I watch him go through these doors to his apartment in the retirement community so long and hard now. Used to be he’d turn and wave and shamble off, only looking back once to wave me away (‘gwan now, doll; go home).

Now, stooped by his ninety-one years (this Wednesday), he turns and looks over and over again.  And so do I.

We’ve been here before. (Back then, when she was two, and again then, at two and a half. Clearly it’s a thing for me: I just counted over half a dozen “carousel”-referential posts here.)

We come to Tilden Park’s Christmas Spectacular (ok, official title is “Fantasy,” but we rotate its name for fun) more or less annually, since she and her brother began to be big enough to not be overwhelmed by a carousel.  Okay, since they were old enough for me to not be overwhelmed by the prospect of holding their wee bodies on a moving zoo animal on a carousel.

We’ll be back every single year, until the youngest of them can no longer grasp enough of a wisp of his childhood self to enjoy the ride.

I really don’t know what to expect with these people. When they reach the tween verge, and the tug-of-war with their past and future intensifies, what will they do with these childish things? They are so full now, with such easy access to a wisdom most would attribute to advanced years, and an equally easy access to a weightless imaginativeness most would attribute to extreme youth.

What I want is for them to continue to hold that paradox, all the while being fully immersed in their present. À la the reformed Scrooge, who, at the end of his three-directional hell ride, vowed to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!”

A gal can, and does, dream.

She fits in my lap, barely, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting to cuddle there, nor does it stop me from hoisting her there and doing all I can to hold and preserve, ’til she’s ready to get up.

The bittersweetness of her disappearing childhood–gradual, utterly inescapable–is a taste she knows as well or better than do her mother and I.

Because she is so adept at putting her feelings into words, we know the acuteness of her awareness. She hears her mama’s or my casual reference to something she used to do when she was a baby, or watches her little brother play with a toy that was once hers (and now, for good reason, is no longer), and it all comes back in a rush: the longing for her own, lost, younger self.

And yet that feeling, powerful though it is when it comes, is wedged right next to its opposite: an insatiable appetite for new knowledge, longer words, more complex keys to vaster mysteries.  The grown-up girl-sounding statements, pronounced as much to hear what they sound like coming out of her mouth as for anything else.

She lurches forward, swirls backward, glides ahead, and then stops again and looks back, hand at her brow, shielding her vision from the bright light of the inevitable.

I’m perpetually bracing for the moment when she is, have been for coupla years now. Still: safe. Not for a whole lot longer, I fear, but she may well surprise me. She pretty much does daily.

Past swingery here.

Above, what I ate for dinner, oh, a number of weeks back.  A favorite meal.  Stir-fried tofu, sauteed purple onions, roasted pine nuts, stir fried kale. Probably olive oil, some Spike and other seasonings, probably a dash of sesame oil, a squirt of Bragg’s Liquid Amino Acids, and a shake of toasted sesame seeds. Dinner of tree-hugging vegetarians.

It’s in a kid’s bowl, because for reasons even I can’t explain, I still hold out hope that they’ll be enticed. There are a gazillion ways parents successfully lure their kids into healthy eating habits, and most of those are assayed by people with more patience and tenacity than my beloved and I, more willing to stay up late and read nifty books and blogs about how to induce your kid into healthy eating habits (there are scads of ‘em). I did listen to Laurie David (environmental champion, producer of the huge documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and advocate for green and mindful eatery) break it down simply, thus: she decides what to bring to the table, her kids decide how much they’ll eat.  That was when her daughters were younger and in the inducement age. Now that they’re teenagers, they’re more vegan and locavore than their mom. Hope springs eternal.

I figure we might get there. But in the never-ending parental steeple chase, you can get up over only so many hurdles, and after everything else (cleaning up after themselves! making creative stuff in some hands-on activity instead of staring at a screen of some sort! engaging in sincere conflict resolution after the inevitable fights do happen!) the tired ol’ mares among us will just have to rear up and trot around that last, one hurdle too many. Working some kind of miracle mojo and conjuring fantabulously non-picky, adventuresome eaters (particularly when a sucrose product bribe is just plain off the table, literally and figuratively) is smply one of those parental hurdles we just gave up on clearing. At least thus far. We’re only seven years into this gig, any thing could happen.

Still, I couldn’t resist at least inviting my kids tuck into this particular bowl of iron-rich, low-on-the-food chain, resource-thrifty victuals.  ”Mmm, yum! Want some?” After being met with adamant refulsals, I queried my kids just what, exactly, caused them to cast such gimlet eyes upon the bowl. This is what I jotted down:

• “It’s funny looking.”
• “It has salad, but only the dark kind. I only like the light kind.”
• “It’s mushy and dark and weird and slimy and green.”
• “It reminds me of green beans that are cooked and I don’t like cooked green beans. I only like raw green beans.”
• “It’s fried. I don’t like many fried things.  Oh, except fried eggs, especially with salt and butter on them.”
• “It has weird, slimy onions.”

Yeah, go ahead and laugh. I won’t blame you. But at least it was Annie’s mac and cheese without the glow-in-the-dark fluorescent food coloring, the veggies were organic and grown locally, the hot dogs had no nitrites, hormone supplements, or antibiotics in ‘em, and the cattle that gave their lives for those dogs were fed an all vegetarian diet and were raised humanely on environmentally sustainable ranches also not more than an hour or two away from here. You know, before the unthinkable happened to them.

The kids’ vegan locavore stage can’t happen soon enough.

Twilight trampoline jumpers, Berkeley, CA.

It was a crepuscular time of day, this particular one an extremely beautiful version of it.  Filled with the bittersweet of the ending of one thing and the possibilities in the beginning of the next.  All in a twilit season: summer’s ending–you can feel it–and winter’s sending its feelers out.  This evening was unseasonably warm, though, and so the children had to be out in it.

After dinner, the they carefully ushered unicorns from the back of their cousins’ house to the courtyard between the houses. I was told their names were Sarah, Rosie, and Twilight. I was also warned that they’re spooked by: “odd bodkins,” “creaking, crackling noises,” and “flash photography.”

Before long, the siren song of the trampoline beckoned the kids.

To take any of these pictures and not frighten the unicorns, I couldn’t use a flash.  Which of course renders a much truer image.  Moving objects move.  Static ones (a house; a tree) abide.

You can barely see the children.  Some essence remains visible, but the rest is a blur.

A year and nine months ago, we went to San Francisco’s Palace Hotel for tea at the end of the girlie’s first week of Kindergarten (more wordy account here).  Her brother was too young to come along then, but he’s more than ready now, and so this afternoon we launched what we hope will be an ongoing end-of-the-school-year tradition.

For his part, the boy child acquitted himself with panache. Sure, he ate his PB&J only and no other sandwiches. And yes, he wanted to slither under the table once. But it turned out it was for legitimate reasons: his back-up pair of sunglasses had dropped under there.

The sunglasses were accessories to a very carefully pieced-together outfit. He had picked out matching bow ties for us to wear (yep: Baba’s not the only dandy in the family). But that was just the beginning: he saw to it that we matched in every way possible. Same color belt, same color shoes, same color jeans. It took a lot for me to convince him that it was okay for me to wear my grey blazer (he didn’t have one). But he felt all right when he wore a dark sweatshirt with the hood folded in. He couldn’t find his “dress up” Baba glasses — an old pair of reading glasses of mine, with the glass no longer in them — and so instead, he proposed we both wear sunglasses.

We were very warmly welcomed by every single person we saw, from the chaps where we parked the car, to the doormen just outside the hotel, to the maître d’, to the patrons we passed en route to our table, to our waiter. I will admit some concern that a woman dressed more or less like an ice cream salesman would draw attention. Turns out, not as much as her criminally adorable mini-me of a son with the matching bow tie.

(For the record, I elected not to visit the loo. It’s all fun and games ’til you cause ladies to shriek and zig-zag out of the bathroom with their arms outstretched in front of them in abject terror. While the chances may have been slim that I’d elicit such a response, I didn’t feel like pushing my luck on such a nice outing with the kids.)

“How many years do you think you guys will want to do this with us?” I asked ‘em, between bites of chocolate-dipped strawberry and sips of hot chocolate (the Palace defines “tea” fairly loosely for the younger set).”‘Cause we’re prepared to keep at it all the way through your college years.  Just warnin’ ya.”

“I’ll do it as long as I can, Baba,” said the girlie, and I believe her. My main goal is to outlive their desire to take a year-end tea here with me.  That, or have their Mama across from me a dozen or so years hence, as we sigh together over the empty chairs at the table and toast one another over a job well done.

Didn’t want pictures with her first grade teacher, or her principal, both of whom she loves so much that the thought of a photo op with them got her teary instantaneously. Really it was only partly for her and hugely for me. So I gave them my heartfelt thanks instead, knowing that we are more indebted to these to women than we will be able to say in any lingering moments on the schoolyard.  As she always had to do when I was the one to pick her up, my girlie tilted her body at a near 45-degree angle and pulled me by the wrist out of the schoolyard.

We had the obligatory, ritual post-end-of-school ice cream, then journeyed to a super-fun playground in nearby Emeryville. Taqueria fare for dinner (they give kids warm corn tortillas free, off the griddle). Home, we watched a movie together, cuddled on the couch (the unspeakably inane Curious George 2, testament to how much we love them).

For the second night in a row, the lil’ monkey — less and less lil’ by the day — wanted to pile pillows on the floor in my office and sleep there (her brother in our bed these nights). The change is so hard– she’s been testy all week, and she cried for minutes on end last night, damp in her towel in my lap beside the bath, insisting never to want any other teacher than Ms. Vines-Aquino ever again in her whole life, even through college. But there’s a part of her that also instinctively knows to move with it. I think bedding down solo in a new room these past two nights is part of that.

After reading HP (again), she was finally tired enough to go to sleep.  Her last words, before shutting her eyes and snuggling into her makeshift nest: “No more first grade ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again.” Then she put her fingertip to my forehead, and tapped it for emphasis: “This marks the beginning of summer, this moment right… here.”

That’s my fortune.

The girlchild is already well into the “paper fortune teller”/ “cootie catcher” game playing era. (Here’s a pretty good set of directions how to DIY. Plus I like the book the website’s in support of.)

Next thing you know she’s going to be studying for the S.A.T., and just a blink after that, calling me up and telling me to find cheap tickets to Oslo to attend her Nobel ceremony. Whoosh, it all goes so fast.

Boy oracle, Los Angeles County Open Space, CA.

This is what happened: they found a dead field mouse whilst hiking, and buried it. (OK Mama buried it, managing to do so without touching it, no simple matter.  Baba looked bravely on from a distance of 15-20 feet.)  Then they gathered bouquets of lupine, mustard grass, and other wee wildflowers,  laid them at the base of this tree, and held a ceremony for the spirit of the dead field mouse, wishing him safe travels on his journey to his next life. The lil’ peanut perched himself on a spot affording the best vantage point from which to watch the proceedings.

Some dog-walking passers-by looked upon the scene and exclaimed, “Oh, sage, please enlighten me!” or some such. Since oracles in days of yore used animal entrails (among other somewhat less grodie things) to aid in their divination, they mightn’t have been far off the mark.  Except: as a tireless sidekick to his sister, and therefore the youngest in most any clump of kids, he is more often seeker than prophet.

Like the field mouse, I reckon that won’t last for ever.