For a split-second she actually grimaced at the camera, in an attempt to “smile” for it. Don’t know where she learned that craziness; certainly not from me.   So instead I said, “How ’bout just look serious at it.” Which she effortlessly obliged.

Best wishes this weekend to those of you celebrating Father’s Day this Sunday — or Baba’s Day, as we do in our household. I got an iron griddle and a spatula and a pancake mixing bowl last year, pretty much the best possible Baba’s Day gift I could imagine.  This year, I can imagine something even more luxurious, more blessed: another morning’s opportunity to use them on these people, after waking up to them and my beloved.

That, right there, is the moon and back.

An ordinary ending to a day which began as many probably do, for many people, all over the world. Meaning, with the breathtakingly unexpected.  

As I watch my daughter dance after dinner to  Swan Lake, (here, Suite 4: Scene (White Swan), I know (again) how profoundly fortunate I am for the existence of her, of her brother, and of my beloved. Likewise I know they are fortunate for my continued existence.  I don’t tend to think my continued existence is predicated on a great deal more than chance.  But for that, so far, I am thankful.  There but for the grace of God.

The camera body and the lens I took this picture with are both on loan from a dear friend, who herself received them from a dear friend who had died of cancer with six short months’ notice.  Many get far less notice than that.  

Every day I look through Barbara’s lens at my children, and now (’til mine is fixed) I am holding Barbara’s body, too.  I have no idea what to do with that fact, but the symbolism is not lost on me.  At the very least, I try to appreciate the gift.  And what it reminds me of.  

After attending Barbara’s memorial, I wrote:

 I realize that death is, at the very least, camped out in a van across the street, eating donuts and sipping cheap coffee. More likely it’s sitting quietly in every room of the house, discreetly reading the paper, looking up from time to time to cast a watchful eye on the proceedings. Waiting for whomever, whenever.

This realization doesn’t make me more lugubrious. It makes me more loving. I don’t feel morbid; just mindful. And grateful.

Tonight, as I was tucking in my daughter, I added a new twist to the rhetorical question I constantly ask the kids.  

“How much do I love you?” I ask her.

“Sooooooo much,” she answers.  

“And how long will I love you?”

She pauses only as long as it takes for her eye to twinkle. “Forever!”

And I nod long and slow and serious. 

“Will you still remember me when you’re a star, Baba?”

And I nod again, long and slow, and also smile. “Absolutely.”  Which is the God’s honest truth. I know this for a fact.

She asks me how I know, and I tell her. “My mother lets me know,” I say. (”How?”) “I hear her here” — I touch my fingers to my temple — “and feel her here” — and I touch my palm to my heart.

Her eyes twinkle again, and she smiles wide, and says, “You’ll be the first star I see at night.”

It is hypothetical/magical to her, I imagine. Not so to me.  I continue to smile, and nod long and slow. One day, that star — the one which was once my mother to me, then my nephew; the one which to my daughter is our dear old dog, now gone – one day, that star will be me.  I try in my ways to prepare her, her brother, and my beloved for the breathtakingly unexpected (a task which forgetfulness makes Sisyphean). All I can really hope for, as Mary Oliver writes, is this:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was
a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” 

Scene: the rocking chair in the kids’ room. I’ve got my not quite two-and-a-half year-old son cuddled up on my lap, and he’s sucking my pinkie as I sing lullabies to him.  It’s a nightly ritual I predict I will be loathe to give up, and I try not to think of that time.  With any luck it’ll be at least five years or so.  Ahem.  

Lil’ peanut (quietly, from behind my pinkie): You’re a great singer.

[Here's where I note that his mum is an opera singer.  Her nighttime routine typically features highlights from the Joni Mitchell songbook, poured like honey into his ear.]

Baba (after recovering from being dumbstruck): You’re a great son.

Peanut (again from behind the pinkie, and only after the merest of pauses): You’re a great parent.

Baba (struck even dumber): You were sent here from heaven, sweetie.

Peanut (smiling): I’m not in heaven.

Baba: No, you’re not. You’re right here with me. And you came here from–

Peanut: Mama’s belly.

Baba: Most recently, yes.

Peanut (after a brief contemplative pause): You’re a great pinkie.

Ghost, Berkeley, CA.

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand; 
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; 
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
    The darkness drops again but now I know 
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~ William Butler Yeats, 1919

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in the aftermath of the first World War (and the Russian Revolution), but it’s hard not to think of the events of the past two weeks — the murder of Dr. Tiller, the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum — when one reads his words.  Violence, specifically hate violence, meant not just to injure or murder one person but to frighten — or to be more precise, to terrorize – a whole group of people into submission, has dominated the news.

The phrase “domestic terrorism” is now on peoples’ lips in a way it hasn’t since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.  Which is to say: we’re talking about American citizens, terrorizing Americans.  And there’s no debate over who is pulling the trigger: people in the extreme right-wing.   (The Department of Homeland Security’s April report on Rightwing Extremism was pulled in May following hue and cry over it by conservatives. People for the American Way is now calling for its re-release, in light of recent events.)

Continue reading ‘The worst are full of passionate intensity’

A tradition nearly as steadfast as the bath and the books n’ milk that follows it.

Emma Goldman is commonly thought to have said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”  But she didn’t.  It seems a feminist legend from a coupla generations later, Alix Kates Shulman, is actually to blame for the distillation of Goldman’s essential beliefs to this very catchy phrase (her account here, in “Dances With Feminists.”)

Regardless of whoever said what, there’s no question that our kids, like happy kids everywhere, love to dance.  And we love to dance with ‘em.  Whatever change we make, revolutionary or incremental, it’s definitely going to happen to the sound of some kind of music.

On our recent date night, the beloved and I managed yet again to defy innovation, walking to the exact same downtown beer garden as we did the last date night, ordering the exact same thing we had the last time, and going to see a movie. Pretty much just like the last time. Only this time, fortunately, we saw a different movie.

It was the documentary about the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line: Every Little Step, and the beloved ate it up like pudding. She’s been in the theater since she was a child actor (spawn of a stage actor/composer and a director/ playwright).  She has auditioned hundreds upon hundreds of times in her life, numerous of which in New York City, where she studied and worked for years.

For every one tear of nervousness and disappointment that was shed on the screen in the documentary, at least two sympathetic tears were shed in the theater by her. On top of which, she’s directing A Chorus Line for her youth musical theater company this fall and had just done a sing-through of the score earlier in the week. So I’m quite amazed she didn’t mutter “a-five six seven eight,” then thrust the bag of popcorn in my lap, clamber over me and bust into a combination, replete with pirouettes and high kicks in the aisle.  

Continue reading ‘Date night vignette’

At the playground, Berkeley, CA.

We pick up the older cousins weekly at their nearby elementary school (probably the A#1 benefit of co-housing with the in-laws: the childcare swaps ROCK).  This day, after picking up the girl cousin we went up to play at the big kids’ playground.  It was quiet and toddler-friendly. I even managed to keep my cool when the little ones climbed high on the play structure.

Thank heavens the little guy’s internal sense of his limits aren’t way off my own, very risk-intolerant ones. Not for long, I know. But for the moment, I’m grateful.