20th high-school reunion the next day, which, predictably, triggered ripples of recollection of once big events and looks that now to our older selves appear proper sized and ludicrous.

The meal closed with small scoops of rose hip ice cream on a plate as big as a shield. Dots of fruit complemented the ice cream, and together we determined they were strawberries. It was as if each berry had been delicately peeled or buffed lovingly by an angel or anyway cooked super slowly right up to the point of collapsing into the idea of strawberries. When all the dishes were empty, we hugged and kissed and wished well and caught a ride with friends home to our kids who had been asleep for hours. A truly lovely evening.

My wife and I don’t go out adult-wise all that much, and under our usual metric, the Blue Hill party easily banked us about six months' worth of big-person time. But then more good friends that we don't see often enough invited us out to join them and another couple for a birthday dinner. How could we not go?

This time we went to Le Cirque, a New York fixture from the 70's, the kind of place where the menu items come sourced with creation dates and chef names. My wife had been to Le Cirque years ago when the restaurant was still in the Palace Hotel on 50th and Madison, when she was still at a large law firm, and when firms like hers still used the city’s finest menus as recruiting tools. I remember her bringing home this delightful chocolate stove, complete with two miniature pots filled with some kind of fruit reduction.** We both thought the whole thing too pretty to eat, and we stashed it in our miniature West Village freezer until the cold burned the flavor out of it.

Le Cirque now occupies a grand chunk of the Bloomberg building's bottom floor on East 58th Street. The interior manages to look simultaneously modern and old money (which it is). But when our seats were ready, we passed through the curved dining room to a lone table in the kitchen. My wife and I knew we were there for the chef's tasting menu, but we didn't know we'd be in sight of the chef while tasting it.

Unlike Blue Hill, Le Cirque's kitchen was massive and populated. Directly behind our table ran a long stainless steel counter, and for hours we watched the chef and sous-chefs assemble and wipe drips off the rims of dishes that waiters took out, shot-put style, on heavy silver trays. The guy off to our right spent the night piling parsley-flecked fries into bowls that went, along with beautiful sliders, to people who were sadly not us. Still, our meal — all six courses — was its own revelation of hard choices: lobster salad or raw tuna with clementines, foie gras ravioli or lobster risotto, scallops layered with slices of black truffle the width and breadth of half dollars, Wagyu beef or baby chicken.***

Our dining companions were old friends from our first days in New York 18 years ago, and it didn't take long for us to eat away the time that had passed since we were last together. We remembered ourselves before and after kids and asked each other whether we preferred making to eating good food. (Myself, I'm almost always taken with process over product, and I particularly appreciate the mysterious alchemy of kitchens.) And we drank lots and lots of wine chosen for us by a woman with a French job title.

We completed our recent menu of fine dining experiences with our anniversary dinner. We celebrate our anniversary each year with a family night out at nice place, and this year we went to Kittichai, an upscale Thai restaurant in the Thompson Hotel in SoHo. Our kids love a good restaurant almost as much as we do (and The Boy, given his ever sharpening eye for design, probably even more so), and my wife and I genuinely enjoy their company. The space was super cool, all provocatively bottom-lit golden silk and teak, and in the center of the main dining room, a pond with candles on lily pads circling magically and endlessly. Orchids were everywhere, including the one that garnished Q's puckery lime drink and, later, her ear. We ate ourselves silly again, this time short ribs in whiskey barbeque sauce, chicken in green curry, chili-smoked hanger steak, and Valrhona chocolate cake served in a banana leaf. By the end, only the creased leaf was left.

After Q and The Boy took their time marveling over the rows of orchids in jars at the restaurant's entrance, we staggered out into the day’s last light. At first, we wanted to walk home along the river and the sunset, but on our way west we saw that with just a little wait we could catch a bus home. Q cradled three orchid blossoms and The Boy talked lemongrass and longbeans as the bus made its way back to our own kitchen, the one with the red stool that helps them participate in the doughs and the dishes.

And if I had room for another dessert, I might have a little of the two "Le Cirque" Stove Cakes still sitting on the top shelf in our fridge.

_________________________

*Funny that so many restaurants claim to occupy former speakeasies. Exclusivity and myth power New York as much as anywhere else.

**Originally conceived of and crafted by the deliriously skilled chocolatier Jacques Torres.

***Okay, everyone opted for the beef over the chicken without hesitation or regret.

Evacuvacation

2011-09-05T22:10:00.000-04:00

The coverage came in long before the storm. Several days out we watched a variety of Weather Channel pundits point, over and over again, at the red stripe that Irene was likely to follow, and New York was squarely in the red. As Irene grew broad and began lumbering up the coast, those pundits spoke about New York in lower tones. Then a Weather Channel correspondent — one of those guys who reports on location from driving rains — starting filing segments from our neighborhood. Cue the nervous laughter.

Our concern really began to swell, though, when the mayor started saying things, too. We live in northern Battery Park City, an area full of new buildings, and I didn’t worry that much about whether our building would withstand the wind. The neighborhood, however, sits right on the Hudson and squarely in what the city calls Hurricane Evacuation Zone A, or the area at greatest risk for flooding during a hurricane.*

As the week progressed, the red stripe didn’t bend out to sea like usual, and on Wednesday the mayor began encouraging residents of Zone A to find other places to sit out the storm. The kids and I went in search of purpose and new flashlights, and my lovely wife and I started thinking about where we could go. The Weather Channel correspondent still filed from our neighborhood, but now he held his hand up as high as he could when talking projected storm-surge levels. A picture of Irene from space made the rounds on Twitter and Facebook, looking like a big ball of cotton hanging out of the continent’s ear. We canceled our weekend beach and U.S. Open plans.

Then things got real serious. The mayor said that if projections held for a category 1 Irene to roll up 5th Avenue, the city was going to shut down all subway and bus service — a precaution never taken in the transit system’s century+ existence. The mandatory evacuation order for Zone A came down from City Hall on Friday morning, and it was official. We had to be out of our apartment by 5 p.m. Saturday.

We don’t have any family nearby, so we thought of those most familiar. Many good friends in the city quickly and happily opened their homes to us.** We also received an invitation from our good friends who live in northern New Jersey. Given that Q and The Boy love their kids, have more or less grown up with them, and had already stayed overnight at their house, we thought that was the best choice. And if a huge tree fell across their roof, I could help hang tarp or something similarly man-related.

All day Friday the city was pushing people to leave their homes well in advance of the mandatory deadline and the transit shutdown. My wife had taken the day off, and I left work early so that we could have emptier trains out to New Jersey. We filled a single bag with just a few clothes, a camera, our stash of passports and certificates, and the hard drive that contains a copy of our entire digital life, including over 260 GB of photos.*** Q stuffed her backpack with her important blankets and some books; The Boy packed several flashlights and books, including 100 Most Dangerous Things on the Planet and 100 Most Awesome Things on the Planet, each with the hurricane page sticky-noted. We walked out of our apartment and our neighborhood, at least half expecting never to see either in the same state again. I said that we were leaving on our "evacuvacation" in an attempt to joke everyone into feeling a little safer.

Friday and and most of Saturday in New Jersey were weirdly beautiful. We watched the news on TV and our phones constantly, watched people (stupidly, I think) talking about how bad the storm was as they struggled to stand against it on beaches in North Carolina and then Virginia. We ordered in pizza. Our friends have a pool and a trampoline, and the kids jumped one way and another.

The rain came in Saturday afternoon, soft at first, and then strong and steady, and then stronger still. Irene spun like a pinwheel firework throughout the night and Sunday morning, flinging bands of yellow and red weather all up and down the Mid-Atlantic, but the winds never picked up enough to take down the trees. To our kids' disappointment, we never had to rely on the flashlights.

By Sunday afternoon, the rain moved north and a stronger wind finally came around. My wife and I took all the kids for a walk around the neighborhood to have a look at any damage. There wasn’t much to see, a few smaller branches brought down here and there, maybe a streak of dirt where the heavy rain took some lawn down a storm drain. The lack of damage was almost shocking, especially compared to what we had seen happen to the north and south of us.

When we returned to Zone A and our apartment on Monday afternoon, not a leaf looked out of place. We slid the important papers back into their place, reconnected the hard drive to our main computer. As we downloaded the photos from the weekend, we saw instead of moments of loss, kids caught smiling mid-bounce, a group of them mixing up biscotti dough together in the warm kitchen, pairs walking hand in hand in the sun, even the finished Scrabble boards from the two nights the adults played. (My wife and I were crushed by our hosts both times.) We really had been treated to something like a vacation, the very opposite of worry.

I set the computer to back itself up; we wanted to take this weekend with us should there be a next time.

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*We’re definitely going to have to move before all the glaciers melt. The place is eventually doomed.
**For a stay of who knows how long in smallish to definitely small apartments. Really incredible people.
***See? Serious.

Father's Day Break

2011-07-26T06:02:00.015-04:00

Father's Day weekend in New York this year was just beautiful, all early summer sun and soft breeze, some of the city's best days. The grandparents (my mother and father) were in town to see Q and The Boy going about their usual business; being half the U.S. away has meant that my parents haven’t just been around our kids that much in a non-holiday context. It was a good time for them to come: We had much on our usual schedule, including the culmination of The Boy's big second-grade project on birds,* Q's final gymnastics class for the summer, and The Boy's last baseball game of the season. And since this was the wrap-up weekend for gymnastics and baseball and (more or less) school, there would be medals and trophies and a much higher tolerance for holding still and smiling for photos.

We managed almost all of that — until The Boy broke his arm for the third time.

Okay. I was across the neighborhood with Q on the Saturday before Father's Day when I got the call, but here's what apparently happened: The Boy was riding his new bike in the park, the one with a larger frame that better fits his larger frame. He’s fast on this one, but he knows the area well, so we let him speed up ahead and circle back. The park paths were full of pedestrians, and when he came up behind a large group of them, he rang his bell, but they didn’t make room. The Boy swerved onto the shoulder to go around them, but the wide-set bricks caught his wheels and channeled him right into a lamppost at pretty much full speed. He tried to catch himself on the way down, as anyone would, and snapped the big bone just above his right wrist. Things could have been worse, of course. He could have fallen into the street and a passing cab, could have had an end of bone jutting up through his skin.

When Q and I arrived running from the playground, I could see the fall in his wrist. He could see it, too, having had some experience in this area,** and sobs of pain and knowledge were roaring out of him. This was obviously emergency-room worthy, and my wife and Grandma took Q and The Boy’s bike back home while I flagged down a cab to New York Presbyterian Hospital, the one with the Best Pediatric ER according to a few Important Industry-Related Magazines. The Saturday evening traffic was light, thankfully, but the pain and our thoughts of the coming cast made the ride seem interminable. Having become a part of the story, even the driver tried to console The Boy as he ached out of the cab at the ER entrance.

By the time The Boy had made it through the paperwork and diagnostic X-ray phases of the ER, my wife had arrived.*** The grandparents were looking after Q (or perhaps it’s better to say that she was looking after them) so that we both could be with The Boy. In a sense, I suppose, they got what they came for—to help mitigate the unplanned jags of life.

The fall had kinked his arm, and the pediatric orthopedist needed to set it straight. The nurse first aimed two light doses of morphine at his pain while we waited for the on-call doctor. Then for the procedure itself, a doctor informed us in calm tones (and asked us to acknowledge via signature of being so informed) that they were going to “moderately sedate” The Boy, which, worse case, might cause him to “lose his will to breathe.”**** We were also informed (this time in a signature-independent way) that though he wouldn’t remember anything, he would still be somewhat awake and might very well cry out when the bone was maneuvered back into proper position. Given the option to stay for the screaming or step out, my wife and I decided that we’d look over the bulletin boards in the hallway and start thinking about ways to shift much of our summer around his cast.

It didn't take long. By the time we successfully distracted ourselves, they had The Boy's reset arm hanging by his thumb and were wrapping it in quick-setting blue fiberglass. He was still sedated, head and eyes rolling. He didn't seem to recognize us or even know we were there, though later he would report seeing his mother and two of everything else. There wasn’t much to do but watch everything work on him, and since it was getting late, I offered to go home to put Q at ease and to bed while my wife saw the visit through.

My first Father's Day in 2003 wasn't supposed to be my first Father's Day. The Boy entered this world a perilous two months early at New York Presbyterian and then kicked himself into a hold on life at its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. That first month my wife and I walked 68th Street so many times, as often as we could, new parents to a strange being with a confounded future. I was surprised to find how much that same trip back downtown, eight years later, felt like walking on a bruise.*****

The Boy returned home from the ER with drugs still lingering in his blood. Q, worried and sleepless, went with me to meet him and my wife in our building's lobby. He hadn't eaten for more than nine hours, and he had thrown up in the cab the little bit of ginger ale given to him by the nurse. He wasn't walking well, and I carried him, wet and unexpectedly stiff, from elevator to home. I hadn't held him in that way for some time. We wrestled off his shirt for a quick bath; he still had a monitor relay stuck to his chest. He hadn't come back into himself yet, his body unable to remember the step into his own bathtub.

As I helped him dress for bed that night, his new right arm heavy and foreign, he said, “Sorry, dad, you have to do everything for me.” I can't think of a more unnecessary apology; I would make myself a house around him.

It's been five weeks since the break, and his arm will return to him in two days. We have a trip to the beach already set for the coming weekend and still over a month of summer left to use any way we choose. I tell this story not to demonstrate that Every Day is Father’s Day or that fathers are made by their sons, though both may be true. I tell it only to cast these days right, to fix them in the proper shape.

I hope you all had a happy Father's Day.

_______________________________

*I always found birds boring until The Boy brought home all his fine work. Now, I must admit, I'm slightly more interested.

**Did I mention this is his THIRD break?

***Funny story. The hardest part of an ER visit, I think, is always waiting for the hospital to cycle through its procedures, and I was doing my best to be supportive and comforting and to speed things along. Luckily, The Boy was moved through the early steps and rooms fairly quickly, including radiology — the cold, cavernous room with the amazingly articulated ray gun. So we’re there, and the tech gets The Boy positioned as best he can given the pain and current range of mobility, and then the tech and I stepped behind the leaded glass for the zap of radiation. Just as he moved to take the picture, I leaned back against the wall, accidentally hitting a red muffin-sized button reading “EMERGENCY SHUT OFF,” which killed the giant machine and the controlling computer. The tech said he’d never had this happen before, and he had to go get help to reboot the room, unsure of how long it would take. There was talk of moving The Boy elsewhere for x-rays, given what could be a long wait. I wanted to page a specialist in stupidity to give me a huge shot of something painful right in my eye. After just a couple of minutes, though, they were able to get everything up and running, and I managed not to get in the way for the rest of the evening. Well, it's a funny story now.

****Possibly annoying note: For us (and not for, say, dolphins), regular breathing arguably doesn’t depend upon the will. Sure, I can hold my breathe (will myself not to breathe) and can breathe more deeply or faster if I choose. Just plain breathing, however, requires no willing on my part. Losing the will to breathe, then, sounds exceedingly ominous to me, something super important but poorly understood. Yes, I’m deflecting here — even now — in my own way.

*****I also was to leave for a week-long conference at Harvard the Monday after Father's Day, which meant taking the Amtrak to South Station in Boston, and then the Red Line in to Central Square, a groove I wore smooth over ten years ago when I was commuting weekly, alone and lonely, to a Harvard teaching job. The whole thing was like going down a memory lane of misery.

Birthday wishes for mom

2011-07-09T22:48:00.002-04:00

Today is my lovely and talented wife's birthday. (I won't say how old she is, for the usual reasons. Besides, were you to see and meet her, I bet you couldn't guess within ten years of the actual number.) The thing about getting to know a person as well as I've come to know my wife, a person as good as her, is that I can see the distance between what she deserves and what I can give her. We all owe her much, under any sort of accounting, but we didn't try to make a dent in the debt so much let her know we know she's owed. Q crafted a card picturing the two of them together, and The Boy, his best drawing arm still fixed from palm to armpit, focused instead on the intangibles like hugs and kisses. I brought back extra-good coffee to start the day. The three of us threatened to make her a Fancy Birthday Cake of her own,* but we all decided it was better to go out for, among other things, a nice lunch instead.

The myth of this particular birthday** is that if it's not exactly the time when a person is supposed to start looking back, it's at least when she should begin turning her head in that general direction. But given our life's propulsion — the steady forward force of Q and The Boy most of all — attending to what's been makes little sense at the moment. We've got a lot to look forward to with her, and for a long time.

Happy birthday, mom, from all of us. We love you.

______________________
*Something along the lines of this or this.
**Still not saying which one, so just stop with the speculation already.

8

2011-06-06T22:49:00.050-04:00

The Boy turned eight today. All the schedules involved made it hard to celebrate the day dead on, so we flipped things around from Q's order of business. We'll have his version of our new birthday tradition next weekend — dinner at The Ninja restaurant in Tribeca — and we started the festivities with his party this past weekend. The Boy remains taken with LEGOs, and he’s gotten into making movies, so we together decided to have a LEGO movie-making party. The idea was to have 7-9 kids (including Q) bring a favorite LEGO minifigure to star in a movie of their own. We would come up with a few general story ideas and leave room for the kids to riff a little on their own. Stop motion takes too much time and special attention to pull off in the window we had, so we talked ourselves into being happy with seeing hands (and whatever) in the frame as the action unfolded. We’d do most of the filming in the good light and weather of our building’s roof deck, which, with its bushes and trees and rocks, could provide jungles and mountains as backdrops for their imaginations. I would then stitch whatever bits end up working into a skit-show feature. I even worked up my post-production skills in case we wanted to add in some laser-blaster effects and/or explosions. And since The Boy has been poking decently around with GarageBand (a fantastic music-making application for Apple devices), I suggested that he make some music for the opening or closing credits. We’d post the final result to Facebook and Vimeo and YouTube and then (who knows?) go viral-ish.

A solid plan (except, admittedly, for the going viral part). The Boy did his part by coming up with a great action-movie track, along with a couple of clever skit premises: Clone troopers take a coffee break and a bunch of minifigures were ordered to bring Darth Vader a trident but mistakenly brought back a pack of Trident gum. Punishment ensues. I suggested that at the end, all the minifigures could spring a surprise birthday party on The Boy’s chosen minifigure, and he added that the little guy could be so surprised that he (literally) falls to pieces. Pretty good, right?

It should be obvious what’s coming. The seven boys (plus Q) all liked the general movie-making idea, but it turned out to be impossible for them not to be eight-year-old boys. They’re all good, smart kids, but the dynamic of them together ran quickly toward chaos. When I mentioned one of my ideas to a kid just a few minutes in, he responded — like some stock character right out of a tween TV show — “BORing.” Okay, I said, let’s hear their ideas, which included:

Everyone is fighting a war and then one guy has to pee, so they stop the whole war until he comes back
China starts to take over the world with its coffee because its coffee is so good
A cobbled-together LEGO creation one kid was calling “Wine Guy” runs around spraying everything with wine
LEGO dancing with the stars where the stars come down from the sky and the minifigures dance with them**

Whenever I tried to steer them toward making any sort of short, even with one of their non-boring ides, they wanted to toss in everything at once.

Above all, they were each interested in making the others laugh. (I assume this is what most mid-list sitcom writers' rooms sound like.) I should have recognized earlier than I did that they were just enjoying each other’s company, trying to better each other in laughs and volume. Once I did finally let go of my idea of what they should be doing, I was able to appreciate the inspired mess.

Some things did go as planned. My lovely and talented wife captured the general theme of the day with an excellent LEGO and Star Wars inspired cake, with an impressive TIE fighter on top and minifigures from both sides of the force at attention. The fighter and figures stood on a cake base frosted in azure buttercream, which looked super futuristic and cool.**

The force was definitely with my wife on this one

Even these many years later, after he was thrown into us early, I’m still a little surprised that he has made it this far and in this wonderful way. I don’t think like this often, don’t count blessings or puzzle over them. I don’t read new studies of premature and low-weight birth, and I’ve forgotten the old ones. I don’t have to pretend that rocking my child while respecting cables and tubes is the most natural thing in the world. I had to look up the word ‘gavage’ to write this sentence. I don’t let his single-digit, gym-teacher-calculated BMI percentile nag. I don’t take mistakes or struggles as portents of things broken when he was most fragile. I just don’t. Don’t have to.

Instead, I get to marvel at how The Boy reflects the better parts of a person back, as charismatic people often do. He’s gotten tall — his head now just starting over his mother’s shoulder — has a solid baseball swing that he more often then not takes with a the right amount of seriousness. Has a temper and can be too hard on himself and quickly embarrassed. Has given us the luxury of merely worrying about the usual things, and not even that much about those.

Happy birthday, son. We love you and are proud of you.
_________________________
*Okay, I actually thought that was a pretty good one.
**The Boy loved the color so much that he requested cupcakes for his class frosted in the same blue.

Daughter's/Mother's Day

2011-05-17T23:34:00.015-04:00

Her finest cake yet?

My pockets harbor fleets of Q's gum-wrapper boats.* While I'm busy chewing and not thinking about chewing, she's walking and folding (and chewing). And after what seems like an instant, she holds up the small ocean of her hand with a tiny boat at sea in it.

Which is one reason why we decided (with Q's enthusiastic approval) on an origami and candy sushi making birthday party for her this year. Both Q and The Boy like paper crafts, but Q especially enjoys the rigor of origami, with its step-wise instructions and nested complications. (The Boy still prefers LEGOs and the improvisations they afford.) And candy sushi has been a favorite treat at their parties for a few years now. My wife thought the kids might enjoy making it and taking it away in a personalized Chinese take-out container — something I'm pretty much certain that all New York kids are first-hand familiar with.

My lovely wife has become something of a master at party planning over the years, and throwing a good kids birthday party is appreciably difficult. It takes a certain amount of guessing, since the right amount of time needs to be filled with party fun/activities that should respect the guests' skills and spans of attention. (Otherwise, you'll find kids scarfing all around your neck at the same, loud time letting you know that their whatever doesn't work.**) As she demonstrated again this year, my wife has the right mix of creativity, steeliness, and perfectionism that leads to genuine good times in our miniscule apartment. We kept the guest list small as before, around 10 kids, which is just about our apartment's capacity — at least if you want to do anything beyond yelling. We chose three origami projects of increasing difficulty, figuring we'd get to two, which turned out to be on the money. Given the general party theme, we started with a beginner-level origami carp that everyone was able to follow along into completion with little trouble. Then Q showed her peers how to fold a paper boat. She was a great teacher — good pace and patience, happy to help strugglers. She seemed to be enjoying the teaching as much as the doing (note: teaching is definitely a form of doing, cliche notwithstanding), and I was really proud of her.

Then came the candy-sushi making. My lovely wife had assembled all the ingredients beforehand, and each kid only had to spread out a fruit roll up (the seaweed), put a rectangle of warmish Rice Krispie treat on top, put a few Twizzler whips inside and a Swedish fish or two, and roll the thing into a log. My wife then cut each kid's log into rolls and put them in her or his takeout box. The takeout containers full of tiny-hand-rolled sushi, together with the paper creations and a cute, Japanese origami kit, made for the goody bag that the kids themselves largely made. The cake, as usual, was gorgeous: lemon, four layers, with blue buttercream frosting. My wife found this fake water lily flower in Chinatown, and used the lily-pad part as the stage for some seriously good-looking candy sushi and sashimi of her making. Several moms stayed the duration, enjoying each other and the leisure of watching their children engaged in something they didn't have to produce or direct.

Q's party took much of the weekend's oxygen, but it wasn't, of course, the only attention-worthy event. Perhaps it's fitting that we had a birthday party the Saturday before Mother's Day, though we don't need any additional evidence that the kids' mother deserves a heaven of her own. We appreciated her as we usually appreciate members of our family, which is to say with favorite foods and good coffee and some lovely drawings by the kids taped into frames they also made themselves. Life shuffled on, too; there were still Q's yoga class and The Boy's baseball game, among other things. I wanted to take everyone out to a fancy place for dinner, but after the usual negotiations, we settled for eating sushi (real this time) on our floor picnic-style and watching a Star Wars. We didn't really settle, in other words, or at least I hope my wife doesn't think so.

I like traditions and holidays, mainly because they're ways we share memory through action, remaking them, too, in the remembering. I suppose that some things can't be adequately celebrated regardless of the gift — I'd put a year in someone's life and mothers squarely in this category. But I think that's as it should be.

Plate a piece of cake, crease a square of paper, hand them to another. Make the good stories a little longer.

Happy birthday, and Happy Mother's Day.

____________________
*Just one of the many things in my pockets from Q. See, e.g., "Aboutness" from a little while back.
**Which is another way of saying that you have to respect your own limitations, too, or otherwise there might be a problem with the robot.

Q = 6

2011-05-03T23:10:00.003-04:00

This past Earth Day, our daughter Q turned 6. The date merely made official the changes we've been witnessing lately: Q has stretched up out of her old clothes and into a whole new set of adjectives: willowy, lissome, striking — words at ease around women. I probably see those words coming for her long before others do even as I resist them (and will likely do so long after I need to). But Q is, I suppose, all of those and more besides, which is to say herself as we've come to know her, still sharply funny and clever and resolute.

Because her birthday proper fell on Good Friday and Easter weekend, we've set her (again, small) party for this weekend.* Still, we celebrated her on her actual birthday, too, just the four of us. My lovely wife had a wonderful suggestion for a new tradition to launch this year: The birthday boy or girl chooses a restaurant for his or her birthday dinner, and both Q and The Boy got quickly behind this idea. It's genius, really, given that it's a great and not unsubtle way to privilege experiences over things while giving us a chance to do a thing we all love, which is eat. Q has been extremely fond of sushi lately,** and we were a little surprised when she picked Indian food. But we all like that, too, and together we settled on a local, slightly nicer place than our go-to Indian restaurant that we've walked by countless times over years but have never been to.

Q made an event of it, as we knew she would. She wore one of her favorite dresses, the aquamarine silk one that ties in the back, and patent-leather Mary Janes. Hair was braided. My wife and I also fancied up when we came home early from work, she with a dress of her own and me with a tie of Q's choosing. The Boy even easily agreed to a collared shirt.

The restaurant was likewise properly dressed, with heavy cotton napkins and pounded-copper chargers at each place setting, and a latticed candle centerpiece that threw small stars on our faces. The ceiling was crisscrossed with runners that reminded me of a howdah. Apart from a couple up front and a family a few tables over, we had the place to ourselves. (Most Indian and Chinese restaurants in our neighborhood make their business through delivery.) They had the waitstaff for a full house, though, and we felt well attended to, especially once the head waitress learned that we had come because of Q's birthday. At the end of the meal, they brought out a special candle-lit dessert — a disc of something tasting like carrot cake orbited by bits of fried, honey-soaked dough — and all sang "Happy Birthday." Q found it hard to stop smiling long enough to blow out the flame.

As we crossed the streets back home, she fit her hand, a thing as quick and alive as she, into mine. Six will too soon become seven, then we'll stop counting years on fingers, then she'll cross streets on her own, then she'll likely hold hands with someone new for different kinds of crossings. Knowing her as I do, I can picture roles for her adult self — first ever Supreme Court Chief Justice/Gold Medal Gymnast, e.g. — but however she realizes herself, these are days I will return to.

Happy birthday, Q. We love you and are proud of you.

____________________
*Theme: origami and candy sushi party. More about same later.
**See note above and our growing stack of receipts from Junior Sushi 2.

Losing stories

2011-04-11T17:19:00.008-04:00

I heard very recently that my aunt, Alice Good, died a few Sundays back. There was a certain amount of surprise involved: Not so long ago, she was being treated for what everyone thought was persistent and nasty arthritis when a full-body scan revealed her body shot through with cancer. She was right up to her 80's and wasn't interested in fighting it with the usual poisonous methods. She decided to let the disease run out, which it quickly did.

I'm sad, of course, to know that she's gone. As I said just recently, Ree Ree (as we all called her) was one of my father's aunts that he grew up with as a sister, the one with the powerfully big laugh that fixed her forever in my childhood mind. But some time ago she moved down to the New Orleans area and I set up a life in New York, which means I didn't see her with even the infrequency of some of my other relatives who stayed around Bourbon County, Kansas.

Though I'm not exactly sure why, Ree Ree was someone I wanted to get to know as my older self. Looking back from the height and distance of my current age, I can see that she spoke to me, reasonably, as an aunt speaks to a child — always with big joy, forever blessing my heart. But over the years, I have picked up bits and scraps of a harder life, or at least a life with more angles than I can now plot, some of which my father subtended. Now she'll remain for me as she was for me so many years ago. I love her like that, always will, but I wonder what stories she would tell the mid-life me, the one familiar with loss and grief and the pleasures of parenthood. Perhaps stories about my father coming into himself, the sun just over his shoulder, the parent I know now a shadow out in front of him. Many of those stories are lost and will stay lost.

When family members go, even distant ones, I also find myself wondering about how they could have participated in my kids' lives, and vice versa. I'm proud of Q and The Boy, not so much of their accomplishments,* but of how they conduct themselves between the tests and the trophies. I think that's why we talk about being "close" to those we know well, as if emotional and physical distance maps 1:1.

Knowing the disease and her peace with it, my father, Uncle Larry, and Aunt Peg went down to New Orleans to be with her not long after they heard. She slept much of the time, my father said, but she talked with them and knew they were there, which was the point. My father told me about the drive down, about how the closer they got to the gulf, the hotter they all became. When they finally reached Ree Ree's small town, they met up with her son, who greeted them with cold beer. Dad said he had forgotten how good a cold beer tastes on a hot day.

It's funny what turns out to be the best part of the story.

____________________
*which, of course, are many and notable

Aboutness

2011-03-10T17:15:00.004-05:00

I’m a hoarder of sorts, always have been, which means my coats end up being seasonal time capsules. When the weather shifts, I finally go through the pockets. I’m sure to find at least two grocery lists that will get me to thinking about the meals those ingredients became, and the lists themselves will likely be on the backs or folded sides of kid drawings depicting stick me doing wondrous things with my stick son and stick daughter. Usually I'll turn up a wrapper from a piece of Chinatown candy, something delicious with an unknown fruit printed on the foil, and maybe a back up train ticket for a commute I no longer make. Twice I came across kazoos.

Most of my pocket loot comes from my daughter Q. She finds beauty and meaning everywhere and then asks me to hold it for her. Walking in the park, she’ll spot a stick shaped just like a ‘Y’ and want to make a gift of it for her mother. Or there will be a chunk of asphalt, pleasingly shaped and flecked with some mysterious crystal (in all likelihood broken glass), that I will end up carrying around for a couple of days, me handling it like a totem in my pocketed fist until we both have forgotten enough about it. I hold on to this stuff longer than I need to, I suppose, because it’s a way of holding on to Q’s way of thinking about the world, her way of appreciating things. Simply putting my hand in a pocket takes me back to times spent with her at moments of discovery and the making of thoughts.

No one really knows how thinking about something actually succeeds — how a thought gets a hold of what that thought is about. It seems rather important to know how this works, since it’s the getting hold of things that makes for true and false beliefs and makes knowledge at all possible. It’s also what makes my thoughts about Q different from my thoughts about stones or justice or ‘Y’-shaped sticks.

For the curious and the philosophically inclined, the first part above has to do with the puzzle of representation and the other is about content. People have been thinking about these puzzles for a while now, though not as long as one might think. There are all sorts of theories, of course — some rather compelling ones — but they all have their flaws and disappointments. Some believe words get to be about things as a function of use (use a word enough for a job and its job becomes the use). Others contend that some words, names in particular, get tied to their bearers through a chain of users and uses that extends back to the birth of the name, a baptismal aboutness relation born and raised like (and usually with) a child. One view holds that the two are born together — that language is a knife that sculpts the world out of the coarse block of experience. A few believe that this is just a thing that minds do, that brains are made such that they just can have states about other things, and all other bits of aboutness — words, maps, paintings, the gestures made in complicated traffic — are merely inherited from brains. I used to cheer for the view that aboutness was a matter of resemblance, that language does its job by picturing what it’s about, but I grew to believe that this approach just replaces one mystery with another. In virtue of what, after all, does one thing resemble another?

Much of the mystery comes from the fact that to think about something, we must have a particular way of thinking about that thing, one way among many, but the world by itself does not suggest who is thinking about it and how. The Greeks’ Hesperus (the morning star) and Phosphorus (the evening star) turned out to be a single planet, Venus, but ask and they’d deny that Hesperus is the same as Phosphorus. The stars are what they are, but our thinking about them makes for its own universe. We can usually get from ways of thinking to the things themselves, but not from things to the way we think about them.

Rummaging around recently, I came across (among the tissues and wheat pennies) a collection of small shells, about five of them. Each a perfect, polished scoop of rainbow, I can see why Q had them end up where they are. They come from the beach in California where my wife and her sisters released their mother’s ashes into the ocean.

We went there in part because of a joke. Once when talk of what to do with your body was only hypothetical, Ba Ngoai said she would like to be cremated and her ashes mixed into the Pacific Ocean so that she could swim back to Vietnam. "You can't swim," Ong Ngoai reminded her at the time. Everyone laughed.

The Pacific coast lacks the angle and anger of the Atlantic. West Coast beaches tend to be gentle and long, the waves cresting far out and then unfurling lazily on the land. I remember that there was a stripe of sand made into a mirror by the wet, and Q and The Boy immediately rolled up their pants and walked out onto their reflections.

It was my wife's idea to cut a hole in one of Ba Ngoai's handbags for the release, and my wife's younger sister carried it down the steps from the parked cars.

"Hold this," my sister-in-law said. I obliged. It was heavier than I expected. She removed her boots and tights.

"I can carry this, if you like," I said.

"That's okay, I'll do it."

"It's up to you; it's your mom."

"That's not mom," she said with a warm smile. And she was right.

The hole in the bag worked for a while, but there was a surprising amount of ash, and the three sisters took turns scooping out what they could until their hands were black. The substance was finer than the sand. But even their handfuls weren't enough, which I found fitting given the size of Ba Ngoai’s life. My sister-in-law went into the cold waves nearly to her waist, and, after a quick glance up and down the nearly vacant beach, she upended the bag and let loose the rest. She then hopped her way out of the surf, the late-afternoon sky over the water bluer than anyone's idea of it, and Q was there to greet her. They looked to each other and then took hands. Q, thankfully unfamiliar with grief, skipped every now and then on their way back to the car, pausing to give me a few small shells to keep. My wife and The Boy together drifted further down the beach and looked out past everything for a long time.

As you read this now, you somehow reach out and grasp them, and only them, even those who now lie beyond our hands. No one really knows how this works. But it does.

This is what I have found, what I ask you to hold for me.

I put the shells back into my pocket.

In between

2011-03-04T11:38:00.005-05:00

Note: This post is part of a larger writing project, "Dad Stuff," about, as you might imagine, dad stuff. To read more posts related to this project, see posts with the "dad stuff" tag.

We spend this Thanksgiving as we traditionally have — that is to say with each other at our own table and with way too much food. Since it’s just the four of us, we really don’t need to cook the full-on meal, but we’ve ingested enough tradition over the years that we find ourselves making lists and standing with over-full baskets in long lines. Besides, Thanksgiving has grown into an all-family thing in our house. We now trust The Boy with a real knife, and as a result, he has become the emperor of stuffing. He’ll cube as many loaves as you put in front of him until all the bread in the house mounds in the silver bowl next to his cutting board. Q loves to do just about anything in the kitchen, loves the mysterious alchemy of cooking, particularly now that she nearly doesn’t need the step stool to reach the stand mixer. She and I make the machine make the pumpkin pie; she and my lovely wife whip the cream for the top. All of us eat it after we've eaten too much already.

For much of my childhood, tradition required that we spend Thanksgiving in Southeast Kansas* with my father’s side of the family. The five-hour-plus drive from our house in southwest Kansas** always seemed covered-wagon long, mainly because my brother and I disputed property lines in the Buick back seat the entire way. All of us we were happy, then, to see the end of the trip and everyone who inhabited it. And there were lots of inhabitants to see. My father and his brother were essentially raised by their grandparents, brought up working the farm alongside their own children (my father’s aunts and uncles, my great aunts and uncles), nine of them counting my father’s mother, as brothers and sisters. It’s as confusing as it sounds, made more so by my father’s referring to his grandfather, Luther, and grandmother, Lucy, as “dad” and “mom,” and to his own mother as “mother.” (My father almost never called his father anything — at least in front of me. Pretty much everything I think and know of my paternal grandfather I’ve pulled from and put into two unbendable black-and-white photographs: a handsome man in a hat relaxed against a boxy car; an older but still handsome man in a high-backed chair with kids just off the arms.)

The aunts and uncles who were brothers and sisters to my father made for a colorful collection of people. I knew them at these Thanksgivings more or less like I know them now, which is to say by their nicknames and natures. The youngest, Larry, was just a eight months older than my father and was called “Lute” by everyone. He flew huge C-5 cargo planes for the military, the biggest they have, so I suppose it was fitting that he piloted those big meals. Thanksgiving was usually held at his family’s grand, historically registered house, the one with the built-in intercom system that it actually needed. (My same-age cousin Joe and I would be up in his room on the fourth floor, building or breaking something, until we were conscripted into chores through the intercom; that thing always seemed to be for receiving orders, and we were forever being called to the front.) Peg, whose real name, Margaret, I didn’t learn until well into high school, ran a company in Hutchinson for years that ran power lines up and down the state. Tom was usually there, moving smoothly about like someone in the FBI, which he pretty much was. He favored mirror aviator sunglasses, which I suppose he should given his line of work. I later discovered that he was a Cold War style expert in Russian. Tom’s nickname was “Black” because of his complexion, but I don’t remember anyone actually calling him that. I do remember everyone calling Alice “Ree Ree,” including me, because of trouble my brother and I had pronouncing her name years before when we were new to talking.*** Growing up, her brothers and sisters called her “Injun,” again due to appearances. She had and has a huge laugh, a powerful lever able to lift anyone who hears it. Donald — Doc, Docky — had a similar-sized laugh and spirit as Ree Ree, but everything about him was shot through with craziness. He dusted crops in his plane and drank fairly heavily, and more than once at the same time. He would brag to us about all varieties of strange meats he was busy curing in his home-built smokehouse, and though now I’m as likely to concoct stories for kids’ delectation as much as anyone, I still believe that Doc may have been telling something like the truth. There was Jerry, whom my father called “Cruit,” as in “recruit,” the word clipped as short as Jerry’s hair. Jerry still lived and worked the farm where they all grew up — he and his wife Beverly, herself an official Master Gardener, who could grow anything. I remember Grandma Jane, my father’s mother, was there for many years with her cigarettes and lovely mysteriousness, then she was someone we missed. And there were all sorts of affiliated husbands and wives and cousins filling out the various geometries of the house. My father had been the anchor of the group in many ways and for many years, and it was a marvel to see why it was needed, to glimpse how they could drift when left to themselves.

Tradition had it that after everyone was too full, the women gathered in one part of the house, cleaning up and talking to each other in ways they would recount bitterly for years. The men, left to themselves, played cards. Eventually being invited into these yearly games meant a great deal to me. The money exchanged in these events stayed exchanged, which meant they were for real, adult. The pots often became sizable, certainly more money than I’d ever seen, and this was when money was a thing you could see often enough. Dad was a good poker player, and he could and would usually disabuse players of whatever they brought to the table, including my brother and me. And dad never returned our kid-sized stake with some parental lesson about fools and their money. Nope — the lesson was in the losing and the staying lost.

We played dealer’s choice, and along with the studs and the draw pokers we would play “in between.” It was a simple game, but one high in drama and stakes. After everyone anted up, the dealer would take turns giving each player a run at the pot by dealing him two cards. The player then decided how much to bet that the next card dealt would fall in between his first two. If the card was between, the player took the amount bet from the pot; otherwise the pot grew. The round ended when someone bet the pot and won. Every now and then, a player would be dealt a pair, which meant doubled chances for luck and loss. Often enough (particularly several Schlitz into the evening) someone would feel like gambling and bet the pot on a tight spread — an 8 and a Queen, say — and the whole table would tighten and lean in, anxious for luck in one valence or another, then snap back into laughs when the dealer turned over a deuce. I loved that I could participate in that kind of adult attention, even direct it somewhat when the deck came around to me.

The food we make for ourselves is good. As we eat, the four of us take turns saying what we’re thankful for. It turns out that we’re thankful for family, for each other, for books, and for LEGOs.

After we package leftovers, we go for a walk to give ourselves a reason for pie. November evening in New York still counts as fall, even this late into it, and it’s cold but not unpleasantly so. Though older now, the kids still marvel at the park at night when the familiar edges to everything get redrawn by the dark. My wife and I wish that we could make Thanksgiving back into a day with family, and it’s time that Q and The Boy learned how to properly shuffle a deck. But work and school and distance make quick trips tough, at least for now. In the meantime, we play what we’re dealt, in between traditions.

___________________________________
*Yes, Southeast Kansas, capital letters and all. It's its own place, one where tradition requires that you curse as you cross the Bourbon County line. And, yes, Bourbon County.
**A place undeserving of special caps.
***Don't ask me how "Alice" could be ever be pronounced "Ree Ree."

Making masks

2010-11-24T13:11:00.012-05:00

It probably started the Halloween my parents made my brother his Ace Frehley costume. I can't pinpoint the year precisely, but it had to be the late 70's, when his then-favorite band KISS rose to prominence, penetrating even our remote Midwest with their makeup and blood-spitting and smoking guitars. The band was more or less a troupe of trick-or-treaters from the beginning, so it's not surprising that kids would eventually show up at their neighbors' doors ready to Shout It Out Loud. I suppose it's also not surprising why my brother chose the band member he did. Paul Stanley, with his aggressively hairy chest, would have been a bold choice in those days, and, as far as I can tell, nobody really wanted to be Gene Simmons, battle-axe bass notwithstanding. Frehley (like cat-faced drummer Peter Criss) hardly ever spoke, but he had a spaceman ("Space Ace") theme to his getup, which made him a prime target of boy-emulation.

My brother's Ace Frehley was, not to oversell it or anything, simply awesome. My parents glittered huge swoops of paper to make a triangle for his shoulders and huge cuffs for his wrists, and they converted his off-brand moonboots into platform shoes truly worthy of moons. Most importantly, they painted his face white with silver star-things exploding around each eye.* I'm sure he had some sort of guitar, too, probably cardboard but with actual strings, and no doubt a wig. I don't remember the actual trick-or-treating or party going or whatever it was he did while he was Ace; I only remember the making and what he looked like.

My lovely wife and I love making costumes, too. There was the first Halloween with both Q and The Boy, when they went as a Dalmatian and firefighter respectively. My wife sewed black spots to an old white onesie and black flaps for ears to an old hat. (Q supplied the smile.) For The Boy, she turned a plastic bottle, clothespin, and some red paint into a remarkably realistic fire extinguisher. Then there was the robot year, with the suit made out of boxes and brass brads and lights that really flashed. Even lately, when the kids have favored off-the-rack options like skeleton, witch, Egyptian princess, and ninja, we embellish. Though you can't really tell from the picture above, my wife made shockingly realistic shuriken out of some silver paper and ten minutes on the internet.

I'm not exactly sure why we do this, why we bother for a day of dress up, perhaps because there are too many reasons: a rare creative opportunity, dissatisfaction with store costumes, or just to make ourselves into makers of things.

It's hard to think about why we make masks without thinking a little about why we wear them. That's a bigger question, of course, one draped in a host of tropes. Myself, I've never really been that convinced by the common claim that most wear masks to hide themselves. Kids, after all, love to dress up, and they are only beginning to have something of the required sort to hide. Instead, I think it's the chance to become something else altogether — some nights, dressing as a 70's rock star is enough to be a 70's rock star.

There's an old story about the particular why of Halloween, of course. Like many of our traditions, this one seems to have been handed down (or up) by pagans** by way of Catholics, though it's all pretty nebulous. Anyway, it's believed that ghosts and ghouls arrived on the last day of the year to revisit their former homes, and steps had to be taken to scare or fool them back under. Funny, then, that we dress up our children and shove them out into the night to deal with the dead. Then again, maybe we make masks for children (and ourselves) because through them we might mix again with the dead, catching a bit of those who we can now see only in ourselves.

We have lost so many, and we don't know where they've gone.

_________________________
*Like so.
**Druids!

The Big Four-Oh

2010-10-29T16:46:00.009-04:00

I think I remember someone telling me that someone once said something like, "I only write when the pain of not writing outweighs the pain of writing."* I've been a collector of writing — particularly writing about writing — longer than I've been something like a writer, and this is one of my favorite bits of pith. I used to think it was true, but now I'm pretty sure it's false.

I took the summer and part of the fall largely off writing wise, not because of one kind of pain and another. If anything, we were too occupied, too much happened, and I simply enjoyed our making memories without my hanging them up.

But back to the pleasure of writing outweighing the not writing. Here's a somewhat big thing that happened during my summer vacation: I turned 40 (back in July). At first I wasn't going to say much of anything about it, then I was but couldn't think of anything useful or interesting to say.

Largely because I find the size of the thing a little puzzling. Nearly everyone who ended up hearing about this new number of mine asked what I was going to do to mark it. Nothing much, I answered — an unusual plan, apparently. Nearly everyone had stories of big celebrations they'd heard or been part of, from a triathlon on the edge of Long Island to weeks spent lolling in Tuscany.**

A bit much. Still, I am somewhat sympathetic to what's driving the big-ticket parties — namely, the feeling that 40 marks a new phase, officially around the time of Starting To Get Old. It's not really old, of course. I've got a mix of longevity and early demise in my family (both from nature and from active engagement with it), so it's hard to sit down and do the math. Nevertheless, I'd like to think that I'm not even half done.

In any event, it's not the worry of oblivion and schemes of overcoming it that move me; it's more like what the leading edge of oblivion means. I tell my kids, as I was told, that they could do and be anything if they set themselves to it. I still believe it of them, as I believed it of myself a while ago. But coming to be things takes time, and each year a little less of that remains for remaking myself. Or so it seems sometimes.

It turns out I did do something remarkable for The Big Four-Oh — or rather my lovely wife did something remarkable for me. Just a day or two before my birthday, my wife told me that just she and I would be enjoying dinner and jazz at Dizzy's Club that night. The club is affiliated with Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the music was, as expected, fantastic — almost as fantastic as the seats she got for us:

We were close enough to map the constellations of sweat on the drummer's head. And before the musicians came out, someone taped down a thick square of wood on our side of the stage. That square eventually became the tap floor for two young dancers who did things with their feet that had us all accompanying them with our rhythms of amazement. (To get on stage, they had to bend around our table.) Such a wonderful night.

As we sat there, the club's window framing the lush canopy of Central Park, my beautiful wife's bare shoulder its own kind of song in the soft dark, I thought: If this is what getting old is like, I'll take it and more besides.

________________________________

*To this day I've been unable to locate the source of this expression. It does sound like something that someone might say, so if you happen to know who, certainly let me know.

**Of course, I'm completely prepared to admit that this could say more about the people I happen to hang out with than about turning 40 in general.

Coming back up

2010-10-15T22:31:00.002-04:00

Soon.

Incantations

2010-09-11T21:11:00.095-04:00

September days in New York recapitulate a year of seasons: mornings cool and dark giving way to afternoons bright and hot. Today will be as clear and blue and usual as that day—or maybe more so, it's hard to trust the memory now that so many have handled it.

Burn the buildings, burn the books. Read out the names again.

Today we celebrate our bodies without really meaning to, Q at gymnastics and The Boy at soccer. My lovely wife and Q make their way uptown to the gym on scooters; The Boy and I kick around our nerves out in the park until game time. Then swimming in the afternoon around the time of the protests, new this year. The mind always trailing the body, getting in its way. Ground Zero lies just a block off, and I see the new building finally rising. Rumor has it they found an old ship at the site—what you find when you dig.

This morning my daughter asks me how we're made.* It's not the awkward and inevitable question of conception. No, she's taken by the larger mystery of how we as things that see, that hear, that think have come to be at all. This is my kind of question, and we begin the long story that goes back before all tellers, the one that has the shape of magic.

But however great the incantations, we can't seem to stop the stories of our unmaking.

________________________________
*Seriously. Not kidding.

9/11 Archive:

Not quite done with 9/11, I suppose (2009)
On collision (2008)
I want to tell them (2007)
By accident (2006)

Steel

2010-08-20T22:15:00.001-04:00

Today is our 11th wedding anniversary (or the steel anniversary, for those who like made-up things). It's cliche to say, of course, but we seem as young and new as we once were.

More important, I think our marriage thus far has been transcendental in the old, Kantian, sense, which is to say necessary for the actual to be possible. To be a little less fancy: To be just the way we are now in this place, with Q & The Boy made as they are, would not be possible without that Friday night eleven years ago.

Congratulations to us, then, for what we have made and what has made us.

And just listen—they're playing our song:

Nina Simone, "My Baby Just Cares for Me"

Breaking

2010-07-25T22:49:00.007-04:00

Been on a break for a little while (Okay, for July actually), and I'm still enjoying the sounds of waves.

We shall resume normal-ish broadcasting shortly.

Look, Q. A big one's coming. Get ready. Ready—

Meantime, feel free to revisit an earlier picture of what it's like to play with the ocean.

World's Best Dad?

2010-06-22T22:38:00.019-04:00

Father's Day was a treat this year, as always. With the help of my lovely wife, Q and The Boy conspired to make a special breakfast for me that included sneaking out for coffee from a local shop where I go to treat myself. ("We're going to get the MAIL now, dad," Q announced in a particular vigorous attempt at misdirection, as they left early that morning.) My lovely wife made cinnamon rolls from scratch, and I made four or five or more of them quickly disappear — a luxury of these special days is not having to keep count. The kids presented me with lovely drawings, nicely framed, telling me what they appreciated about me, and my lovely wife gave me some nice shirts. I am well loved and loved well, is what I'm saying.

The Boy's tennis lessons have ended for the time being, so after the morning's surprises he and I went out to the park to hit baseballs while Q went to yoga. Then we all went to Yankee Stadium for the afternoon's game. Though it happened on Father's Day, the game was really for The Boy's birthday. It was his very first major league game, and what a game it was — punishing heat, a grand slam, a rain delay, a brief appearance on the jumbotron, a Yankees win. He loved it all, especially the wildly overpriced fan/spritzer thing shaped like a baseball, and I enjoyed sharing it with him. Q made it until the fifth inning before the seats far too hot to sit in and the slow pace got to her, and she jumped at the chance to leave when my wife offered it to her. But though I gave him a similar offer, he wanted us to stay all the way through Sinatra's "New York, New York." On the subway home, we even saw a guy with a hook for a hand, which somehow completed the day for me.

A few weeks ago I was paging through one of the thousands of catalogs we get from a place called Oriental Trading,* an outlet that specializes in bulk orders of craft and party supplies. If your kids have left a birthday party recently with a goody bag, I bet that at least some of the disposable dreck** dumped out on the couch has come from Oriental Trading.

Anyway, times being what they were, I saw lots of opportunities to pick up some chintzy stuff of the No. 1/World's Best Dad variety. Q was sitting beside me, so I casually asked her if she was going to get me a "World's Best Dad" mug (or whatever) for this Father's Day. No, she said. Didn't she think that I was the World's Best Dad, I asked? Nope.

Okay, but here's the interesting part: She's right. I asked her why she thought as she did, and she said that she really didn't know all the dads in the world, but even so I probably wasn't the best one. And, you know, I can't argue with that logic. Come to think of it, there are and have been quite a few dads,*** and, though I think I'm a decent one, odds are that at least someone is better at the parenting thing than I am.

It's an odd claim to stake anyway. I'm not sure what makes a best parent, though I have some idea of what makes for better and worse ones, and I'm not sure that if I did know, I'd want to be one. Why would I want to deny my kids the chance to improve on what I did and could do for them? (Or would the World's Best Dad realize this and make noticeable, lesson-worthy mistakes?)

In any event, I love being a father, and I love thinking about being a father. And if I've learned one thing this Father's Day, it's don't ever ask your kids how you're doing.

Happy Father's Day, all.

________________________
*I would very much like someone to explain the existence and history of this place to me. Not only is the company named "Oriental" Trading—an adjective that has long since stopped being acceptable geographically or racial-sensitivity-wise—it's located in Omaha, NE. I've been to the, um, Orient, and I've been to Nebraska, and one does not make a person think of the other. Also, Oriental Trading offers quite a bit of Christian-themed merchandise (e.g.), which doesn't really honor the majority traditions of most Far Eastern societies. All this adds up to one big ball of why.
**I'm looking at you, balloon-powered race cars.
***Abraham, e.g., or the Big Man Himself (if you're into that sort of thing)? Tough competition, admittedly.

The Boy at 7 (Or there's a problem with the robot)

2010-06-10T22:24:00.008-04:00

The Boy turned seven last Sunday. Unlike his sister, whose trip from four to five seemed like a slow, multi-stop cruise, The Boy's birthday was more bullet train. My lovely wife made cupcakes for his classmates the Friday before, but the handing out and eating of them during school snack time for the most part involved being outside and devouring and yelling. And then it was Saturday, with its little league game and swimming lessons and growing feeling that we were not quite ready. Then it was Saturday night, with my wife out rounding up the rest of the books for takeaway gifts while I soldered the last of the wire. Then Sunday morning tennis lessons and yoga for kids. Then the party.

Given the success and fun of Q's party, we decided to again have a small number of kids over to our apartment to celebrate The Boy. We whittled his list until together we settled on inviting eight kids, which meant (given siblings), we'd be looking at 13 kids total. Doable. Probably.

The main activity was mainly my idea. I'm a fan of the maker's movement and had seen in some post or other an idea for building a simple robot, called a vibrabot, out of household stuff. It consists of a small motor (from one of those small plastic fans) attached to a tin box of some sort, supported by thin metal legs. When attached to a AA battery, it spins an offset paper clip or bobby pin and "walks" around a reasonably smooth surface. It's pretty cool to bring something like this to life, and The Boy, who enjoys designing and making things in general, really loved making a prototype. It seemed like a good project for a room of seven-year-old boys.

The Boy and I did the difficult and dangerous stuff beforehand. I held the Phillips screwdriver as he hammered holes in the tin boxes to thread wire through. He held the solder spool as I joined wires to motors and batteries, and alligator clips to wires. At the party, then, kids would just have to attach motors to the boxes with cable ties, tape batteries to the inside, connect up the wires, and attach the legs with small nuts and bolts.

Okay, that meant we still had to get from this:

to this:

in something like an hour. With 13 kids. In our apartment. Sure, it was a lot, but I wanted each kid to enjoy the making as much as the having.

It almost worked. Some kids were able to get their bots together with just a little instruction, but several couldn't. A few played with their wires until the solder or the wire broke, or they worked newly attached legs until the bolts came loose. While cake was being eaten, I worked so that all but two kids (I think) left with working machines, and those two left with promises to get theirs working sometime soon.

Speaking of cake, it was, as usual, crafted by my lovely wife and (as usual) awesome:

(Note the actual working lights on either side of the "M7.") My wife continues to impress and amaze, and the kids have noticed. When she expressed worry about getting the cake to look like a circuit board, my son said, "You can do it, mom. You can do anything." And she can, I swear.

Growing up, my father and I shared a language of work, spoken in hands and tools. Some of my favorite moments with him were spent looking over the underside of a lawnmower or re-screening a door. Though I'm sure I often came along to fetch and hold (that's what kids are for, after all), he honored me with these quiet conversations. I probably talk too much when my son or daughter and I make and do things together — I'm pretty sure I think too much — but I want them to learn the grammar of work, to have their hands become familiar with a vocabulary of tools. And I want to have another thing in common between us that goes without saying.

After everyone had left and The Boy had opened his presents, the wind picked up from the west, and a mean-looking bank of clouds unfurled toward us over the river. The phone rang, and I answered it, but the line seemed empty. Then a boy from the party softly said, "There's a problem with the robot."

That's okay. We can fix it.

Wanting you

2010-05-31T22:58:00.016-04:00

My lovely wife was away in California all weekend helping her sister and brother-in-law with their new baby. Having your first newborn is a little like staying up for a week solid and then having some stranger throw everything you own into the air at once.* To maximize both the time with her sister and her own children, my wife flew back to New York through Sunday night. She didn't sleep much on the plane,** and after four days of nights up she was too exhausted to walk an aircraft carrier.

Yes, an aircraft carrier. Each fleet week, military ships glide up the Hudson and open themselves up for free tours. Visitors can climb on trucks and tanks, sit in cockpits, slide the bolts on rifles. The four of us went last year, but Q has been quite mom-centric these days, and she elected to stay home with her tired mother.

It was just The Boy and I, then, two men out doing men stuff. Or something. The Boy, like nearly all American males, has a fascination with military hardware, one that I had*** myself. Unlike most American males (whatever the age) we live in a place where we actually get to see some of it.

The Boy is big now and makes for great company. He doesn't tire easily, and we walked every civilian-accessible foot of the USS Iwo Jima in a couple of hours, which is a lot of ground to cover. We headed first up to the flight deck to look over the aircraft before the crowds g0t crushing, and he was particularly excited to see the Cobra. Chinooks have been powering up and down the Hudson for the past few days, escorted menacingly by a pair of Cobras. It's hard not to want to see such things up close, and he loved sitting at the Cobra's baffling controls. We then went back down the steep grade ("Use low gear," a sign advised) to the belly of the ship, passing service men and women posing for photos with tourists holding guns. The Boy sat at the wheel of a giant cargo truck, then an amphibious assault vehicle of some sort. The longest line was for the M1A1 tank, but we waited. When our turn arrived, we scaled up to the turret, and The Boy asked me to take a picture of him in a helmet. He even slid into the tight driver's seat and asked for a photo of that, too. Later, he asked his mother to print out photos of him doing all this to put up somewhere important.

Back before we begin this day, The Boy and I get bagels to keep our heads out of our stomachs until we get back from the ships. He likes poppy seed with scallion cream cheese, and I spread what smooshes out of his onto mine. We sit at the window. Across the street, I see the "U.S. Army Career Center," and then he sees it and reads the awning. He asks what it means, and I tell him. Before I finish, he says "I know, dad."

But I don't know how to tell him both that the people who make up the military do an important job and deserve our respect and that I don't want him to do that job. I want him to understand the absurdly real risk these people take on — to understand the gravity of their commitment. And with that commitment comes, I think, a moral glow (for lack of better term) that I take no issue with. How, then, to let him know that here's something really really good (in the moral sense) that I don't want him to do?

Me: ...
Me: People in the military do important things.
The Boy: I know, dad.
Me: They help to keep us safe, and they deserve our respect.
The Boy: I know, dad.
Me: They risk a lot to do what they do. It's not like playing video games.
The Boy: I know, dad.
Me: [long pause] You know, I really don't want you to—
The Boy: —I know, dad.

I think he does understand, even better than I.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone.

________________________

*Except it's not like that, or anything besides just what it is.
**JetBlue charges 8 bucks for pillow and blanket. Sheesh.

***Okay, and still have a little, though it's strictly man professional.

Okay, so just a little more on stopping and quitting

2010-05-25T10:52:00.001-04:00

At the end of my previous post about stopping and quitting, I said that there was more to say about all of it and that I'd stop there. Well, at least the first was true.

I've been ruminating about stopping and quitting a fair amount more since then, mainly due to the excellent reactions and commiserations I received.* Seems I'm not alone in struggling both with not quitting and with failing to make much sense of why that is. All signs might point to giving up (jobs, habits, marriages, whatever), but a lot of us don't and don't exactly know why.

As I said before, I do think honest, straightforward reasons do explain some of the resistance to quitting—heavy investment (of time, money), say, and the general cultural conditioning against ever quitting anything. (We're told pretty much right away that nobody likes a quitter). Enjoyment might even have been derived from the thing, whatever it is.

But what about when the straightforward reasons just don't sufficiently justify sticking something out? And what about the not understanding? Part of what stalls me at this point, I think, has to do with not really knowing how to take my own reasoning about quitting.

Let me try to be a little clearer. I'm not the hugest fan of Malcom Gladwell,** but a recent article of his on espionage for The New Yorker nicely gets at the problem here. He begins with the story of "Operation Mincemeat," a bold and successful plan by the British in World War II to leak false information to the Germans about a pending Allied invasion. It's a fantastic tale told exceptionally well, and with a powerful lesson. Gladwell writes:

It is not just that secrets themselves are hard to fact-check; it's that their interpretation is inherently ambiguous. Any party to an intelligence transaction is trapped in what the sociologist Erving Goffman called an "expression game." I'm trying to fool you. You realize that I'm trying to fool you, and I—realizing that—try to fool you into thinking that I don't realize that you have realized that I am trying to fool you.

Oddly enough, we spy on and fool ourselves, too. I'm sitting right here, so I'll use myself as an example. Why don't I just give up my academic research, such as it is, and get seriously going on some of the writing projects I've been meekly pecking away at for a while now? When I put myself on the couch I get to thinking that I probably fear what might happen if I actually made a real run at writing—that I might not get beyond sucking badly or (worse?) that I might not suck all that much but can't get anyone much to notice my not sucking. But then I think that these worries (that I might always suck or be always outside) is really me fooling myself into finding a way to stay between everything, to have more "could haves" to console myself when I get to wondering, in the end, about what happened. And then again, maybe I'm fooling myself with that, too.

However fractal-like this gets, I've learned that quitting can lead to good. I have seen a few of those close to me bloom after divorce, and others make themselves new when time demanded it. But anyway like just about every parent ever, I worry over what my kids see when they observe me (which they, like all kids, scarily do), even more so than what I say. I'd like them to use more "dids" than "should haves" if they wonder about me.

Will they know when to quit? Will I?

_______________________

*Thanks Twitter, Facebook, and blog-reading folk. I really appreciate the thoughts.

**The guy can tell a good story, but Blink was just awful.

Stopping and quitting

2010-05-17T10:48:00.004-04:00

Turns out I'm very good at stopping things, less so at quitting them.

The distinction is an important one, actually. Take, for example, my academic career. My trajectory past graduate school was a little nontraditional in that after (finally) graduating, my first jobs were not really in my field. I did teach philosophy courses more or less and lucked* my way into two of the best universities in the world, but I was mainly a faculty member in writing programs and not in Philosophy Departments. My plan was to fill out my list of publications and courses taught while earning (very little) money until I hit the academic job market lottery.

My number never came up — at least for a tenure-track job. I did, though, manage to take a small step into university administration (again more or less through luck). I found myself with much more time and less stress than as a "pure academic," or someone whose livelihood depends upon scholarly production and the glacial peer review process.** I could read what I wanted, write for whomever I pleased.

But for some reason, even though I stopped my academic research, I couldn't quite quit it. I'd find myself browsing the on-line article databases, collecting PDFs to read on the train home, starting fresh Word files with titles heavy on clever. Those Word files usually stayed short while the pile of unread articles grew, as did the list of non-academic writing projects that I wanted to pursue.

Okay, sure, it's understandably hard to quit the career I spent over a decade preparing and striving for, particularly since I'm still part of a university, still showing up in classrooms to talk about ideas. At this point, however, I will have no professor position — the job market is too tight and my resume is too anemic. The life of an academic isn't as glorious as it used to be, too, given the terrible pay and ridiculous politics inevitable with groups of people who can't be fired. I have every reason to quit entirely.

Quitting can be glorious. The Boy had been a solid member of his school's chess club, which meant going nearly an hour early to school each Thursday and Friday for lessons and scrimmages. Then there were the three-hour practices one Saturday afternoon a month, and frequent tournaments. He only ended up competing in two of them (he was snowed out once), and the second he won first place in his division. (He even brought the first-place trophy for his first show-and-tell turn.) He liked chess. He wanted to play chess.

And then he didn't. About a month ago or so, The Boy no longer sped out of the house on Thursdays and Fridays, even though his best friend kept at it. Each time we asked him whether he wanted to go to lessons or practice, he answered with a firm "No." That was it; he was done. Space in his head once reserved for chess is now occupied by baseball, and he's the freer for it.

Why is quitting so hard? Perhaps for the same reasons that ending things are hard. As a friend of mine once nicely put it:

For me, however, starting is fairly easy; the drama of writer’s block is largely alien to me. To the extent that starting is mysterious, that’s more-or-less okay, because, even if you can’t dial it up at will, the whole process is one of getting from nothing to something. Starting is a practical problem, easily overcome, if it’s a problem at all. Finishing is a metaphysical problem, full of subtleties and abysses. Finishing involves knowing –knowing!—when something is enough (for what?), when something that hasn’t existed before is finally wholly and completely itself.

Well, that’s enough of that.

He's talking here about academic writing in particular, but the lesson applies wider, I think. Knowing when something is enough is the hard part, and merely stopping without quitting only causes the commitment part to accrue. The commitment outstanding means being haunted by something else I should be doing, regardless of what I'm doing at any particular moment. I've got to figure out how to finally quit some things and free myself for others.

There's more to say about all of this, of course, but I'll stop here.

__________________________
*Luck had everything to do with it, but I'm pretty sure that I deserved and earned my right to be at those fancy schmancy places.
**I once submitted an article to a journal for publication, and the editor held on to it for a year before finally telling me that he didn't think he'd send it out for review. The article eventually found a home, but since sending work out to multiple journals at the same time is considered poor form, I was put back quite a bit. And everyone in academia has similar stories.

Let them make cake

2010-05-10T22:51:00.003-04:00

Two days before Q's party, a classmate of hers asked how many birthdays Q has. I know the feeling: First it was her birthday proper, with gifts wrapped in Amazon boxes and (from us anyway) in the New York Times.* Then my wife made blue-frosted cupcakes for Q's Pre-K class, enjoyed by all except for that inevitable classmate with the egg allergy.

And then there was Q's actual party. My wife has earned a solid reputation in the neighborhood for executing great parties, and this one wasn't unusual. What was unusual, though, is that unlike past years, we decided to have the thing in our (little) house instead of in our apartment building's playroom. This meant having fewer kids than usual, but some sacrifices just had to be made.**

A smaller guest list made more intensive activities possible. Q liked the idea of a cooking party, and so did we. Each guest was greeted with a paper chef's hat (individually sized and stapled) and an apron to decorate. Instead of ordering pizza, we gave them their own ball of dough to stretch and roll and sauce. While their early dinners browned in the oven, the kids made animal cupcakes to accompany the barn cake my wife had made. The results were, as you can see, lovely.

Cupcakes done and corralled, everyone ate the pizza they made. Interestingly, almost everyone had leftovers—and everyone wanted to take them home. (As far as we can remember, that's a first for any party.) Guests also took away their cupcake in a special box, their hat and apron, and a cake and cookie recipe book. Little was left.

Q smiled the whole time.

Until that night. After opening all the wonderful presents from those who came to celebrate with her, she slowly slid into tears. Q almost never cries about anything. My wife and I asked her why she was sad. She said she didn’t know, and I believed her (and I don’t always believe her). The day had meant a lot to her, but, unlike her brother, she struggles with attention. It’s as if she can feel the weight of all those thoughts of her, and they finally got too heavy. Or at least I think that's what it was; it's hard to say.

I suppose it's now an old story—at least 300 years older than the philosophers who first told it (and as new as the newest science)—that we arrive blank and are written on by the world until we leave. This picture suggests that the longer we go, the more we're taught, the more we understand. But I think it's something like a half-truth. Childhood has all sorts of knowingness—of cruelties in particular—and adults often find themselves bothered and saved by mysteries. No matter how old one gets, there are always puzzles, and the pieces keep getting smaller. I hope that I can help her appreciate not understanding, and that she can do the same for me.

Happy birthday, Q. We love you.

________________________
*Never too early to introduce a little liberal bias, right?
**[Smile.]

America's — and The Boy's — game

2010-05-01T10:55:00.001-04:00

All of a sudden, The Boy is into baseball. He walks around the house swinging at imaginary pitches, rises early on game days.

We've never been huge baseball fans in our house (despite my wife's attempts to anchor our appreciation of the sport). But however mysterious, it's fun to watch him love the game, especially before all the knowing comes in. He gets to have moments like this:

I may have slowed things down a bit and added a little soundtrack (thank you, Aaron Copeland), but it does feel just like this.

Even Q is slowly coming around, I think.

Q turns 5

2010-04-22T22:38:00.004-04:00

NOTE: Sweetest thing not pictured above.

Today Q, our little one (who's never really seemed all that little), turns 5. We will celebrate her in a week or so with a house full of her friends, and therefore with madness. She sleeps now, after a day of wishes, and we wonder what the next year means for and to her.

I'm sure she'll let us know.

Happy birthday, Q. We love you.

Montage

2010-02-14T22:23:00.014-05:00

Happy New Year, New Decade, Valentine's Day, Lunar New Year,* and President's Day Eve.** I hope this finds you all well. It's been a little while.

New Year thoughts are things that I get around to eventually. Perhaps I wanted to dip a toe into the fresh year — wait for two New Year's to arrive — before easing into it. The water over here seems fine, and I suppose it's time to get wet.

Going forward usually triggers looking back. Networks love to soften their shows the days up to the ball dropping in Times Square with a string of tape capturing the highlights of the year (a major celebrity death, a shot of soldiers and an explosion, an unknown birth). My wife and I love montages,*** too, so here's a little one from me to you.

First, the blog: Looking over the past year of posts, here are the ones I don't mind recommending:

"Lessons" (January 29)
"Bye, 2008, Finally" (January 15)
"I Lic school" (March 23)
"Q at 4" (April 22)
"Who's your favorite princess?" (May 7)
"Tour and duty" (June 1)
"The Boy is 6" (June 25)
"Birthday break" (July 23)
"The end of a summer that never really was" (September 1)
"Saints and thanks" (November 22)
"Believing" (December 24)

Here are a few of my favorite 2009/Year of the Water Buffalo things:

The photos my wife takes. Most of the headers and pics that appear on this site come from her, such as:

Many of the best she takes flout my No Faces Rule, which means you'll just have to trust me. And then there's:

The sound of my son reading.
Q, excited, the day of her gymnastic lessons, and how hard she works to be better.

There is more than this, of course; we always forget more than we remember. But the more I thought about it, about what I found myself drawn to in the year that's just passed, I lingered not on moments but on changes. My son reads now, and he will more or less forever; the world is now a named place for him. Q has found what passion and strength can do for her, and in so doing has found an exemplar of self-perfection that will remain with her long after she's stepped down from the beam and let loose of the bar. And my lovely wife will (among a vast many other things) continue to see us for us better than we can on our own.

But perhaps the change I've enjoyed most of all is the one that can't last. The job and career shifts I've had this year have given me two full days a week with Q and The Boy. I've hatched schemes with dolls and made cookies in the afternoon. I've built LEGO ships and lobbed balls when I would have been dead on the train. Eventually, however, there will be new and more work (there already is), more school, more after school.

This I will take as a moment and remember it just as it is.

Happy New Everything, all.

_______________________

*And DO NOT CALL IT CHINESE NEW YEAR. We will correct you—in school, at work, even in the elevator.

**Okay, so that's not a real thing. But you do have to admit that these few days is quite the convergence of holidays.

***Perhaps it was all of those 80's films during our formative years. Kids these days are, I think, undernourished montage-wise. Have they seen this? HAVE THEY?

Believing

2009-12-24T22:39:00.005-05:00

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

2009-11-22T22:02:00.007-05:00

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

2009-09-23T14:08:00.007-04:00

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?

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

Not quite done with 9/11, I suppose

2009-09-14T09:21:00.010-04:00

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

2009-09-08T14:20:00.002-04:00

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.

_______________________
*!

The end of a summer that never really was

2009-09-01T09:33:00.010-04:00

August ended with a wet sigh and little else. The official end of summer supposedly arrives Labor Day Weekend, but even this first day of September feels like the end of something that never really happened.

It's not that the past two months were uneventful: The Boy lost some teeth, my lovely wife and I crept ever closer to forty (with my creeping becoming particularly close), we had our ten-year wedding anniversary, and we traveled to see family, the latter involving (among other things) the feeding of aggressive pygmy goats.

Much of what was supposed to happen — what usually happens — just didn't, however. The Boy was a kindergartner last year, and in New York that meant school through nearly the end of June. Then a little over two weeks out of classes, The Boy broke his arm, which (through no fault of his own, of course) kept our July beachless. He was really a good sport about it all despite being no good for any sports.

Our poor luck didn't come off with The Boy's cast, though. Work for me was, and is, a puzzle with too many missing pieces. We talked about getting away for a short trip, just the four of us, but we never followed through. And we had plans for a long weekend last week in which we'd reacquaint ourselves with the coast that is always so close to us, but Bill and Danny teamed up to close the Atlantic for nearly a week and to produce just enough rain to make being outside annoying. We did rearrange our house while the weather worked over the trees in the park, but that's about as exciting as my wife's three-day weekend got.

Danny irritated us the most. Along with two to three trips to the beach each summer, we also make a habit of Arthur Ashe Kids' Day at the U.S. Open. The Boy can play tennis pretty well, but he isn't the most motivated thing in the world. Taking him and Q out to the huge grounds for the kid activities (with prizes always donated by Hess Oil) makes him want to believe in himself. After Danny soaked all the fun out of a Coney Island trip we had planned,* it canceled everything at the Tennis Center but the stage show with all the tweens lip-synching poorly. We did attempt to squeeze a little life out of the butt of August with a Sunday trip to the Met (particularly the always cool Temple of Dendur), a Central Park playground, and Pop Burger. Q had a good time feeding the pigeons nearly half of her jumbo pretzel, but I'm sure she would have preferred Jersey sand crabs tickling her hands instead. But it is what it is.

There are so many metaphors that could ably stand in for this summer (broken arm, anyone?), but Bill and Danny let me be dramatic, so I'll let them serve. Large storms like those don't make land here in the city (thank goodness). Still, they bend our weather and waves enough to keep us inside with our faces on the glass. Throughout the summer it has seemed (and here comes the drama) like some enormous force has been spinning slowly somewhere too far away to be calamitous for us but close enough to remind us of our size, what we didn't and don't have.

I'd like to think, though, that September will remake us. Both Q and The Boy will soon go back to school, and I will be a bigger part of their lives in the months to come. There will be gymnastics (or ballet, if Q ever makes up her mind), and swimming and tennis and reading and — with the laziness of August behind me — writing. The days have already begun rolling down into fall, the most beautiful time in New York.

We can't wait for the change in the weather.

_________________________
*And Coney Island was Plan B. We usually head for Robert Moses or the Jersey Shore, but both had been closed for a while.

Gone fishin'

2009-08-12T22:55:00.002-04:00

We're away in Kansas for a while visiting family. Reporting on minutiae of little lives will resume once we return and have finished digesting all the meat.

Birthday Break

2009-07-23T11:51:00.005-04:00

My 39th birthday came and went last weekend. It was fairly uneventful for me, which is the way I like it. It was, unfortunately, much more eventful for The Boy. A week ago, he and his babysitter came suddenly home from his best friend's house with his arm held still. Apparently he fell while climbing around and down a bunk bed and landed on his left wrist. Now I'm no doctor (or at least no doctor that counts), but I could tell that his arm looked, well, wrong.

We left pretty much right away for the hospital. We rode nearly silently in the cab, his streaked face now dry, me trying to say something both soothing and believable. He'd been through this before more or less, and I assumed that he was thinking about what this trip likely meant. Which is to say a cast. Given our terrible experience with Q at NYU Med Center, we went back to the source this time — New York Hospital, where Q and The Boy were born.

It was the right choice. Whereas the folks at NYU looked at Q as if she were some kind of foreign object, New York hospital has a pediatric ER, with a waiting room (in which we barely waited) decorated with animal murals and a real fish tank. After checking in with a nurse (and not some grumpy lady behind bullet and largely soundproof glass), we were taken back to a bed to wait for an examination. As we sat on the gurney, a young woman came in to ask if we wanted to watch a movie while we waited. This ER had a waitress. The Boy and I settled upon The Polar Express, and by the time we made it home about five hours later, we had pretty much seen all of it. There were questions asked over and over by different doctors — "Did you ever black out?" — several x-rays that appeared magically on screens right after the beam switched off. He had, it turned out, a buckle fracture, and the bone needed to be reset. They used what they called "conscious sedation" so that he wouldn't be completely under while they realigned the fracture, but he wouldn't remember the procedure either. It all went quickly and without problem.

We went home tired and with his arm in a cast. (No purple this time; we weren't given a choice.) We also weren't given a lot of information about how long he'll need to keep the thing on. (We'll find that out next week.) We do know that his summer contracted in an instant — no more bike, scooter, beach, or pool. No tennis or soccer or basketball. Take it easy in the sandbox and on the slide, though he's probably better off staying away from both. Bathe, fittingly, with the arm in a trash bag. A week has passed, but he still says, every now and then, "I wished I didn't do it." He didn't do anything, of course. It's just one of those things.

So that's a bit of context for my birthday, which, like I said, was much nicer for me than it was for him. I'll spare you many of the details, largely because some things I keep just for me. But I do have to share a bit of my great present from the kids. Q and The Boy (with a solid assist from my lovely wife) made me a book about them and me. On one page, for example, Q said:

I am, in fact, on the tall side, and, if I do say so myself, good at giving slingshots. Note: Q colored the picture and wrote "100" herself.

And The Boy reminded me, among other things:

Such a simple idea, this book. I have it here by me now, close, where I like it.

I'm not sure when it was exactly (maybe around 27 or so?) when I entered the middle stretch where birthdays don't seem to signify much of anything. At both ends of a life, they mark successful survival, which is certainly worth celebrating (with presents!). The middle is a little mundane, which is just fine with me.

Then again, thinking about that cab ride to the hospital last week lets me see a bit of how my middle-stretch birthdays matter. I'm still a puzzle to myself in many ways — and can't see what there is for me even a month out from now — but each year I get a little better at being a solid thing for the kids to lean and climb upon. I can be the person who gets The Boy to thinking how cool beds with wheels are and the one he looks to before the drugs take him under. And I can show Q how to twist the cutter on the counter to make a clean biscuit, which is the same as showing her how to make things to be proud of. (She figured out on her own how tasty the raw dough is.) Then I can be the one that she can be proud to.

There are other things, too, but some things I keep just for me.

Birthday Wishes for Mom

2009-07-09T15:03:00.003-04:00

Today my lovely and talented wife turns — well, just a little bit older. This morning Q and The Boy proudly gave her cards they had made themselves. The Boy made a picture of her holding a cupcake and a balloon under a deep-red heart. Q drew herself and mom seated at a round table enjoying brownies. They were just perfect, and my wife took them to work with her today.

Later, after dinner, the kids and I made cupcakes and were right in the middle of making frosting when she came home from work. Q and The Boy cut their losses and each frosted one up for themselves and ate it in her honor.

I've been looking through our stash of digital photos (now well into the 30,000 range), and she's responsible for so many of them — what's pictured as well as the pictures themselves — that she doesn't appear herself that often. Rest assured that it's hard not to smile around her, even if you, out there in blogland, may not be fortunate enough to see her face. That is my present, I suppose.

Happy Birthday, Mom, from all of us. We love you.

Sparklers

2009-07-07T03:41:00.007-04:00

Unlike the past two years, the skies remained pretty clear throughout the Fourth of July. Also different this year was the location of the Big Macy's Show: Usually things blow up over the East River and the heads of questionable celebrities, but this year the barges parked in the Hudson just a little north of our building.

Though Q and The Boy are older now, the 9:20 launch time was still on the late side, and they had little steam when the dark actually arrived. From our roofdeck, the snag of small boats seemed dense enough to make hopping to New Jersey almost possible.

Q was (and is) still convinced that she's scared of fireworks, which meant that as soon as the explosions started up (just faint pops in the distance), she asserted, "They do not look like flowers, and I want to go inside." Though she sounded more tired than spooked, my lovely wife took her down to our couch to watch the festivities on NBC.

The Boy and I stayed up with the crowd (largely made up of people who don't live in our building) until the end, around 10 p.m. Sure, the display was spectacular and seemed to go on forever and all, but I found myself missing the humbler show that Jersey City puts on annually out by the Statue of Liberty. It was still on this year, too, but it's hard not to look at the other end of the river where 40,000+ fireworks were being flaunted (and set to questionable music) by a middling department store. We left right after only smoke was left and the boats started sounding off as thanks for the show. The Boy was so tired, he fell into bed face first like drunks do in movies.

That wasn't the best part of the long weekend, though. On Sunday, facing an open day and an unending Wimbledon final, we decided to take the ferry out to Governor's Island. Don't let the 90's-era website fool you; the little swatch of land just five minutes off the tip of Manhattan is a marvel. The city allows no cars on the grounds, and the place just feels still. Lush lawns framed by ancient trees and up-kept old buildings are everywhere, and we never felt obliged to stay on the paths. We spent time under the great branches feeling small and cooled.

We only wandered along one side of the small island but found plenty to busy us. We discovered sculptures inserted here and there, including a giant wind chime with a cord for making yourself into the wind. And there were retired cannons here and there that The Boy could pretend to shoot and could think out loud about.

But the most fun thirty minutes of the weekend weren't spent looking at a lit-up sky, but rather rolling in a hammock. Q and The Boy had never seen one before, and they couldn't get enough of using themselves to send it tipping in all sorts of ways.

My wife and I sat smiling nearby on the grass. No crowds, nothing loud except explosions of laughter. No need for a show; we made our own. And it was better.

Happy 4th of July!

2009-07-04T23:26:00.001-04:00

Doing it wrong:

Gotta remember where you came from, right?

Door

2009-06-30T16:20:00.001-04:00

Time to open the door. Time to leave. Time to get better.

The Boy is 6

2009-06-25T13:12:00.014-04:00

Like Q, The Boy celebrated his birth this year at least three times:

On his official birthday, which was June 6th,* he opened his presents from Ong Ngoai, Grandpa & Grandma, his cousins in Minnesota, Q, and us. And we spent that Saturday and Sunday assembling large, wondrous Lego and Bionicle sets.
Receiving a gift from his babysitter, also Legos (which he assembled, proudly, all by himself).
Blue frosted cupcakes with a '6' piped on them at school, the tops licked clean by his classmates.
At his party proper on Sunday, 6/14.

Though he turned 6 on the 6th, we set aside the 14th for his party so that his friends could all make it. And what a party it was. After Q's fairly girly celebration just a few months ago, we found it only fitting to go All Boy for The Boy's 6th. We decided to keep it small but go big, inviting six of his guy friends and Q to the Intrepid Museum and then back to our apartment for pizza and cake.

We all met at the Intrepid right as the doors opened, and headed up to the flight deck to check out the fighter jets and attack helicopters.

The Boy had been there before, and he happily served as informal tour guide for his friends (even the ones who themselves had already toured the museum). Among so many other things, he showed them where to sit on the large anti-aircraft guns and how to fire up the fans that demonstrate how a wing creates lift, and nearly lifted off himself. We were there for about two hours and probably could have made a day of it.

We then came back to the roof deck of our apartment building for pizza. The adults, good friends all, caught up a bit while the kids chased each other along the pavers or, fingers hooked in the fence, spied the boats 200 feet below. The wind being what it was, we all went down to our apartment for the singing and the candle-blowing and delicious aircraft carrier birthday cake. (My lovely wife did an amazing job on the cake, right? Certainly one of her best, and The Boy loved it. You better thank your mother.) As his friends and their parents forked aircraft carrier into their mouths, The Boy took time to get everyone cups of water.

It's funny, but I sometimes have trouble writing about him. Here's more or less how he began:

(That's Ba Ngoai doing the soothing, by the way.)

He's long now — has to fold himself up now to sit on my lap — but I can remember holding him in a single hand. Why he came early will remain a puzzle, as will what that's done to him, if anything.**

Also, I think of Q as part of Einstein's universe, like a heavy ball lying on a sheet, curving space and time and light around her. The Boy's pull, though, reminds me of Newton's gravity — a mysterious force, unexplainable action at a distance.

Some mysteries improve in their dispelling; others are more precious just the way they are.

Happy Birthday, son. We're proud of you, and we love you.

--------------------------
*Yes, he was 6 on the 6th day of the 6th month. I expected either the devil or Dan Brown to drop by that Saturday, but I guess neither was ultimately interested.
**I know, I know, but it's hard to stop thinking about.

Happy Father's Day

2009-06-22T06:34:00.008-04:00

In our house, we tend to praise each other with food. And so it was on Father's Day, when Q and The Boy together carried in a tray with homemade cinnamon rolls, juice, hot coffee, a crisp white napkin, and a flower they sneakily picked from the park moments before. As I held the tray, Q combed my hair* while The Boy scratched my back with a backscratcher we've had hanging behind the bathroom door for something like forever. I brought the wonderful breakfast spread out of our bedroom to the table, though, so that I could sit by both of them as we all dismantled the sweet rolls.

Later, my lovely wife made delicious enchiladas while the kids and I were outside on the swings in the light rain. After we all ate too much for lunch, we took in Pixar's "UP" in 3D.** Which, by the way, was one of their finest films, and that's saying something. It was a wonderful day, just the kind I like.

I love being a dad. Among other things, I get to be the fixer, the assembler, the tosser-in-the-air, the paper airplane maker, the highest shoulders upon which to sit. (It does help, of course, that I've got a fantastic wife and two swell kids to make my role so much easier to realize.)

Unlike so many other roles (jobs, e.g.), I will never stop being a father, long past the years where I'll embarrass them and then won't again, past their own marriages (should they have them), past their parenthoods (again, should they have them), past when I'll need plates brought to me, past me. All along I will be proud.

Happy Father's Day, all.

_________________________

*The hair combing was The Boy's idea. Not sure where it came from, but I must say that I rather enjoyed it.
**Unexpected bonus: The heavy, black-framed 3D glasses made us each look like Martin Scorsese, particularly (for some unknown reason), Q. Probably has something to do with her being about the same height as him.

Not well heeled

2009-06-04T22:06:00.003-04:00

The good folks at SlateV go to a convention for baby, toddler, and tween products. Yes, you will make one of those uncomfortable laughs, especially if you have a daughter:

Tour and Duty

2009-06-01T14:05:00.005-04:00

Memorial Day in the City is usually somewhat of a big deal, for two reasons. First, lots of people leave, which opens up lots more space (physically and psychologically) for those of us who stay. And second, it coincides with Fleet Week, where various branches of the military glide into the city, on water or air, for a yearly exchange: They open their boats and planes and tanks; New York opens itself to them.

We took advantage of the emptiness (as we usually do) by going out for lunch on Sunday, after a morning spent burning our breakfast in the park. Tables were, as expected, plentiful. We ate outside even, in praise of the excellent weather, and between courses Q and The Boy shot their hands into the waterfall/fountain just outside the Winter Garden, as if after fish. It seemed very much like summertime, and, as the old song goes, the living did seem easy.

On Monday, we first honored the military side of the holiday. The Boy, as many boys his age do, has become interested in military hardware. We’ve been to the Intrepid Museum here in New York, a WW II-era aircraft carrier repurposed as an exhibit, complete with a flight deck full of decommissioned jets and helicopters. During Fleet Week, the military and Coast Guard open a few ships for free tours, so we take advantage.

We’re up early, as we usually are on bright mornings thanks to The Boy, and we make it to the ships early, too. Past the metal detectors and lines of rigid but friendly soldiers, everything stands amazingly open. A steep ramp leads up into the cavernous hold of the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima, where we can hold the weapons currently in use by Marines on patrol in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can feel the weight of mortar shells and sniper rifles. We can climb into tanks and troop transports and assault craft meant for land or water or both. And military personnel stand everywhere in crisp camouflage, happy to answer questions or to pose for all manner of photos.

We climb onto some amphibious vehicle with large weapons mounted in all directions. Q, her hair in pigtails and wearing a bright-red butterfly dress, draws smiles and some cameras when she pretends to point the heavy guns at nothing in particular.* The Boy wonders what some oddly shaped canisters on the truck/boat’s stern are for, and I encourage him to ask the young marine. He’s too shy, so I ask for him. Turns out they’re smoke flares for evading pursuers. I also ask, for myself this time, about a particularly thick-necked gun guarding one side. The young marine tells me that it’s an MK 19 automatic grenade launcher, capable of shooting 325+ rounds a minute. He adds, with more than a little relish, that having it is like “playing a game with all the cheat codes.”

We keep going up the ship’s insides, from the main hold to a level where Navy sailors in their anti-camouflage display their branch’s firearms. Then up a longer and steeper grade to the flight deck, from which we can see miles of Hudson, including the Intrepid just to the south.

About a dozen aircraft, helicopters mostly, have been opened up for anyone to walk through. The Boy turns shy again, but Q convinces her brother to go inside them all, and they do.

Q plays this game with my lovely wife where she goes in one end of an aircraft while my wife stays outside, only to come out the other to surprise her. My wife is all too happy to play along.

After nearly two hours, we leave as the really big crowds begin to come in. Q and The Boy impress, as always, with their easy behavior.

Later, after lunch, we travel up to Connecticut for another Memorial Day tradition — a barbecue with friends by a swimming pool. As my wife and I eat jerk chicken and Q and The Boy and our friends' son splash in the shallows, it's hard not to notice the gap between where we spent our morning and where we spent our afternoon. Here in the sun, everything still seems possible; less so in the dark of the ship. I sometimes think of my kids' futures as arcs that shoot out from them, curving up and out beyond where anyone, including themselves, can see. To think about them and war is to imagine a bullet or a bomb tracing those arcs back in, erasing the paths as they work. I don't even want to do this kind of thinking, but I do. Sometimes.

Many thanks to those, like many in my own family, who have and do risk themselves. We do remember.
______________________________
*Look for her on the next brochure for the Marines; the "tip of the spear" never looked so cute.

Who's your favorite princess?

2009-05-07T14:35:00.006-04:00

When Q told us that she wanted a princess birthday party, we were of two minds. We want to make her happy, of course, and pretty much every store everywhere makes something princess related, making it pretty easy to pull off. On the other hand, we're not huge fans of the main princess narratives, which usually have to do with some preternaturally beautiful girl giving up a central part of herself for some guy (see Ariel) or waiting for some guy to come rescue them (see pretty much the rest of the Disney Royalty).

We're also not sure where her princess fascination comes from. My lovely wife embodies the strong, contemporary woman — much more Queen Rania than Sleeping Beauty on the monarchy scale. My wife rarely wears dresses (or color, for that matter), is always beautiful but not girly. But we suppose princess is in the air around all little girls and is therefore unavoidable — at least until she grows up into an atmosphere with less pink. Anyway, we have no doubt that it will make her happy, and since that's our ultimate goal, we go with it.

As usual, my wife has been thinking about/researching this for a long time. Our party ideas tend to start with the cake and then expand outward, and my wife has decided to make a jewelry-box confection, complete with a lid and separate compartments filled with candy bracelets and ring pops. She made some even more amazing sweet sushi appetizers out of rice crispy treats, Swedish Fish candy, and fruit roll ups:

As for activities, we borrow fancy dresses for dressing up from good friends next door — though it turns out that each girl has and brings her own ensemble. For Q, my wife scoured the Easter Dress sales and found a rather beautiful cream number with soft flowers and a silk, pink ribbon on the waist, which Q inhabits with grace. My wife also had the idea of cutting out paper dolls, affixing them to sticks, and adding a photo of each girl so that she could dress herself up in a gown she colored herself.

As you might expect, these were definitely a hit with parents and kids alike. My lovely wife again does a great job of making the party our own. (You better thank your mother, Q.)

The party itself is small. In asking who she wants to celebrate with, we settle on ten girls. And it will be only girls — The Boy and his friend are somewhat invited, though they willingly exclude themselves from the dressing up and general prettification. Unfortunately, two girls had to cancel at the last minute — two that Q definitely looks up to — because of illness.* The eight girls get their hair pulled up and done, and suddenly, their faces so revealed, I can see more clearly than I have in a while our friends re-mixed and re-made in their children. Then the girls get glittered nails and generally just move around the room on clickety heels. Because summer seems to have arrived, it's nearly 90 degrees in fact, we go outside to the full park for some sun and photos. The girls draw all sorts of looks and cameras from people lolling on the grass, particularly when they decide to take a stroll (best way to describe it) along the path that rings the lawn in back.

After just a little while, Q abandons her plastic shoes to race down the hill in her bare feet and smiles.

Myself, I like princesses when they run.

Then it's back inside for pizza and for cake. While they eat, a good friend of ours asks everyone in turn who her favorite princess is. We hear all the regulars — Cinderella, Ariel, Snow White, etc. When it comes to me, I say "Princess Q, of course," and I mean it.

We always forget more than we remember. But for her much of her remembering starts about now, a long ribbon of being unrolling out behind her that she makes and that makes her. The person** who savors her cake now is the same as the one who yesterday fashioned a contraption out of a jump rope and fruit bowl, and she will be the same as the one who tonight will link hands behind her mom's neck, asking for just a little more time before she must call it sleep.

As she grows and goes, I will hold that ribbon, use it to make a gift of everything.

Happy Birthday, Q. We love you.

__________________
*Not swine flu related, if you must know.
**!

Q at 4

2009-04-22T22:53:00.005-04:00

Q turned 4 today.

Because my lovely wife had an absurdly early meeting this morning, I was the engine that cranked out breakfast, snack, lunch, and (eventually) dressed and brushed children. Which also meant that I got to wish Q a happy birthday at the very beginning of her fourth year. A few hours later, my wife left her work to bring cupcakes for Q's class, which Q passed out proudly and without assistance.

And in a little taste of what is no doubt to come, my wife and I both came home from work to an empty house. Q and The Boy have what they call Date Night each week with their close friends where they eat dinner and watch a movie, usually at their friends' house, and tonight happened to be Date Night. We busied ourselves with pictures from the day and by fielding calls from her aunt in California, her uncle and aunt and cousins in Minnesota, and her grandparents, until word came that our kids were ready to be retrieved. After the door swung open from my knock, Q practically floated out of their building and into ours. After her bath, she opened presents from us, from grandpa and grandma, her babysitter, and her aunt, and she showed us all how to enjoy ourselves.

We're having a party for her this weekend (princess-related, natch), so more to follow. In the meantime, I leave you with some words from her. When asked by her teacher today what she wanted to learn now that she's four, she replied:

I'm going to work on my letters and numbers and I'm going to learn to read.

If you ever read this, Q, you will see the size of your story.

Happy Birthday, Big Stuff. We love you and are proud of you.

Q Bits

2009-04-09T21:11:00.012-04:00

I've come to really like Twitter.* (You can follow us on Twitter here, by the way.) It's got all the jazz of social media/Web 2.0 (or whatever) without all that "friendship" business imposed by Facebook or Myspace. And the added trick/benefit is that posts can be at most 140 characters, which makes it a challenge to do well.

Q and The Boy say so many wonderfully odd things, so I particularly like to use Twitter as a kind of online memory for their bite sized bits of funny. Looking back over my timeline, I see several great Q quotes in particular worth passing along.

Here are just a few of my favorites:

Bonus: Here's a great one from The Boy:

Now if you excuse me, I've got to mention this post on Twitter.
_____________________
*For some reason, many people seem to enjoy worrying about what Twitter is exactly. I'm happy to provide a fairly straightforward answer for the curious.

Family Friday: The Boy in Action

2009-03-30T12:16:00.005-04:00

The Boy's school dedicates at least one Friday a month to what they call "Family Friday." On these Days, parents are encouraged to come into their child's classroom and join in on a project with their child, whether building something, artwork, reading, etc. — basically whatever their current curriculum consists in. My lovely wife and I work (a lot) so we take turns going, and my wife went to last Friday's festivities. Which was good, because the topic was (ostensibly) math, and that's squarely within her wheelhouse.*

Not long after she arrived at her work, my lovely wife sent me the following description of the morning.

THAT'S MY BOY:
Kid 1: "Is your dad coming to make paper planes today?"
The Boy: "No, he's not here today but my mom is here and she's really good at art and math."

TEACH A BOY TO FISH:
Kid 2: "Can you make one of those cool paper planes for me?"
The Boy: "Watch me so that I can teach you how to make it and you don't always have to ask me to make you one."
Kid 2's grandfather to The Boy: "Is your dad a plane engineer?"
The Boy: "No, my dad teaches but he teaches me lots of things. Now watch me — this is the tricky part of the plane."

COFFEE TALK:
Mom 1: "Did you hear the "B" word was used yesterday during recess? Yes, two boys were fighting and one called the other the "B" word. The teacher had a talk with the whole class telling them it was a bad word and disciplinary action was taken."
Mom 2: "Gasp."
Mom 3: "Oh my god."
Mom 4: "Well, that happens."
Mom 5: "We know it's probably not [The Boy]; he won't even eat McDonald's without calling his mom."
Lovely Wife: "This coffee is good."

_____________________
*I mainly stick to making the most awesome paper airplanes I can, thereby solidifying my Cool Dad status with all the five-year-olds.

I lic school

2009-03-23T10:06:00.008-04:00

Though it contained little spring, last week was officially Spring Break. I earned a little time off from teaching, and Q and The Boy were intermittently off for parent-teacher conferences. (My lovely wife, as always, soldiered on in the Real World.)

Parent-teacher conferences for preschool always strike me as a little odd, and not just because we all sit on and around undersized furniture. What is there to talk about, really? And why do the report cards always have to be printed in Comic Sans?

Turns out, a lot — or at least in the little bit of talking much is revealed. Q has always been quick* to pick up just about anything, but she's a pretty solitary soul. As we learned in our conferences last fall, Q has grown more comfortable working with others, and this time around we hear that she's opened further still. (We did notice, though, that The Boy's first "high mark" at Montessori was in "Greeting" whereas Q still is "Working toward" this skill. Typical. Also typical, though, is her eclipsing his scores in just about everything else.) Overall, she's just so solid — she tries all the projects available to her, and will work them until she achieves something like mastery. She has even started to write the letters and numbers. And she's proud of herself and likes school, which is all that we're really going for at this point.

The Boy also continues to astonish. As I said before, his Kindergarten actually delivers academically, and since neither my wife nor I had similar experiences, we don't really know what he should be capable of. We also mainly see him at the end of a long day when he's tired all the way through and not particularly interested in reading. It turns out, according to his teacher (whom we like a great deal), that he's reading (above grade level) and doing all sorts of math. And he's writing so much.

My wife and I love the writing in no small part for selfish reasons. I fancy myself an author of sorts, so I like to see how words come out of his head. There's that time where my wife was joking around with The Boy, and he jetted away, wrote a little something on a piece of paper, rolled it up, and handed it to her. She unrolled a message that read: "I love the Red Sox," which, since my wife is a Yankees fan (or used to be, anyway) is about the funniest/cruelest thing her child could write. And then we find ourselves coming home to things like this:

To translate for those of you who don't easily read Kindergarten: "Stuff I like to do with my mom and dad. I love my mom and dad. I love to play with my mom and dad. I like to build with my mom and dad. I like to go on the train, sit on the train. I like to go to the park. I like to go to the zoo and look at the animals. I love the Star Wars Wii."

I haven't got much to add to that.

Sometimes I think we forget how much we ask of them. Writing, Thoreau once himself wrote, is our "father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak." Not all that long ago, very few could read and write, and now we have our three-year olds muscle-memorizing the shapes of letters. How amazing that is.

Their bodies and brains constitute and confound them (though that doesn't really go away, I suppose). As they spurt and stretch in countless ways, we set walls to press them into pleasant shapes. I'm not sure how they do it — or how we'll do our part — but I'm glad that I get to watch and to participate. They make me want to be better.

_________________
*Sometimes we think that's what the 'Q' stands for. Goodness.

Yeah, I'm scared of this

2009-03-11T22:14:00.002-04:00

but probably powerless to resist. And don't get me started on the new Dora.

In any event, SlateV does a good job.

(And what was with all the hair in the 80's? I mean, I lived through it and all, but really.)

It's all a blur

2009-02-26T21:42:00.002-05:00

Because this is how fast it goes.

Now that's definitely spreading the love

2009-02-21T20:22:00.002-05:00

Valentine's Day isn't quite over at our house. We're still enjoying a wonderful, homemade card from Monkey & Roo (and Nadine). It actually arrived on Valentine's Day proper, which was so nice.

A very big thanks to the crew over at Hello world it's me, and hugs from us, all the way across an ocean.

Same to you

2009-02-14T10:03:00.002-05:00

Card I received from The Boy today.

My "dadship" (instead of "friendship") card from Q today.
(Click on the image above to see the card at flickr with notes.)

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

You go, little plastic girl!

2009-02-13T09:53:00.002-05:00

A new movement is afoot, and you can be part of it. Just ask yourself: Can female Duplo dolls do anything male Duplo dolls can do? The answer is, of course, yes. But not everyone thinks so, as Nadine has clearly shown.

Add your voice to the cause!

The real reason why we do Legos with the kids

2009-02-03T15:42:00.002-05:00

These are the long days of winter, which means lots of time inside. Which means lots of Legos and K'Nex and paper airplanes and tiny, self-stapled books for letters and numbers. It's a lot of fun for us, too, which is why we sometimes find ourselves gluing together paper fish or coloring inside the lines even after the kids turn in for the night.

Guess I'm not the only one. Christopher Neimann has some excellent fun with Legos and NYC on his NY Times blog Abstract City. Some of my favorites:

Check out the whole post here. So very, very clever.

He also did a great series of coffee-stained napkins. (It's much better than it sounds.)

Lessons

2009-01-29T12:55:00.006-05:00

Our Saturdays now largely belong to lessons.

Though The Boy is only 5, we've been resisting organized lessons/activities for some time now. Our kids' friends and acquaintances from the building and the neighborhood have been in music and tumbling and ballet and pottery and Taekwondo for years now, but my wife and I have kept Q & The Boy mainly to the loose activities that we can think up. We've got lots of reasons for that, I suppose. My wife and I are both a little stubborn (wonder where Q gets it?), and so we're constitutionally primed to resist the New York City Parent Pressure to turn our kids into highlighted calendars. We're also both not that loose with the buck, and classes can really set you back in the City: taking Taekwondo in our neighborhood costs around $700 a month. You can go as much as you want, they say, but come on. Add to all this the simple difficulty of signing up for something. With all the kids and all the money around here (at least until the recent Wall Street implosion), most slots for most things get filled six months out.

Besides, it's not as if Q and The Boy have been totally free range. Both of them joined in the excellent free summer soccer program sponsored by the Parks Department. At age 3, The Boy enjoyed his music class, and we kept him in it until he went off to Montessori. (Q not so much; she only made it through two music sessions until none of us could put up with the pain of it all.) We've also encouraged both of them to like some sport or other and not tried to foist our own likes upon them.

But The Boy has changed, and we want to endorse it. Not that long ago we struggled with getting him to try new things, primarily because of a chronic perfectionism (again, thanks mom and dad!) that pretty much choked anything new he went into. He's worked through a lot of that somehow since starting Kindergarten.

Perhaps it has something to do with his body finally catching up a fair amount with his mind. Philosophers of mind often talk about "direction of fit" when it comes to beliefs and desires. We (usually) aim to have our beliefs "fit" the world as it is — be accurate or true, in other words. Desires, though, are the other way around — they represent the way we want the world to be at some future time. (Hopes lie somewhere in between, I'd say.) Desires are usually the things that make us get off the couch or off jelly doughnuts (or onto either, for that matter). Perfectionists, though, run into problems because they want perfection, which doesn't come easy or at all. Sometimes this amounts to expecting to produce or do something beyond what's possible right now, and I think that was The Boy's problem.

Nowadays, The Boy seems fine with meeting his mind halfway a lot of the time. For example, we make a lot of paper airplanes these days, and he can fold just about any shape on his own after just one or two tries. Then he designs his own, working through different combinations of creases, launching them from the table and noting their distance and grace. Most don't make it that far and look pretty ugly coming down. A year ago he probably would have dissolved into sobs, but now he just asks for more paper.

So our Saturdays now belong to lessons, and The Boy loves it. When he finishes tennis in the morning, he wants to keep hitting. After an hour of intense swim class, he still wants to jump into the 12-foot end of the pool and swim on his own to the side. Now Q talks about which lessons she wants (ballet, predictably), and we're looking into something for her. We do, after all, have an hour or two free on the weekend.

I suppose this is the part of the post where I talk about lessons I've learned from all this. There are some to report, of course. That stuff about perfectionism above counts, I think. And I continue to be surprised and amazed by how growing older simply changes the landscape of possibility, slowly and imperceptibly like some ancient glacier. Which I suppose it is.

Happy Tet (New Year) — Year of the Ox/Water Buffalo Edition

2009-01-26T09:45:00.008-05:00

Today is Lunar New Year,* celebrated across Asia and across Asians. We, too, note the day (as we have before), by eating our weight in pho and by giving Q & The Boy little red envelopes filled with lucky money. We also asked them to each put on their áo dài for some pictures, and we lit incense for Ba Ngoai and for others who won't see the year of the Ox (or the year of the water buffalo, according to the Vietnamese zodiac).

What's in store for this year? Well, according to the Great Wikipedia, the year of the water buffalo:

The BUFFALO symbolizes industriousness and patience. The year is one of slow, steady progress and patient strength; traits suitable for a scientist. He is the traditional symbol of spring and agriculture because of his association with the plow and his pleasure in wallowing in mud. People of that year are thought to possess the characteristics of that animal: steady, placid, but stubborn when crossed. The buffalo hours are from 1am-3am when buffalo are feeding and the day's farm work begins.

I suppose this symbol fits the tough times ahead that we'll need to plow through, but I'm not sure about this 1-3 a.m. business. Can't we make slow, steady progress during the day?

Most (if not all?) American holidays don't have much edge to them, particularly when compared with Eastern traditions. Our New Year provides a clean slate, a chance to rededicate oneself to messy closets and exercise. Lunar New Year has its negatives as well as positives, as indicated by the entry on the Year of the Ox:

Positive traits: Responsible, dependable, honest, caring, honorable, intelligent, artistic, industrious, practical.

Negative traits: Petty, inflexible, possessive, dogmatic, gullible, stubborn, critical, intolerant, materialistic.

In any event, chúc mừng năm mới, or Happy New Year! to you and yours. Eat too much, light a candle or incense in memory. Enjoy.

_________________________
*Note: It is not simply "Chinese New Year." Sure, the Chinese celebrate New Year today, but they're not the only ones.

It really is a new day

2009-01-20T13:47:00.004-05:00

Congratulations to Barack Hussein Obama, our 44th president. Finally, time to be responsible.

The picture above is a wordle of Obama's inaugural address made by, well, me. The larger the word, the more often it appears in the speech. How telling, in these troubled times, that 'Less' is bigger than 'freedom'.

(For fun and comparison, I've also created ones for George W. Bush's first and second inaugural. Enjoy.)

Bye 2008, finally

2009-01-15T06:36:00.027-05:00

And but so as I mentioned in the first part of the Leaving 2008 post, we went out to celebrate the holidays with Ong Ngoai and to put 2008 to rest. We also went to help put Ba Ngoai to rest.

Buddhist tradition (or at least its Vietnamese inflection, as far as I know) requires that a deceased person's ashes stay in temple for 49 days. After that time, family and friends pay final respects in a ceremony at the temple, and then the ashes can be released from there and wherever.

Ba Ngoai's 49th-day service was at a lovely temple a little over an hour away from the house she shared with Ong Ngoai. Much like the other services, there was a lavish altar with her picture (from her daughter's recent wedding) ringed with fruit and flowers that Ong Ngoai bought in the dark hours of that morning. The altar sat at the end of a long red carpet hemmed in gold, and visitors, after leaving their shoes at the door, could take up a chair on either side of it or kneel on it directly. Nearly all the big family had been out for the funeral, but not everyone could make it this time. Ba Ngoai's son was home waiting with his wife and kids for his new daughter to arrive — a girl who'll likely carry Ba Ngoai's name. This time Ong Ngoai, one of Ba Ngoai's sisters (and her two daughters), my wife and her sisters, and Q and The Boy knelt close. Three enormous Buddhas contemplated everything with closed eyes, the center one a luminous gold.

Monks in gold and maroon sang into microphones and softly rung bowls with wooden mallets. Despite the Southern California sun, it was cold.

Q and The Boy were outstanding — Q even managed to sit for the entire service, and The Boy nearly so. And when the time came for each member of the family to light incense and pour tea, the kids joined my wife in the ritual. As they waited for the fire to catch, a stitch of sun angled down out of the window and sewed them to the moment.

After the ceremony and the songs and the pictures and the bathroom, we left the temple for a nearby beach. We went there in part because of a joke. When talk of what to do with your body was only hypothetical, Ba Ngoai said she'd like to be cremated and her ashes dropped into the Pacific Ocean so that she could swim back to Vietnam. "You can't swim," Ong Ngoai reminded her at the time. Everyone laughed.

The Pacific coast lacks the angle and anger of the Atlantic. West Coast beaches tend to be gentle and long, the waves cresting far out and then unfurling lazily on the land. There was a stripe of sand made into a mirror by the wet, and Q and The Boy immediately rolled up their pants and walked out onto their reflections. They can't pass up an ocean.

It was my wife's idea to use one of Ba Ngoai's handbags with a hole in it for the release, and my wife's younger sister carried it down the steps from the parked cars.

"Hold this," my sister-in-law said. I obliged. It was heavier than I expected. She removed her boots and tights.

"I can carry this, if you like," I said.

"That's okay, I'll do it."

"It's up to you; it's your mom."

"That's not mom," she said with a warm smile. And it wasn't.

The hole in the bag worked for a while, but there was a surprising amount of ash, so the three sisters started to let go handfuls until their hands were black. It was finer than the sand. But even in handfuls it wasn't enough, and my sister-in-law took the bag into waves nearly to her waist. After a quick glance around the nearly vacant beach, she let loose the rest. She came hopping out of the surf, the late-afternoon sky over the water bluer than anyone's idea of it. My wife and The Boy then drifted further down the beach together and looked out past everything.

Like I said around this time last year, I've abandoned New Year's resolutions and the bullying of the calendar. I have many things that I yet want to do and be, of course, and people I want to see flourish. But I've come to relish much more the moments that select themselves. Like when my sister-in-law walked out of the ocean and back up to us, and Q was there to greet her. They looked to each other and then took hands.

That was the end of 2008 for me.

Happy 2009, everyone. Now on with living.

Hey, 2008, don't let the door hit you in the...

2009-01-12T22:53:00.002-05:00

This past pair of holidays, we broke with tradition and traveled. Our families live far away, but since having children we've favored off-peak visits when the weather is better and the airport lines are shorter. This Christmas was different, of course.

Ong Ngoai was there, alone, to pick us up at the San Diego airport. The air was summer-evening cool, and our East Coast clothes felt thick. I then drove us all the hour more to the smaller town and bigger house.

The house was really too big for the two of them, and seems cavernous now. Ong Ngoai has only recently gone back to staying here after weeks of sleeping on friends' couches. He had been packing, though. He'd neatly sorted Ba Ngoai's clothes and bags and shoes into clear bins that had been labeled and inventoried. She was a hair stylist for many years, and she had accumulated shears and rollers and chemicals in industrial strengths and sizes. Much of it needed to be gone through and carried, which was mainly why we were there.

Ong Ngoai now lives in a part of the first floor — a small bedroom just off the kitchen, and a bathroom just off of that. He only goes upstairs to bring food to his wife on the altar of family who have passed on, as tradition requires. (Throughout the visit, we could hear him talking sweetly to Ba Ngoai as he brought a small meal upstairs for her.) The three second-floor bedrooms had mostly been cleared out and left to themselves. We spread out into the two smaller ones, my wife sleeping with Q for the week, and I in the other one with The Boy.

We first noticed the new silence, especially since we brought Q and The Boy in from the car dreaming. Ong Ngoai was excited to have the kids come, and he had set up and decorated the Christmas tree, complete with a ring of presents for them. It looked small in the empty room. Ong Ngoai then went to bed, too, and my wife and I sat very still on the couch with our hearts in our throats. We weren't as still as the house; the quiet was so thorough. I've never heard anything like it in my 17 years of visits.

We used the week to try to help Ong Ngoai prepare for what's next, though none of us are sure what that is. He wants to move, and he should; there's no longer anything for him here. He has many friends and places to go in a Vietnamese community a little over an hour away, and he soon wants to spend a month or so in Vietnam, particularly since his sister is rather ill. 2008, as he himself said, has been a terrible year.

You wouldn't know it from the weather. It grew warmer each day until Q and The Boy were getting overheated riding their bike and scooter along the sidewalks or playing restaurant on the patio out back. We went to Sea World for most of one day, and spent a good part of another outside at a family fun park riding boats and gokarts. At night we all piled in the car and toured the neighborhood light displays, which, to Q's bottomless delight, were reliably garish. (Some store must have had a compelling sale on motorized reindeer.) Throughout the entire trip, the kids slept and ate so well and were so joyous and loving with Ong Ngoai that they deserve their own heaven.

We are generally not religious, but in these last few months we've again become puzzled. Ba Ngoai was so alive, so here, just two months ago. It's tempting to believe that if she's not here, she must be somewhere. But reasoning this way leads to more puzzles — is she scared where she is? Does she know that we think of her and miss her? That first night in California, my wife wondered when she dies, will she be with her mother? These answers are unknown and unknowable.

[to be continued]

Meanings in the meantime

2009-01-05T09:49:00.011-05:00

I'm still coming back from California and 2008, but in the meantime, you might enjoy re-learning some definitions via the photographic dictionary.

You know, something like this would make a good project for us, what with my lovely wife's photog skills. For example:

f

future | fu ● ture [fyoo ch ər]
—noun
1. the time or a period of time following the moment of speaking or writing; time regarded as still to come.
—adjective
1. at a later time; going or likely to happen or exist.

r

resolute | res ● o ● lute [rez ə loot]
—adjective
1. admirably purposeful, determined, unwavering: she was resolute and unswerving.

Feel free to suggest your own contributions from your own libraries.

Happy and Merry

2008-12-25T03:35:00.003-05:00

In the greatest snow globe of all, and us a speck on a flake. Such glorious smallness and vastness.

May you have a wonderful holiday.

What happens when it's too cold to go outside and we introduce the kids to The Sound of Music (and we loved doing it, too)

2008-12-22T09:18:00.004-05:00

(Okay, so if you want the "professional" version — executed with less passion and commitment, I'd say — you can go here. We're also fans of the Muppet Show version.)

Tree hunting

2008-12-17T15:35:00.018-05:00

Last weekend we brought back our tree. Like last year, we rented a car and headed out to New Jersey, mainly to spend more time with our good friends (and, as a bonus, thereby avoiding the outrageous gouging provided by the tree hawkers on Greenwich Ave). These are the friends who provided Q and The Boy with their first sleepover when we had to go to California last month. They've grown up with their kids and always look up and forward to them.

Accordingly, trips to our friends' house reveal the future. We've known them for a long time, and they have one boy and two girls and a comfortable home. Once inside, Q and The Boy disabuse themselves of us as quickly as their coats, and my wife and I are fine with that since we're left to be adults with adults. Since those that we've known in our building have all but left, we don't have much chance to act our age (by which I mean both younger and older than Parent Mode usually allows).

After the kids hatch and execute several schemes in the basement, we go out for lunch. Again, my wife and I get treated to a strange sensation — Q and The Boy want to ride with their friends, and left with nothing in the car but me and the quiet, my wife almost falls asleep. I do not take it personally. Then burgers and sandwiches and scoops of ice cream.* Then we go in search of a Christmas tree.

When I was young but old enough to remember, we would earn our trees from the field of a friend of my parents. If there was snow — which there often was in those Kansas Decembers — my brother and I would zip on our coveralls and pull on ski masks. Dad would be waiting for us in the red Jeep CJ7 that never quite got warm, and we'd throw snow at each other on the way out to it.

Drifts over the tilled-under dirt always made the field a fallen swatch of moon. Dad always drove right out on it in the Jeep, and if we looked closely, we could see coyote and maybe deer tracks. Otherwise, the white was immaculate.

The cedars we thinned each year stood in a little crowd surrounded by open land. I still don't know why they were kept that way (or if I'm even remembering correctly), but I don't want to know now. Some small mysteries are worth preserving.

I said a few paragraphs back that we earned our trees, and I meant it. My father would pick one and sweep away its skirt of snow, and we'd all then take turns slowly felling it with the old orange bow saw. Dad taught us to start the cut on the pull (push first and the long teeth bounce and gouge). It was always hard going, even for the small trunks. With the saw on its side, it's hard to keep the blade flat, especially when your off arm starts to give out, and the saw easily chokes on its own cut. But between the three of us, our hands creased from cold and work, we could get the tree down.

Our hunt is decidedly different now. We follow our friends (and therefore our kids) to a large garden center selling trees from Oregon. They have an enormous number of trees, and they've arranged them into a good-sized forest to make the picking easier. But unlike any other place I've been, they've suspended the trees from ropes on beams, which means they fill out full, and, more importantly, they spin. All five kids realize right away that they're surrounded by a bunch of 8-foot tops, and they run through the rows, grabbing branches, whirling the trees and themselves. They don't even feel the cold, and they warm me, too.

My wife and I settle on one more or less arbitrarily (there were so many good ones), and a smallish, solid man loosens the tree's knot, helps it down and then up onto our rented roof. It's the tallest we've ever had. Though Q and The Boy are anxious to decorate at home, they are not at all ready to leave their friends. Eventually we manage to get the kids in our car and head back to New York.

The tree is glorious and big in our apartment — so big that our old tree stand (bought 10 years ago on a Greenwich Village street) couldn't hold it. Q and The Boy went to bed that night with only a promise to decorate the tree the next day. After they had gone quiet in their room, I went out to the tree hawkers on Greenwich Ave. On my way home from paying them only a little too much for a new stand, it began to snow. The flakes were small and hard, like memories.

I hoped that some of them would stick.

_______________________
*I just want to note here how nice it is to go out to eat with well-behaved/-mannered kids. We ate, told jokes, had fun. Highly recommended.

Best joke ever?

2008-12-10T13:50:00.009-05:00

We've been telling lots of jokes around our house these days. Most of mine are repeats of some I heard as a child (and must have found funny). But lately Q has been making up her own, including what might be the Best Joke In The World:

Q: Why did the cat turn off the light?

Me: I don't know. Why?

Q: Because it's dark.

I'll just let that one sink in for a bit.

Well, I guess you can't spell 'Dada' without 'dad'.

Giving Thanks

2008-12-03T23:05:00.010-05:00

The Thanksgiving holiday gave us four full days with just each other after two months of coming and going. Like previous years, we each don’t get enough time away from work and school for travel to and from the tables of family, so we set and sat at our own. We prepared less than last year, though still enough food to feed the entire 9th floor. Which is the point of Thanksgiving, I suppose.

We usually make a fairly big deal of being thankful, each of us expressing our personal gratitudes, but we didn’t do much of that this year. It’s not that we don’t have lots to be thankful for — we’re in better shape than many these days, what with all the banks on fire and us both having jobs (for the moment, anyway). But given all that's happened lately, it's hard to feel appreciative for what we have when it's effortless to feel otherwise for what we've lost. It's hard to give thanks without being thankful, hard even to go through the motions of thanking.

But, as always, Q & The Boy apply salve to our sorrows. After we sit down to eat, the Boy tries everything on the table and finds himself really loving the fresh cranberry sauce and stuffing. We share a toast to family, clinking our wine with their fizzy grape juice, and Q savors her special drink almost comically. I say "almost" because she's sincere in tipping her glass all the way back and tapping the last drops onto her purple tongue.

And that's their secret, I guess. My wife and I look at this moment and can't help but see it in the arc of others — the many great meals we've had with family and the future ones just made impossible. But they are right here right now and for just this time.

I am truly thankful for that.

Chips and blocks

2008-11-24T21:03:00.015-05:00

Last week the cold came in and sat down. With fall all but over, the trees in the park crook up bare like dendrites and, like what they look like, are probably busy memorizing the year.

The ending of fall means parent-teacher conferences, and this year we sat in two sets of miniature chairs. And we discovered that both Q and The Boy are doing better at school than we imagined, mainly because they're confounding the types we imagine them to inhabit.

If you've been reading this blog for a little while now, you'll know how we think of Q — which is to say tough, quick, and a little stubborn (or, if you prefer, resolute). Being second born, she's also content to play and do by herself, and fiercely so. We therefore thought that she might not enjoy being in a classroom with sixteen other kids while being told what to do. Turns out that her independence has been a gift of sorts: she dedicates herself to all kinds of work until it's finished, and she isn't distracted by the doings of others. She's also grown more social; we hear she completes a puzzle every day with a friend, for example. And she does actually listen to her teachers. In fact, we hear that she listens intently, and I know the look her teachers are talking about — the one where Q fixes right on you, and you start wondering how soon her thinking will lap yours. Oh, and she knows the sounds all the letters make.

We also saw great parts of The Boy revealed in our conference with his teacher. We've been reading with him at home,* and he'll be reading quite well on his own pretty soon, I'd guess. But we didn't know that he can draw a diamond (and, for that matter, that that's rare at his age) and can recognize numbers up to 100 out of order. Okay, before I go on too long as a proud/bragging parent, here's the point: The easily frustrated and distracted perfectionist kid we knew him as while at Montessori somehow remained there. The Boy who shows up to PS 89 tries new things on his own, crosses out mistakes and moves on, teaches other kids how to draw and fold jets, etc. At one point in the conference, after The Boy's teacher said some extremely nice things about him and his place in the class, she offered, "I wonder what he's going to be when he grows up." My lovely wife responded (and I agreed), "As long as he doesn't become a lawyer or professor..."

Times like these it's hard not to look for yourself in them, but here again nothing is straightforward. The Boy looks more like me than Q does, and he obviously inherited my perfectionism and love of words. But he's also much more social than I am and more dynamic. Q is the spitting image of her mother and has an equally analytical mind, along with the same drive and determination, only more so. But Q also has my second-born independence and comfort with solitude. And surprisingly she has my even temperament (that is, when she's not wringing out the new babysitter in the mornings before school). We thought Q would be the artist, but The Boy has lately shown that he can draw out his imagination in some really clever ways.

Q and The Boy really are our better selves in many respects — or, to put it better, the better way to mix the good and bad of ourselves. It's been nice to see how others see them and to see what they're becoming, whatever it is.

_____________________
*This is not my Naps And Milk Kindergarten — they read and write and do real math and the year isn't even half over. Sheesh.

Slingshot

2008-11-16T23:37:00.004-05:00

These days, I've been thinking a lot about a bit of a This American Life episode by John Hodgman. Quite some time ago (long before he achieved anything like the fame he has now), he wrote a letter for the (now defunct) Open Letters project that then became part of a This American Life show. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode (linked above) and/or read the slightly longer print version here.

But here's the Hodgman piece itself. Just click on the name to start the story.

Mom's home

2008-11-07T22:18:00.002-05:00

Once she purchased her ticket, I told Q and The Boy that mom was coming home, and they immediately set about making a sign. I helped The Boy work out the spelling of 'welcome', and he wrote the rest on his own. He added hearts and flowers, and Q added some flair of her own, including (inexplicably) carrots. She also asked me to draw some flowers and hearts for her to color in, and, though it's a little hard to see above, she added a 'Q' for good measure.

We taped the sign to the front door of our apartment, which triggered the less rosy part of The Boy's imagination: What if it falls down? What if someone takes it away? We had to check before bed that it was in fact still there, and I had to promise that I would check again before I closed my own eyes for the night. My lovely wife was taking the red eye back from San Diego so that she could maximize her time with Q and The Boy before returning for Ba Ngoai's services, so we all had to have faith in the strength of the tape.

She came into the bed just before the sunrise; I would take her over it every time. I hadn't been able to sleep myself, and moved to her to be something quiet and warm. She was tired from the five-hour flight and two weeks of tragedy, and, saying nothing and not needing to, we slept.

They both got up early. I was already in the shower so that I could start on breakfasts and lunch and get the kids off to school on time. The Boy whooshed into the bathroom and swept aside the shower curtain, letting out an inarticulate noise of disappointment when he saw who it merely was. I told him to look in our bed, and he whooshed back out and onto his mother. Q came in not long after with both her blankets and piled on, too. Mom's being home unclenched the fist of things.

We both took the day off. We both dropped off and picked up both kids from school, in part so that I could draw the children away while my wife told each of the kids' teachers about Ba Ngoai's passing in case they needed context for unusual behavior. And though I had told Q and The Boy that Ba Ngoai was very sick — and that not everyone who gets sick gets better — we had yet to talk about her being gone.

That conversation came later that night, and it was a difficult one. At first we couldn't get The Boy to pay attention, so we focused first on Q. We explained that Ba Ngoai didn't get better, that she died, and that we can't see or talk to her any more. Q perhaps gave Ba Ngoai the most joy of anyone — the two of them were very much alike in many ways, and every time they were together, they would play private games and laugh and just generally give off sparks. But Q is just three, and she deeply furrowed her brow at the news in an effort to understand and didn't say much of anything. Telling them brought up gushes of sadness in us that weren't very far down to begin with, and Q hugged mom's arm hard with her whole body and didn't let go, as my wife sobbed. The Boy began to catch on and himself exploded into sobs. It's okay to be sad, we said, but he was all questions: How was she sick? What stopped working? Where did she go?

Q looked pretty puzzled and anxious, so I took her for a bath while my wife tried to answer The Boy's questions as directly as she thought she could (which was pretty directly). In the end, she quieted him by reading a book with him and by laying down beside him in his bed, by caring for him.

They were back to their regular selves the next morning, though I can't quite say the same for us. The kids have definitely been a tonic while my wife was away, and even now — it's hard to remain sad when tickled by tiny fingers or when Q keeps trying to jump on your shadow or when softly kissed on the cheek. The Boy has not forgotten; he declared to his teacher that his grandmother was very sick and died and that now he has only one left. He says he's sad (and I believe him), but what happened has become a fact for him, a step that still eludes me.

My wife left again today for California to help with the preparations for Ba Ngoai's funeral. I follow her out tomorrow to help and to pay my respects to someone I have known so closely for 17 years. Q and The Boy will remain here with friends and then with family. I will be the first one they will find in the bed on Monday morning when they wake. After the difficult weekend to come, we could use some welcome signs on the door and the touch from the small hands that made them.

Yes we did

2008-11-05T09:59:00.002-05:00

Here, I'm proud to say, is the first president my children will remember.

America has remade itself, and it is better for it.

Goodbye, Ba Ngoai

2008-11-04T11:49:00.002-05:00

She drifted away peacefully last night, surrounded by her family. We have not yet told Q and The Boy and are trying to figure out how to do that. I haven't yet figured out how to tell myself.

That's about all I can bring myself to say right now.

Twittering the Vote

2008-11-04T08:37:00.004-05:00

I've recently set up an account on Twitter, and I thought I'd put it to good use. While on line at the polling place here in NYC, I'll provide some updates in real time.

Photo of NYC voting machines waiting to be deployed by flickr user wka, used under creative commons license

All Saints

2008-11-03T12:24:00.013-05:00

Halloween is over. Q, The Boy, and I certainly milked the holiday this year. Last Thursday, we attended a costume party put on by the parents of Q's classmate, Friday was official trick-or-treating, and Saturday was a costume-themed birthday party for a classmate of The Boy's. Needless to say, the kids obtained way too much candy and related trinkets — we did take our open bags along each of our building's 26 floors on Halloween night. The four of us will be indulging ourselves through the winter and long after, I'd guess.

Just yesterday, as the cold again descended on the yellowing leaves in the park, we busied ourselves inside. We had reprieved the pumpkins until mom came back, but she's had to stay longer in California than anyone expected with her own mother, Ba Ngoai, in order to somehow help bring her back from what has seized her so suddenly and meanly. (I'm leaving Q's hand at the top to help her find her way.) So instead of carving them with mom, we carved them for her — so that we could tell her about it, so that she could see our thinking about her affect the world (perhaps also so that I could confirm that thinking still does affect the world), so that she could have a pleasant place to put her mind for even a moment or two.

The kids drew the faces they wanted on their respective pumpkins, and I handled the knife. The Boy's (pictured above) turned out suitably scary, as did Q's. We roasted the excised seeds and actually ate some. When night came, we lit their candles and contemplated them, side by side, in the quiet and the dark. Such a simple idea that makes something so compelling. I sent Q and The Boy off to brush their teeth, blew out the jack-0-lanterns, appreciated the snake of smoke sliding out of the noses and eyes.

We miss you, mom, but we love you and are proud of what you are doing. There will be other Halloweens to haunt, many more pumpkins to submit to the carving knife. We know that you are where you are supposed to be right now.

Halloween is over. Now is the time of the saints.

Apparitions

2008-10-31T11:47:00.005-04:00

These days I'm particularly susceptible to portents. My watched stopped at 13 minutes to midnight last night (I'm not making this up), the date dial frozen mid-switch. I'm afraid to fix it for what might begin or end. And I find myself finding messages in the The Boy's morning oatmeal, though I'm not quite sure of their meaning. I'd probably throw bones if I had access to goats.

Soon we will put on our costumes and go trick-or-treating, which is good: I am in the mood for pretending.

As you move about in your mask tonight, be kind to the ghosts — they will be leaving soon, and we need to talk with them. What can they tell us about the living and those at the line between?

It is the unknown that scares the most.

Come back to us, Ba Ngoai

2008-10-29T23:12:00.003-04:00

Come back to us, Ba Ngoai. Take Q's hand, hold on, and come back.

Boo, scared you

2008-10-27T21:10:00.011-04:00

Our favorite time of year, usually.

As I type this, the weather is practicing its winter meanness via a respectably heavy snow, believe it or don't. But last Sunday was an ideal fall day, perfect for celebrating Halloween.

Each year our building hosts a Halloween party for its residents, decorating much of the lobby and all of the playroom in inflatable spookiness. This tradition started about four years ago and has gotten a little smaller each year (no edible treats or building staff dressed up as Darth Vader this year, for example), but it's always the first official occasion for Q and The Boy to wear their costumes. As you can tell from the pic above, The Boy is eyebrows-deep into Star Wars and wanted to be a clone trooper this year. Q took a while to come to her costume — first she wanted to be Chilly Willy, then a witch. Once The Boy started playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii, though, she decided she wanted to look like this:

which is a little hard to pull off, as you might imagine. And though I think Q would have made a fabulous Darth Maul (maybe next year!), we managed to convince her that she would make a wonderful witch. And she is. (A wonderful witch, that is).

Halloween proper is this Friday, of course, and the kids can barely contain themselves. The Boy has posted an October calendar, largely of his own making, on the fridge and dutifully crosses off the passing days in red pen. Q stands next to him as he does this each day and counts off the uncrossed date boxes to the end. (My lovely wife and I look forward to Friday, too — we like to eat around the edges of all that candy.)

To be honest, I'm hoping that for us Halloween reverts to the ancient traditions. On October 31, evil spirits became dangerous for the living, and people dressed in costumes and masks to propitiate them. November 1st, though, marked the beginning of the new year, and the spirits retreated to the underworld, leaving the living to the business of living.

We have seen more than our share of demons this October. May Q The Witch and The Boy The Clone Trooper — and Darth Maul himself, if it comes to that — usher them home and us into a new year.

Pick the perfect one

2008-10-26T09:20:00.001-04:00

If you haven't seen these, you probably should

2008-10-24T11:23:00.005-04:00

This election season has been a long one, nearly interminable at times. And even those who aren't political junkies (like me, I'm afraid) can't escape seeing and hearing the candidates.

It's easy to believe, I think, that we glimpse national politicians as they are, particularly in the cuts of video passed around the Internet or included in a nightly newscast. It's probably safer (and more accurate), though, to believe that we see packages more than people.

Enter the photographer. I'll admit right up front that I prefer both photography to video and Obama to McCain, so adjust your grains of salt accordingly. But if you, too, appreciate even one of the two, you really should have a look at the series of photos by Callie Shell. (A little background on it and her can be found here.)

Here are two of my favorites (click each for the full-size version):

and

Looking at these pictures (as she calls them), I get the feeling that I'm seeing him for the first time. And I keep finding hints of my grandfather in his face, which may not be that unusual since there's a fair amount of Kansas in both of us.

In any event, please do have a look at them all. (Note: You'll need to click "Show More Images" several times at the bottom to show the entire set.)

What I wanted to say v. what I did say

2008-10-21T08:53:00.013-04:00

When I visited The Boy's Kindergarten classroom recently to see him at work and to help him paste together a picture of his family. The teacher asked all us parents to leave, and he went into a slump that slowly rolled into a sob.

What I wanted to say:

Don't cry. This is the smallest of moments. Growing up and older has a lot to do with figuring out the true size of things (which I myself am trying to get better at even now), and what may seem monumental at the moment will not be worth remembering, let alone forgetting, just a little later. Once I leave this room to go back to turning the smaller gears of our life, you will come back to yourself. You will have a snack and make things that we will marvel at. When I pick you up, you will tell me how much you enjoyed being here without me.

What I did say:

It's okay, it's okay. Your teacher said that I've got to go now, but I'll be back to pick you up soon. Have a good day.

When Q and the boy were fighting over the K'Nex building tools a few days ago, mainly because The Boy said they were playing spaceships and Q insisted they were playing guns.

What I wanted to say:

Look, son, she's just pushing you around because you're an easy mark. She's got you figured all the way out already and can move you around the house almost without effort, like you're on those Moving Men things from TV. Take a look at what she's doing — using your belief in rules and Truth to flip you over — and learn that belief can be bigger than both of you. Do that and she loses her power over you. Besides, Q should be reminded that there are other wills in the world besides hers (though good luck with that).

What I did say:

Stop it.

When Q simply refused to go to sleep last night (like most nights).

What I wanted to say:

Come, get into your bed, it's late, time to relinquish the day. But this isn't surrendering, there's no need to fight the night that's here. Dreams are for stringing the shiny bits of the day just past into a Queen's necklace. And pick your battles. I love that you're resolute, but you need to make out the line between resoluteness and stubbornness, and that line has to do with object, what to be resolute about. My father taught me that mules are misunderstood — they, unlike horses, know their limits and won't overwork themselves. I know that this regular struggle is you discovering the shape of limit and that it's our job to be something firm for you to push against. Which is why we keep putting you back in your bed, and will do so pretty much forever. And good luck with the pushing. Have you not met your mother?

What I did say:

It's late, Q, time for sleep. I bet if you ask nicely, mom will lie down with you for a while.

If the election doesn't go the way you want...

2008-10-15T14:33:00.003-04:00

Particularly funny to me as a Midwestern Boy cum East Coast Elite. (Get a load of the magazine the guy slams on the coffee table, for example.)

Because I like it

2008-10-12T20:43:00.004-04:00

This picture is a little old (from around our wedding anniversary), but I couldn't find a swell spot to drop it in. I like it, though, so here's Q looking over our wedding album. (Afterward, we asked her if she was going to get married. Her response? "No.")

Now for something completely different — and Good, actually

2008-10-09T11:03:00.004-04:00

Things have been a little serious around here lately (understandably), but I know just the thing to brighten the mood. A friend of ours is a great filmmaker, and her latest work is a documentary called "Frontrunners," that follows the student council elections at Stuyvesant High School (the prestigious public school near our apartment where we go swimming on the weekends).

As for release dates, it starts trickling out to theaters in larger cities starting this Friday, October 15. In the meantime, though, you can enjoy the trailer:

You can also view a higher-resolution version of the trailer over on Apple's trailers page.

That first part still makes me chortle every time I see it.

We're sick of all this

2008-10-06T21:09:00.016-04:00

This past week has been healthcare week — or rather sick-care week. Q's breathing worsened last Monday, so much so that a quick call to the pediatrician sent me carrying Q in her pajamas and stocking feet out to a cab to NYU Medical Center, while my lovely wife stayed home with The Boy who was sleeping unknowingly. Q and I spent five first worrisome and then boring hours trying to get people with medicine to pay attention to us. In the end, everything worked out — a steroid shot released her throat and cheered her up enough to play silly games in our ER bed until I bothered them enough to let us go. On the way out at 3 a.m., they gave her a little blue teddy bear as some sort of bizarre parting gift, which she cleverly named Bluebear-y.

Soon after, we heard that Grandma's root canal (which is something bad enough as it is) went awry, and the stuff they put into the hollowed-out tooth — and I'm cringing even as I type this — leaked into her jaw. So she's basically waiting for her body to reject it and for the necessary surgery to scrape out — again, cringing — the whatever it is.

Then we heard that Ba Ngoai went to the ER with severe liver problems, the extent of which is still unknown. The entire family sprang into action to find her the best care (my wife's sister is an administrator for Scripps, so that really helped), and she's doing much better. Even so there's been serious talk of a transplant, which is serious talk indeed.

The health of our healthcare system is questionable, too. Without her daughter's inside help, would Ba Ngoai still be sitting in the first Emergency Room? What if we didn't have the money to cover the insurance or the co-pay for Q's hospital visit or The Boy's cast? What if the recklessness of financial institutions and fecklessness of government has now made responsible overhaul of U.S. healthcare all but impossible, even if Barack Obama wins the presidency?

On the brighter side, Q and The Boy also went to the dentist last week. The Boy is a real champ at these kinds of things (general checkups, that is), but Q is a wildcard. After her ER experience, we didn't know what to expect. She watched her brother in the chair and, holding her mom's hand, took after his example. I'm happy to say that they both did very well.

Now if we could just fix healthcare or something, they'd have a lot more to flash those great smiles at.

(Photo by Flickr user gaultiero used under Creative Commons license.)

Breathe

2008-09-29T12:03:00.007-04:00

It started yesterday morning with a raspy voice and the characteristic barking cough. Q seemed in good spirits for the most part, if a little tired. After a day spent mainly inside, we steamed up the kids' bathroom with the shower and gave her a bath in the mist. We played boats and drew jack-o-lanterns on the fogged mirrors, anything to keep her in there. We suspected she had croup and put her to bed early. She appeared fine.

Then night begins. First at 9 p.m. — then at 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. — we come to her crying in her room and fighting for air. The virus has closed much of her throat, which scares her awake, and crying makes it worse.

When I was a young, we had formaldehyde foam insulation put into our house. Formaldehyde itself is old, but its use as an insulator was new then, and it was supposed to be miraculous. Men came and drilled hundreds of holes in the siding and filled the walls with foam from a truck. Later we (and everyone else) discovered that it made us all sick, particularly my mom and me. My breathing eventually became so difficult that I was moved out of our house to a hotel room across town. Sleeping there one night on the high old bed, I remember dreaming that water came rushing under the door, slowly filling the room. I remember reminding myself in the dream to breathe.

In our small bathroom with the shower running hot (for the fourth time this night), Q struggles to cry and to breathe. The air can't come in full and fast like it should — some flap in her throat seems to snap when she tries to inhale, and her crying quickly spends whatever air she manages to draw each time. I catch myself inhaling deeper and deeper in the dark, to breathe for us both, I suppose. Q rarely gets sick and almost never cries, so the way she sounds truly unsettles my wife and me. I'm glad it's hard for Q to see our faces. The doctor will confirm that we're doing what we can and should to help her. There are no drugs to give, nothing for us to do but soothe and wait for the virus to lose.

Slowly, she calms in the steam, and her breathing returns to the regular, smoother rattle. I ask if she's ready to return to our bed, and she nods. She's loud and hot on the pillow between us for the rest of the night. I rub her back because it's all I can think of to do and because it keeps me convinced that her lungs are still working away. How do you remember to breathe? How do you do it? How do you breathe for another?

The light comes up this morning, and Q climbs out of our bed and into her old self. She makes jokes and laughs at them, bothers her brother a little, and pretty much bewilders us with her mood. We begin to hope that the next night will be better.

DFW R.I.P.

2008-09-21T22:13:00.004-04:00

A lot has been said about David Foster Wallace since his apparent suicide a little over a week ago. And I mean a lot. To list just a few of the more interesting pieces:

A nice tribute by Laura Miller in Salon.com (probably my favorite of the bunch).
"Finite Jest," a collection of reactions from writers, editors, and friends (Slate.com).
"Infinitely Sad," Tim Noah from Slate doing some pop psychology on Wallace and his literary life.
The New York Times has something like wall-to-wall Wallace appreciation, including an obituary, reflections by A.O. Scott, Verlyn Klinkenborg , and Michiko Kakutani.
n+1 has its own little list of Wallace memorabilia (a little earnest and snooty as you might expect).
John Hodgman has an appropriately titled tribute on his blog (Hodgman is worth reading, too, if you haven't yet had or taken the chance.)

These are all well and good, but I suggest instead reading some of his own work. Wallace did quite a bit of excellent work — and some of his best nonfiction — for Harper's, and they've nicely put up all of his articles on the web for free. (I particularly recommend "Shipping Out.") And(/or) if you're new to Wallace, you could do worse than read his reporting on the Main Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine called "Consider the Lobster."

In his NY Times article on Roger Federer, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," a classic I remind myself of each U.S. Open, Wallace talks about "Federer Moments." He describes these as "times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K."

Wallace had his own class of Moment, and his work is full of them. He made such difficult writing seem effortless (witness the contortions Michiko Kakutani works herself into to try to sound even a little like Wallace). One of my own favorite DFW Moments comes in his short story "Here and There" from Girl with Curious Hair. The story, about an MIT grad student who thinks he can reduce poetry to logic and but loses his girlfriend, initially reads like any old thing from a fancy schmancy po-mo funboy, albeit a gifted one. But then the story is suddenly about the very real and relatable experience of someone using thinking as a defense against loving.

The piece ends with the grad student struggling to fix his aunt and uncle's ancient stove and failing more and more spectacularly the more he tries. Or as DFW puts it:

'My aunt comes back behind the stove and stands behind me and peers into the tidied black hollow of the stove and says it looks like I've done quite a bit of work! I point at the filthy distributor circuit with my screwdriver and do not say anything. I prod it with the tool.

...I believe, behind the stove, with my aunt kneeling down to lay her hand on my shoulder, that I'm afraid of absolutely everything there is.'

May he rest.

On collision

2008-09-11T09:57:00.003-04:00

The first beams cycled through the Large Hadron Collider yesterday deep under Switzerland and France. It's the world's largest particle accelerator, designed to hurl bundles of protons into each other at nearly the speed of light so as to break them open and reveal the seams of all things. The collisions themselves don't begin until October, and people have joked (a little uneasily, I think) that the scientists at CERN might produce black holes, though small, still sufficiently strong to swallow the earth.

Collisions do reveal. There is an energy, mysterious and calamitous, that holds the hardest bodies together, but we have learned that speed and thought can break loose almost anything, can open a hole. Some things are here, then not — the particles, no longer parts, return to being elementary. We can't seem to stop studying them.

Bodies obey laws. Accelerate the heavy jets and they will knock the rigid structures down into a hole that can't be built over with concrete or flags. Discover the weakness, make pieces, study the streaks in the clouds. What's left will ratify gravity.

Mass. Motion. Force. Sometimes I think we can know too much.

(I keep telling myself I will stop writing about September 11 in one way or another. Perhaps next year.)

Her turn: Q goes to school

2008-09-09T20:56:00.008-04:00

Today marked Q's official entrance into school proper (after a pretty chilly performance at yesterday's Back to School Picnic). I could recast the day as it was reported to me, but I received such a great e-mail from my lovely wife that nicely caught the day, so I'll let her tell you directly.

-----begin forwarded message-----

to: RM
cc: family
from: Lovely Wife
date: Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 1:58 PM
subject: Q's first day

She put on a brave face as we entered the classroom. While putting her backpack and her box of supplies into her cubby, I informed one of her teachers, Ms. T, that her name was spelled incorrectly. Of course, Q had to point out to Ms. T how her name should be spelled. We walked into her brother's old classroom — the blond bookcases were familiar but the faces were all new. Q went to the table where her other teacher, Mrs. B., went over to her and tried to get her to warm up. At the table, she was surrounded by girls with ribbons and hairbands. I watched her for about 5 minutes and then told her that I was going to go downstairs. Her bottom lip started to quiver but I told her that I had to make sure our stroller didn't blow away in the rainstorm. She bought the excuse so I kissed her good-bye and off I went. I then lingered behind the cubbies for awhile and peeked every now and then to see if she would cry. It was strange to see our typically self-possessed girl look apprehensive. She continued to stick out her lower lip but I didn't see a single tear. I saw her turn to ask Mrs. B. something and I figured it was time for me to leave.

I ran home in the downpour to get her rainboots and raincoat and to put on my own rainboots and raincoat before running back to pick her up at noon. As usual, the teachers came out escorting each kid but she came out walking by herself with her bright pink Q backpack swallowing her up. She ran up to me and immediately noticed my rain gear. "Mom, did you go home? I thought you said you were going to wait downstairs." I told her I ran home super fast to get her rainboots and raincoat but that I had been downstairs most of the time. Happy to have the rain gear (although she grumbled that her brother's old yellow slicker was too big for her), she decided she wanted to walk ALL of the way home in the rain. Her backpack sat nice and dry in the seat of the stroller under the plastic force field as she splashed and laughed the entire 0.9 miles (yes, 0.9 miles according to Google maps). Since it took us about 40 minutes to walk home, I learned along the way that during her brief hour of phase-in class today, she had made a sculpture out of play-doh, participated in circle time, sang a song, and made a new friend named Lola whom she claims looks just like one of her cousins. On our way into our building, we ran into her best friend, K, who was wearing her older brother's hand-me-down yellow slicker. Q smugly told K that she had gone to school today and that she would share details later this afternoon during a playdate with The Boy and K's brother. She was excited for the playdate later today to play with K but also to see The Boy. Since The Boy is gone all day for Kindergarten now, she misses him immensely and always asks when he will play with her.

As we headed up the elevator, she skipped down the hall to our apartment. She told me that after lunch she wanted to call Dad and tell him all about her first day of school. As I made lunch, she left you a message. (You should check your voicemail, and check out these photos of Q on her big day.) She then laid down and told her comfort blankets all about her big day.

Oh, and The Boy wants fresh pineapple for lunch tomorrow, so could you pick one up at Whole Foods on the way home tonight?

Bee-lieve it!

2008-09-04T21:26:00.006-04:00

Let me introduce you to the "Behavior Bee" from The Boy's kindergarten class:

He earned the privilege of bringing it home on his second day. He was so proud when my lovely wife picked him up today:

He's asleep with it at this very moment.*

I know, I know — I'm proud of the fact that he's conforming quickly and nicely.

My wife has a slightly different take:

Me: You're proud, aren't you.
Lovely wife: [smiling] You bet.
Me: They're just getting him to conform, you know.
LW: [still smiling] It's his first award. He's a winner.

Q wants one now, too. That behavior management stuff really works.
____________________
*We're also glad that he's getting it early because it will travel through a lot of homes and beds over the course of the year. It actually still smells good at the moment.

The Boy's first day of kindergarten

2008-09-02T22:29:00.005-04:00

So it was interesting. He slept fairly well the night before, but got up early and fidgety. From his being extremely close after climbing into our bed this morning, we knew he was anxious. On the way there, the closer we got, the more he resisted so that I was more or less dragging him through the doors. We found his class list in the six taped to the trophy case in the lobby; there were a lot of kids bouncing and streaming everywhere. It turns out that his class is the smallest kindergarten section with 20 kids; the others have between 23-25. We don't recognize a single name.

We're allowed into his classroom today (and for the rest of the week), and my lovely wife, Q, and I introduce ourselves to his teacher and try to make him feel at home by encouraging him to draw or to build blocks or to read a familiar book. Nothing works, really, and by the time they start ushering the parents out, The Boy is flat out sobbing. Never a good moment when the school psychologist comes up and introduces herself.

We left him there rather upset, and made our way to the cafeteria with other parents and younger kids for complimentary coffee and pastries. After about a half hour (and after Q had plucked all the raisins out of the right triangle of scone we weren't quite eating), we went back to steal a peek into his classroom. The Boy was sitting quietly in a circle with the other kids. My wife went to work, and Q and I went to eat the rest of our breakfast amongst the ducks and the fish out front of our building.

At 11 a.m., Q and I went to pick him up. He and his classmates came out in a neat, tentative line. When he was dismissed, I took his hand and walked him back home for lunch. He talked at length about all the rules and what his teacher had told him about his class and his school. I asked whether he liked it. He put his cheek on my hand that held his and said, "I loved it." For the rest of the day, he'd insert comments about kindergarten, such as the "behavior bee" — a stuffed toy that a well-behaved student gets to take home for the night. At one point he said, "I can't wait to go to school tomorrow" and then later "I can't wait to eat lunch at school." We'll still see about that last one.

Given his glide into preschool, we were surprised by how firmly anxiety seized him this time. (It seems clear that, like his father, he lives more and more in his head. Sorry about that, son; at least you got mom's hair.) But given how much he loves other kids — and rules — we weren't at all surprised with the view of school that he came home with today. May P.S. 89 provide him with enough to keep him looking to the next day until June.

Q's first day of preschool, which arrives next week, should also be, well, interesting. Particularly for her teachers. We shall certainly see what happens when the immovable object meets the irresistible force.

Anyone for tennis?

2008-08-26T22:30:00.010-04:00

The end of August means the beginning of the U.S. Open and Arthur Ashe Kids' Day. This being our fourth year, we knew to take the comfortable and speedy LIRR train option instead of riding the lumbering 7 Train to its end. We also knew to go early and to head straight for the Hess obstacle course and still the free racquets were gone by the time The Boy made it onto the court. Still, both he and Q earned a fan, sunglasses, and a light up Hess ladder truck toy.

Then it was on to the Little Tennis activities. And this year he was ready to return the balls hit to him by the volunteers. He himself said, "I did much better this year, mom."

(Note: For what it's worth, the above pic got picked up by a contributor to NowPublic.com for an article on the Open, and they have The Boy rubbing elbows, picture-wise anyway, with the likes of Federer, Nadal, and Ivanovic. Or go here for a direct link to the photo itself.)

The lines started to get long as it neared noon, but we heard that Nike was giving free shirts so we headed to that court for a little SPARQ training.

The Boy always steps out into all the flying kids and balls, running to where he's told with his face full of intensity. Q was not in the mood so didn't do much besides look sweaty and eat all the granola bars.

This year we also knew to eat lunch in the shade in the Grandstand court while we watched some pros we didn't recognize hit amazingly hard to each other. (Tip: Don't try to snag one of the tables out by the food stalls around 12 p.m. — too busy, too hot, too messy. Bring your lunch, buy some fries that "look like tennis racquets," according to The Boy, and enjoy the pros showing off. )

We left not long after that and just a little before the Big Show started in Arthur Ashe Stadium, and after the hours and the crowds The Boy still wanted to stay. The whole thing does make you just want to go out and play. Glad he felt it, too.

We've been taking in a lot of sports lately, in fact, which is somewhat weird for us. Watching the Olympics became a nightly ritual before Q and The Boy dismounted into their beds. (We even let them stay up extra late for the opening and closing ceremonies, which The Boy rightly pronounced "flashy.") Now it's the U.S. Open before dreams, and then maybe I'll get both Q and The Boy to watch basketball with me when the time comes.

Arthur Ashe Kids' Day also signals the end of summer. In a week, The Boy starts Kindergarten, and Q begins her own classes shortly thereafter. Outside will give way to inside, and t-shirts to jackets, then to coats. And we lose them, it seems, just a little more to the people they will become.

9

2008-08-20T21:13:00.012-04:00

Today my lovely wife and I celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary. That's us up there polishing the floor on 14th Street in Manhattan to Nina Simone singing "My Baby Just Cares for Me." Over champagne tonight we remembered what's past and wondered about what's to come. We both agreed that it doesn't seem as if we've run through that much time (perhaps because we've actually been together for nearly 17 years now), which bodes well for the long term I'd say.

Put on a dark suit; fashion a proper knot in your tie. Drink deeply from your champagne, then rest the flute by the plate. Take a hand and step out into the music together. Twirl so that your dress floats just off the floor — the earth can't keep you. Think of nothing but this.

Happy anniversary to us. They're playing our song:

Dance with us, wish with us, love with us.

Where I'm from

2008-08-19T15:07:00.004-04:00

You get the idea: it's real flat.

(And this is from the major thoroughfare I-70, not from the lonely US-56 where I actually grew up.)

Heartland meat blogging

2008-08-13T23:23:00.006-04:00

We're still away on our Kansas trip, but my parents happen to have wifi, so I might as well put up a quick post. Besides, I think I was asked perhaps the greatest question ever. My father managed to set up an evening for my brother and his wife, the grandparents, and my lovely wife and me. (An evening without the 8 grandkids, in other words.) We went out to dinner at a Brazilian churrascaria here in Kansas City where, as is the custom, passadors (or meat waiters) keep accosting you with cooked animals on sticks until you tell them to stop. And after way too much delicious sausage, flank steak, filet, lamb, and various other meats wrapped in meats, the attentive waiter asked:

Would you like a fresh plate for your meats?

I had to say "No." Sadly, I had simply had enough meats.

What have I become (and is it really that bad)?

2008-08-08T10:34:00.007-04:00

080707 032, originally uploaded by street_scenes.

So this new, huge, Whole Foods market opened less than a month ago just across the West Side Highway from us. For years we've had to walk a fairly long ways either to get gouged by Food Emporium (whose name itself is a cruel joke) or to browse the low-quality groceries at a Gristede's while tolerating some strange smell. We therefore usually fill our fridge via an on-line store called Fresh Direct, but it's impossible not to forget to order something when you're not actually in the store while shopping. Now, we've got a five-minute walk to the Organic Glory that is Whole Foods.

The Whole Foods is clustered in a new high-rise condo building (luxury, of course) along with a Bed, Bath & Beyond, a Barnes & Noble, and a Bank of America, all brand new. And Whole Foods also has this hippie, hipster cache that puts me off a bit. Not long ago I stopped in on my way home from work to pick up bananas, and found myself on-line to check out with fancy red bananas, listening to This American Life. On my iPhone. Sheesh.

I thought I was too old and too urban to be a suburban and/or hipster cliché. Guess not.

(Note: the banans were rather tasty and the TAL episode was a good listen. So there. I guess.)

School Daze: Private Edition

2008-08-06T09:05:00.005-04:00

School Bus NYC, originally uploaded by Mr.Cab.

The New York Times includes a fairly prominent article today on widespread kindergarten overcrowding in the city's private schools. Reporter Winnie Hu writes,

Despite mounting layoffs on Wall Street and the broader economic downturn, private schools in New York City continue to thrive, with administrators and consultants saying this year has been the most competitive yet for admission to kindergarten. Some estimate that several hundred children were rejected from every place they applied.

What's behind the growth in private school applications? Again, from the Times,

Emily Glickman, a private school consultant for Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, which helps parents gain admission to private schools, said competition had intensified not only for brand-name schools like Dalton, Collegiate and Trinity but also for lesser-known and newer schools, as more couples opt to have two or more children; more families remain in the city rather than moving to the suburbs; and the wealthy in New York get wealthier.

And, let's not forget, overcrowding at elite public schools around the city — many of whom sit in neighborhoods of the very wealthy — has undoubtedly pushed some parents toward seeking private enrollments.

Of course, this being New York — and the Times — this problem isn't framed in terms of parents worried about finding their children somewhere to receive a quality education. Instead, as the article's title declares (a little nonsensically), it's about "where the race begins at kindergarten." Hu points out in her second paragraph that because of all the kids and the money "the competition for kindergarten places can rival that of Ivy League admission." The thing about Ivy League admissions is that you're always already behind and never doing enough — just the stance I want to take towards my son's education at age 5.

There is a bright side for the wealthy and a lesson for all of us here, though. When faced with mounting admissions and growing student bodies, upper tier private schools like Mandell and (the relatively new) Claremont school actually expand:

Ms. [Gabrielle] Rowe [Mandell's head of school] has hired 20 new teachers, including specialists in fine arts, music, drama and physical education, and a psychologist, and promises a five to one student-teacher ratio for the elementary grades. She is also negotiating for an additional 47,000-square-foot space nearby for the upper grades.

What an interesting idea.

Project: Chalk Robots Seen From Space (or suitably high up)

2008-07-31T22:18:00.015-04:00

Giant Park Robots Best Seen From Above

What you'll need:

Box of sidewalk chalk (with plenty of both blue and pink for, um, making boy and girl robots).
Lots of sidewalk/cement, the curvier the better.
Bored and/or gullible children.
Roofdeck.*

*Roofdeck is optional, but it's way cool to look down from way up.

Begin by getting the kids outside in the park; tell them you're going to do something really cool. Bring fancy drinks like pink lemonade if need be. Don't forget the camera. You want to draw something large (and easy), so we suggest robots. You don't have to be that old (or young) to draw big squares, triangles, circles, and whatnot.

What goes with Giant Robots? A rocket, of course (which are, conveniently, also pretty easy to draw).

Think big. That's the idea, after all.

When you're done (or at least until the pink lemonade has been exhausted), head up to the roofdeck for the payoff.

I love how it looks like the blue (boy) robot is tossing the pinkish (girl) robot in the air, and we didn't intend that.

Next up? Robots playing tennis. And swimming. Probably.

There is something about California, admittedly

2008-07-29T21:32:00.006-04:00

Okay, so Q is on to something with the liking California. Consider the following:

On the left we see what NYC more or less looks like in July (with about 80-90% humidity, of course). On the right: nothing but a week of pure pleasantness in San Diego. And the thing is, every week there looks just like this.

There's more. My lovely wife's sister and her husband live about 10 driving minutes away from a beautiful beach that includes a playground high up on what amounts to a scenic overlook. From the swings, Q and The Boy could watch surfers climb and then disappear into the waves.

Even more: My lovely wife's sister and her husband live in a townhouse complex that also includes extremely nice tennis courts and a salt-water pool. The Boy spent a lot of time hitting balls over the net and practicing on his follow through, and Q was in the water more than she was out. And to top it all off, they lived just up the hill from where hot air balloons were launched, which meant that we could walk out the door in San Diego to find perhaps ten balloons hanging silently in the air like a flock of exotic creatures. It made the whole world seem enchanted.

I can understand what makes southern California so attractive to so many people (and why everyone tends to move more slowly than out here).

California conversations

2008-07-25T20:50:00.008-04:00

Are you glad to be home, guys?

The Boy:

Yes. I mean, eventually it gets boring in California. And I missed my friends. And we had to take a car everywhere.

This from the child who while we were there declared:

There aren't any kids in California.

Q had, of course, a different take:

I like California better.
Us: Why?
Q: Because Ba Ngoai* likes me so much.
Us: How do you know?
Q: Because she makes me pho and gives me lots of kisses.
Us: What about all the swimming?
Q: That, too.

__________________________________
*Maternal grandma in Vietnamese.

(almost) back

2008-07-24T21:56:00.002-04:00

After nearly a week and a half in Sunny Southern California, we made it back to New York, more or less. This week we lugged ourselves back into our apartment around the time that we were supposed to eat dinner on the East Coast, but our bodies were still trained by the other ocean. We split the difference and ordered pizza.

Just through the door, Q turned to my wife and asked, "Do you have to go to work now, mom?" And later that night, as I worked a washcloth along The Boy's back in the bath, I mentioned that I had to go back to work. "I know," he sighed.

My lovely wife and I did indeed go back to work—the day after our return, in fact, so it's taken me a little longer to readjust, with my head being the last to arrive.

Birthday wishes for mom

2008-07-09T21:51:00.001-04:00

Today is my lovely wife's birthday. I won't mention her age, but I will say that for nine days she and I are the same age. And I'm old. (Unlike me, though, she doesn't look like it.)

This morning, even before I left for work, Q poked out of her room and came into ours. She said that she got up early because she didn't want to miss mom's birthday. The Boy made my wife a huge picture he had made weeks ago and (later) a fan that he decorated with drawings of cakes, candles, and presents. Q had made several 'Q's on her fan, along with two faces close together — one for her and one for mom.

We didn't do anything fancy today to celebrate her big day, mainly because we leave for California tomorrow for an extended stay. One of these days, we're going to have to start making her a fancy birthday cake. I'm open to suggestions for a theme.

the dorsal stream

Memorial

Giving season

Another break

Fine dining

Evacuvacation

Father's Day Break

Birthday wishes for mom

8

Daughter's/Mother's Day

Q = 6

Losing stories

Aboutness

In between

Making masks

The Big Four-Oh

Coming back up

Incantations

Steel

Breaking

World's Best Dad?

The Boy at 7 (Or there's a problem with the robot)

Wanting you

Okay, so just a little more on stopping and quitting

Stopping and quitting

Let them make cake

America's — and The Boy's — game

Q turns 5

Montage

Believing

Saints and thanks

On hiding

Not quite done with 9/11, I suppose

Washed away

The end of a summer that never really was

Gone fishin'

Birthday Break

Birthday Wishes for Mom

Sparklers

Happy 4th of July!

Door

The Boy is 6

Happy Father's Day

Not well heeled

Tour and Duty

Who's your favorite princess?

Q at 4

Q Bits

Family Friday: The Boy in Action

I lic school

Yeah, I'm scared of this

It's all a blur

Now that's definitely spreading the love

Same to you

You go, little plastic girl!

The real reason why we do Legos with the kids

Lessons

Happy Tet (New Year) — Year of the Ox/Water Buffalo Edition

It really is a new day

Bye 2008, finally

Hey, 2008, don't let the door hit you in the...

Meanings in the meantime

Happy and Merry

What happens when it's too cold to go outside and we introduce the kids to The Sound of Music (and we loved doing it, too)

Tree hunting

Best joke ever?

Giving Thanks

Chips and blocks

Slingshot

Mom's home

Yes we did

Goodbye, Ba Ngoai

Twittering the Vote

Actually live from your friendly neighborhood NYC polling place

All Saints

Apparitions

Come back to us, Ba Ngoai

Boo, scared you

Pick the perfect one

If you haven't seen these, you probably should