Pops returning home at the end of the evening, Castro Valley, CA.
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.
At the Tilden Park Carousel’s Christmas Extravaganza, Berkeley, CA.
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.
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.”
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. Â Baba looked bravely on from a distance of 15-20 feet.) Â Then they gathered bouquets of lupine, mustard grass, and other wee wildflowers, Â 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. Â 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.
Voting open 'til Feb 19, 2012.
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