Tree hunting

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.



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*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?

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

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

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.

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*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

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.