Daughter's/Mother's Day

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.

Losing stories

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

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.

Steel

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"

Happy Father's Day

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.

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)

(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.)

Heartland meat blogging

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.

Far from family

When my parents came out this past holiday lull between Christmas and New Year's, my lovely wife and I managed to sneak out to see the movie Michael Clayton, which was fantastic. (Congrats, Tilda Swinton, on your oscar.) The theater we saw it in sits in our old West Village neighborhood and is one that we used to go to often two kids ago. Along with a movie, then, just the two of us had a chance to remember and not miss the life we had in New York before Q and The Boy essentially reset our memories.

Counting Michael Clayton, we’ve seen roughly three movies in the theater since summer 2003 (including Cars, which probably shouldn’t count for present purposes). This isn’t all that difficult to explain:  We work pretty hard.  During the week we get home in time only to ask what the kids had for dinner (my wife coming home at least a half hour after I do), and I usually leave before they rise. It's no surprise, then, that we devote weekends to the kids and that nights after they finally give in to sleep tend to involve a lot of low-impact activities.  Like sitting.  And since our families are either half way or all the way across the country from us, we haven’t often had the chance to lean on them to distribute the load that usually leans on us.

Still, a little relief from parenting now and then is the least interesting part of having relatives close by.  After all, family don’t merely watch the kids, they get to see them, and vice versa.  I often wish we were closer to everyone so that Q and The Boy could get to know their grandparents, their Ong and Ba Ngoai, their aunts and uncles and cousins in some way similar to how they’ve come to know my lovely wife and me. Which is to say thoroughly and up close. We talk a lot about family in our house, and goodness knows we take and look at lots of pictures of everyone. (According to that little gray bar at the bottom of iPhoto, we’ve crossed the 19,000 mark in our digital photo collection alone.) And there are weekly phone calls, photos sent out by my wife every other week, cards, and twice-yearly visits. But Q and The Boy don’t help wrench stumps from the ground with a chain and a Jeep or feed koi or craft springrolls or bait hooks for the delectability of channel catfish. Q and The Boy likewise have large, quick personalities that (we think, anyway) sometimes need to be seen to be believed.  And they also need to be reminded who they could be by someone other than us.  Missing, then, are the kind of experiences useful for building a rich story of family.  Some stories are best heard straight from their tellers.

This is all true, and I haven’t stopped wishing that it were otherwise for them. But I was also struck by something else when my parents visited this December.  When any family visit, we tend to remind ourselves that we live in New York by going out to a fancy-ish restaurant and indulging our way down its menu. We did that with my parents this time, too, a nice steak place in Tribeca. The meal was memorable, as expected, but not as memorable as the conversation that passed over the broad plates.  I found myself missing my parents as adults, thinking about how much I’d like to know my family as they are now, and how much they could still know of me as I am now. I’ve been pretty far away from them for many years now and have (more or less) found a home and made my way in New York.  I have my own family with its own ruts and rules.  Over the years, I’ve acquired my own shelf of theories and explanations, revisions of and replacements for many of the ones they started me off with. I’d like to know how they’ve changed, too.  And much has simply happened to so many of us over the past few years — both good and bad — and it’s hard not to feel remote and removed.

We’ve talked about this, my wife and I, and I know she feels as I do about her mother and father, sisters and brother.  And though she and I have been a part of each other’s family for over fifteen years now, I still feel like I’m just beginning to know them in many respects.  (Internet messaging chats with my younger sister-in-law (among other things) keep us closer; still, I have to think that it’s not quite as good as hearing first hand the laughs each of us trigger in the other.)  When out to California for family visits, we strive to find children-free time with my wife’s parents and siblings, but things (and children) being what they are, we usually end up talking out the few hours left after all the kids have gone down for the night. (This is also officially a shame given that my wife’s parents live in wine country.)  We find ourselves wanting more time to catch up on months worth of living.

Funny thing is, the more I thought about it, what’s allowed us to miss them in this way, to want to know them again now, is the years and miles between us. As Stanley Cavell nicely puts it, "I must disappear in order that the search for myself be successful."  Without leaving, it would be too easy to sit in the same chair at the table, to sleep in the same room — to be too familiar, as it were.

I’d like to think that I more or less succeeded in my search — or that I’m at least looking in the right places.  It’d be nice to hear a little about and see where others who are so close to us came back from.  As always, I suppose, it’s scaling the distance that proves the hardest part.  And one mile never equals one mile.

Happy Birthday, Bro!

Today is my brother's birthday. And though I'm going to call him and everything, I thought I'd use this little piece of the Internets to mark the occasion in an Internets kind of way. What's gotten to be a long time ago, he and I had this tradition of sending our parents to bed and watching the movie The Sure Thing. I don't know how many times we've seen it, but I still know most of the dialogue by heart. (With a cast including the likes of John Cusack, Daphne Zuniga, Anthony Edwards, Matthew Modine, Tim Robbins, and with Rob Reiner directing, it holds up pretty well considering.)

I don't see my brother as much as I'd like, and we haven't watched The Sure Thing — together anyway — for ages. And it might be a little while until we get to see it again.

In the meantime, I offer a little nostalgia courtesy of YouTube, complete with VHS look and feel:



Happy Birthday, Bro: I'm talking to you cordless.