Hi folks, Max the singing jeweler here...(If you weren't within maybe 60 miles of LaCrosse, WI, around 1977, you have no idea what I'm talking about. But if you were, you have just been transported. You're welcome.) The kids and we had some outdoor adventures the other day, and here they are for your enjoyment. Tell your friends.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Burying, Unearthing
Hello, all, and welcome to a quick and newsy edition of Meet The Johnstadts.
Q and T have both had tennis camp this past week. T, Tuesdays and Thursdays for 45 minutes, and Q Monday throught Thursday for ninety minutes. And both have enjoyed it a lot. Q was scheduled to be in a camp for 8-9-year-olds, but it was canceled, which we didn’t find out until Janneke was there to drop him off. But someone informed her of a concurrent camp for older kids up the road a piece, and she took him there, where, after assessing his skills, they accepted him. And he has really flourished there – since T doesn’t have day care this week (a wholly different saga that is beginning to tick us off), I would drop him off there and take T to a park for 45 minutes or so, and would come back expecting to see them curled up in the shade, suffering in the heat. But he was always skipping from game to game, getting into his stance with renewed energy all the time…The instructor made a point of coming over to Janneke on one of the days she picked him up and saying “He’s a very good tennis player.” Janneke said “Thank you,” and the instructor repeated it, emphasizing: “He’s really very good.” So of course I rocket straight to thoughts of enrolling him in classes at the indoor tennis facility in Pittsfield, then growing a paunch and wearing sunglasses everywhere, getting thrown out of a few tournaments for aggressive and strange behavior, then glowering over him at a press conference, leaning down to take my cigar out of the side of my mouth and whisper something in Spanish into his ear before every reply, immediately after he wins Wimbledon at the age of 17. Promptly thereafter he'll quit tennis and join a Mexican ska band. I'll have to shake my schedule around some to make all that happen...
T’ camp, meanwhile, consists of a lot of variations of tag, meant to teach them the sections of the court, and basick ball-whacking. She really enjoys it and is proud to be going. There are only two or three other kids there when she goes, and it’s at the North Adams public courts, which have saggy nets and a fair amount of litter. So it can be a somewhat disheartening sight when you drive up. But she loves it, and the instructor is great. T gets a very serious look on her face when we arrive, and also when the kids get together at the end to do their cheer. Typically it's "Tennis!", and you can tell she believes with every ounce of her being in the cheer every time she gives it. They use spinner balls, oversized foam balls that bounce remarkably well and which the kids find easier to locate and to hit.
Q went to a two-hour baseball clinic put on by the Steeplecats, the North Adams summer college league team that put on the 4th of July game last week. We went and watched the whole game, analyzing everyone’s batting stance as we watched, and then watched the fireworks. T did much better on the fireworks this year – that is to say: She sat in my lap with earphones over her ears and hands over the earphones for good measure, and softly cried. Last year, she bolted and had to be corralled and held inside a store by Janneke to keep her from pulling her own head off. But the game was fun, and Q was thrilled to spend two hours getting fist-bumped and high-fived and butt-slapped – oh, yes, also: coached – by twenty of the coolest college athletes any kid ever met. They gave him a tee shirt and a free hot dog, and cemented Q as a lifelong fan, all in one swell foop. When he did his round of batting practice, I sat in the stands and watched – we’d been practicing a lot lately, trying to remember to keep his weight on the back foot, and he did really, really well at it, hitting all but about two of the thirty or so balls pitched to him. (Nice when the pitcher can reliably throw strikes.) A man in the stands noticed me clapping softly to myself when Q finished, and asked if that was my son. I said it was. “Kid’s a player,” he said. “I said so to my wife right when we got here. You can just tell when a kid’s got it, and he’s got it.” And his wife happily confirmed it. They were there with their own son, who was six, and was off in another group, being taught to run bases. Nice people.
Bought a bird bath today and set it up, and when I was showing it to the kids, they found a dead robin, right by the deck. Probably died in the storm we had a couple of days ago – pretty fresh, and very young. Barely out of the nest, still largely speckled, and with undeveloped underfeathers. We buried it by the bird bath – it’s under the slab of stone visible to the left of Tie, on the ground. (There’s also a stick on top that has “Robin’s Grave” written on it in Sharpie.) I posed the kids to show their sadness, and to show the new birdbath. Q began to sing a very sad, haunting little refrain while I dug the hole and he and T kept watch over the robin. “Goodbye” was its only word, but it was extremely catchy and memorable. And after a few rounds of it, he did a key change up the scale a ways and repeated it, and my heart just about broke. It literally sent chills up my spine. Here's the photo:
When I was leveling out the patch to put the concrete slab that the birdbath sits on (it’s been leaning up against our fence since we bought the place), I found seven or eight rectangular slabs of what I think is marble. All broken, one of them over four feet long, most less than three. They were laid out on the ground under where I put the brid bath, covered by a layer of soil and creeping weeds. Very strange thing to find – they look so much like tombstones. I’ll have to find something to do with them.
OK, more photos, and then I’m off to bed. It’s getting late:
T shows everyone how to make absolutely anything look good. Thank you, Flavia, for the outfit!
The kids were playing around, pretending to nap, and bang!, they were asleep. That's napping: Dangerous stuff.
More napping adventures - Siblings of mine: Remember that picture of Ma napping on the couch where she looks dead...?
YOU write a caption that does this justice. I dare you.
Yeah, I'm bushed too. Off to bed.
Q and T have both had tennis camp this past week. T, Tuesdays and Thursdays for 45 minutes, and Q Monday throught Thursday for ninety minutes. And both have enjoyed it a lot. Q was scheduled to be in a camp for 8-9-year-olds, but it was canceled, which we didn’t find out until Janneke was there to drop him off. But someone informed her of a concurrent camp for older kids up the road a piece, and she took him there, where, after assessing his skills, they accepted him. And he has really flourished there – since T doesn’t have day care this week (a wholly different saga that is beginning to tick us off), I would drop him off there and take T to a park for 45 minutes or so, and would come back expecting to see them curled up in the shade, suffering in the heat. But he was always skipping from game to game, getting into his stance with renewed energy all the time…The instructor made a point of coming over to Janneke on one of the days she picked him up and saying “He’s a very good tennis player.” Janneke said “Thank you,” and the instructor repeated it, emphasizing: “He’s really very good.” So of course I rocket straight to thoughts of enrolling him in classes at the indoor tennis facility in Pittsfield, then growing a paunch and wearing sunglasses everywhere, getting thrown out of a few tournaments for aggressive and strange behavior, then glowering over him at a press conference, leaning down to take my cigar out of the side of my mouth and whisper something in Spanish into his ear before every reply, immediately after he wins Wimbledon at the age of 17. Promptly thereafter he'll quit tennis and join a Mexican ska band. I'll have to shake my schedule around some to make all that happen...
T’ camp, meanwhile, consists of a lot of variations of tag, meant to teach them the sections of the court, and basick ball-whacking. She really enjoys it and is proud to be going. There are only two or three other kids there when she goes, and it’s at the North Adams public courts, which have saggy nets and a fair amount of litter. So it can be a somewhat disheartening sight when you drive up. But she loves it, and the instructor is great. T gets a very serious look on her face when we arrive, and also when the kids get together at the end to do their cheer. Typically it's "Tennis!", and you can tell she believes with every ounce of her being in the cheer every time she gives it. They use spinner balls, oversized foam balls that bounce remarkably well and which the kids find easier to locate and to hit.
Q went to a two-hour baseball clinic put on by the Steeplecats, the North Adams summer college league team that put on the 4th of July game last week. We went and watched the whole game, analyzing everyone’s batting stance as we watched, and then watched the fireworks. T did much better on the fireworks this year – that is to say: She sat in my lap with earphones over her ears and hands over the earphones for good measure, and softly cried. Last year, she bolted and had to be corralled and held inside a store by Janneke to keep her from pulling her own head off. But the game was fun, and Q was thrilled to spend two hours getting fist-bumped and high-fived and butt-slapped – oh, yes, also: coached – by twenty of the coolest college athletes any kid ever met. They gave him a tee shirt and a free hot dog, and cemented Q as a lifelong fan, all in one swell foop. When he did his round of batting practice, I sat in the stands and watched – we’d been practicing a lot lately, trying to remember to keep his weight on the back foot, and he did really, really well at it, hitting all but about two of the thirty or so balls pitched to him. (Nice when the pitcher can reliably throw strikes.) A man in the stands noticed me clapping softly to myself when Q finished, and asked if that was my son. I said it was. “Kid’s a player,” he said. “I said so to my wife right when we got here. You can just tell when a kid’s got it, and he’s got it.” And his wife happily confirmed it. They were there with their own son, who was six, and was off in another group, being taught to run bases. Nice people.
Bought a bird bath today and set it up, and when I was showing it to the kids, they found a dead robin, right by the deck. Probably died in the storm we had a couple of days ago – pretty fresh, and very young. Barely out of the nest, still largely speckled, and with undeveloped underfeathers. We buried it by the bird bath – it’s under the slab of stone visible to the left of Tie, on the ground. (There’s also a stick on top that has “Robin’s Grave” written on it in Sharpie.) I posed the kids to show their sadness, and to show the new birdbath. Q began to sing a very sad, haunting little refrain while I dug the hole and he and T kept watch over the robin. “Goodbye” was its only word, but it was extremely catchy and memorable. And after a few rounds of it, he did a key change up the scale a ways and repeated it, and my heart just about broke. It literally sent chills up my spine. Here's the photo:
When I was leveling out the patch to put the concrete slab that the birdbath sits on (it’s been leaning up against our fence since we bought the place), I found seven or eight rectangular slabs of what I think is marble. All broken, one of them over four feet long, most less than three. They were laid out on the ground under where I put the brid bath, covered by a layer of soil and creeping weeds. Very strange thing to find – they look so much like tombstones. I’ll have to find something to do with them.
OK, more photos, and then I’m off to bed. It’s getting late:
T shows everyone how to make absolutely anything look good. Thank you, Flavia, for the outfit!
The kids were playing around, pretending to nap, and bang!, they were asleep. That's napping: Dangerous stuff.
More napping adventures - Siblings of mine: Remember that picture of Ma napping on the couch where she looks dead...?
YOU write a caption that does this justice. I dare you.
Yeah, I'm bushed too. Off to bed.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Pictionary
I went to Leonard's True value the other day. They know me there now, at least by sight - I have a card I use to get discounts, they ask me jokingly how much more dehydrated cow manure I'd like, since I bought five bags of it on three separate visits over the period of a week...Nice people, very helpful. Just across the line in Pownal, Vermont. I think I was in looking for grass seed.
But the thing that happened, happened in the parking lot. I pulled into it on a hot and hazy day and curved around to an open space, right next to a very rusty, old pickup truck, with sheets of cornflake-thin metal falling into rust and onto the ground from every bit of it. The truck had originally been red, I think, but now had panels of a number of colors. Vermont plates, coated in the almost-orange, sticky mud, now dried, that underlies the actual fertile soil here - where a vehicle gets covered in that, is where holes and ruts have been dug for a very long time, through anything that could ever have grown a decent plant. Old and unkept farms, clearcut slopes, mountain roads that have never been paved... All of which are found in great abundance in Pownal.
I stepped out of the car and looked into the cab as I swung past it. A very young man, late teens or early twenties, sat in the passenger seat. He was small - shorter than me, rangier - but tightly muscled, with a thin mustache and thick, black eyebrows. He seemed to be squinting and drifting off to sleep at the same time, slouched, pushed up against the dashboard more closely than I would have found comfortable. Shirtless, with a baseball cap.
Behind him, in the area where my Dad used to lose things between the seats and the rear wall of his pickup trucks, sat a thin young woman. I saw the back of her head and the curve of her hunched shoulders, framed by the swoops of a tank-top. Her hair was straight, and long, and she sat in the same curled, folded, lethargic posture as the man in front, facing sideways, much lower down, sitting as she was on the floor. There was no way for her to put her feet toward the front. It isn't a seat, this area - it wasn't meant for people. I felt immediately claustrophobic looking at her, but she was unworried, or seemed so from behind. Patience, was what I felt from her, and from him. Or maybe just a complete lack of expectations.
The strangest thing about them was that they didn't shift, didn't adjust themselves, didn't speak. Just looked, each in his or her own direction, and waited. Their vehicle had arrived just before mine, and was still clicking and hissing as it cooled down. But this arrival, change in their status, hadn't altered their outlooks. They waited.
I rounded the back and saw the bed of the truck filled with thick, black, old sewer pipes, seven or eight inches across. The bed was just filled with them - dozens, jangled in among each other, haphazard enough to look like they'd been dumped, but also fairly densely packed with some evident care. Messy and purposeful, at the same time. No tools, no tarps - just the pipes. Salvaged, I felt sure, and on their way to sale somewhere.
Passing the end of the truck, thinking about it still, interested in it without knowing why, I saw the driver, leaving the truck and walking toward the store. Shirtless - he was producing a tee shirt from somewhere as we both moved toward the store, roughly parallel. He saw me, said "'Lo", as if obligated; he nodded quickly, and looked even more quickly away, toward the store, his mouth firming under its black mustache. As he walked he pulled the tee shirt over his head and his shoulders - the head wore a baseball cap, the shoulders were prodigiously muscled - but again in a wiry way, and he, like his passengers, was very small. Barely more than five feet tall, with wavy black hair and dirty jeans. He walked more quickly than I, as if wanting almost to run, and moved into the path my own steps were describing, six feet ahead and pulling away. The tee shirt fell over him just as he pushed open the door. He was so very like the man waiting for him in the truck that I felt certain they were brothers.
I didn't see him inside the store - the grass seed is close to the front, and I made my purchase quickly. But as I came back to my own car, I looked carefully again at the truck, and sneaked another scan of its waiting passengers. The man's face turned languidly toward mine, saw it, but looked again toward the front without acknowledging. He had not moved the slightest in my absence. The woman either - her head had some motion to it; otherwise I could have believed she was a slouching mannequin. They were absolutely silent.
I drove home and ran the whole scene over again in my head. I didn't know why - I couldn't stop looking at my brand-new memories of them. They were familiar; I had seen them before. Maybe not these specific people, but people like them. Where?
I knew it before I arrived back at my driveway, a mile away: Indians. Ecuador, in the mountains. They were often similarly poor, similarly marginalized and resigned to it, similarly floating in what they saw as their lives and their lots. Ritually similar to each other in their clothing, whispering in their own language, aware of their poverty and of others' disdain for it, and for them; unable to hide either identity, their economic or their ethnic and cultural one, they endured on every trip in to town the stares and the insults of almost everyone around them with a stoicism that was equal parts selective deafness and jaded, numb indifference. Unwilling to talk to each other on these forays into the world that looks down on them - because, I always felt, the voice of each speaker would remind the other of his company, and of their station. So they stare silently, thinking more comforting thoughts, and wait until they are back among their own.
And I was reminded of what Bill Bryson wrote in "A Walk In the Woods", his book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He quotes a nineteenth-century visitor to the mountains of Georgia, describing its inhabitants as "cadaverous", and many other unkind things. But the one word that struck a chord with me was this:
"Melancholy."
The pathological, culturally institutionalized sadness of Andean Indians should have cemented that word for me for all time, but somehow it didn't. I didn't knowingly taste "melancholy" until I thought a while on my ride home about the hot, cramped wait, in that parking lot, in that truck, with a load of salvaged shit-pipes, in dead, deathly, accepting silence, at the age of maybe 20.
But the thing that happened, happened in the parking lot. I pulled into it on a hot and hazy day and curved around to an open space, right next to a very rusty, old pickup truck, with sheets of cornflake-thin metal falling into rust and onto the ground from every bit of it. The truck had originally been red, I think, but now had panels of a number of colors. Vermont plates, coated in the almost-orange, sticky mud, now dried, that underlies the actual fertile soil here - where a vehicle gets covered in that, is where holes and ruts have been dug for a very long time, through anything that could ever have grown a decent plant. Old and unkept farms, clearcut slopes, mountain roads that have never been paved... All of which are found in great abundance in Pownal.
I stepped out of the car and looked into the cab as I swung past it. A very young man, late teens or early twenties, sat in the passenger seat. He was small - shorter than me, rangier - but tightly muscled, with a thin mustache and thick, black eyebrows. He seemed to be squinting and drifting off to sleep at the same time, slouched, pushed up against the dashboard more closely than I would have found comfortable. Shirtless, with a baseball cap.
Behind him, in the area where my Dad used to lose things between the seats and the rear wall of his pickup trucks, sat a thin young woman. I saw the back of her head and the curve of her hunched shoulders, framed by the swoops of a tank-top. Her hair was straight, and long, and she sat in the same curled, folded, lethargic posture as the man in front, facing sideways, much lower down, sitting as she was on the floor. There was no way for her to put her feet toward the front. It isn't a seat, this area - it wasn't meant for people. I felt immediately claustrophobic looking at her, but she was unworried, or seemed so from behind. Patience, was what I felt from her, and from him. Or maybe just a complete lack of expectations.
The strangest thing about them was that they didn't shift, didn't adjust themselves, didn't speak. Just looked, each in his or her own direction, and waited. Their vehicle had arrived just before mine, and was still clicking and hissing as it cooled down. But this arrival, change in their status, hadn't altered their outlooks. They waited.
I rounded the back and saw the bed of the truck filled with thick, black, old sewer pipes, seven or eight inches across. The bed was just filled with them - dozens, jangled in among each other, haphazard enough to look like they'd been dumped, but also fairly densely packed with some evident care. Messy and purposeful, at the same time. No tools, no tarps - just the pipes. Salvaged, I felt sure, and on their way to sale somewhere.
Passing the end of the truck, thinking about it still, interested in it without knowing why, I saw the driver, leaving the truck and walking toward the store. Shirtless - he was producing a tee shirt from somewhere as we both moved toward the store, roughly parallel. He saw me, said "'Lo", as if obligated; he nodded quickly, and looked even more quickly away, toward the store, his mouth firming under its black mustache. As he walked he pulled the tee shirt over his head and his shoulders - the head wore a baseball cap, the shoulders were prodigiously muscled - but again in a wiry way, and he, like his passengers, was very small. Barely more than five feet tall, with wavy black hair and dirty jeans. He walked more quickly than I, as if wanting almost to run, and moved into the path my own steps were describing, six feet ahead and pulling away. The tee shirt fell over him just as he pushed open the door. He was so very like the man waiting for him in the truck that I felt certain they were brothers.
I didn't see him inside the store - the grass seed is close to the front, and I made my purchase quickly. But as I came back to my own car, I looked carefully again at the truck, and sneaked another scan of its waiting passengers. The man's face turned languidly toward mine, saw it, but looked again toward the front without acknowledging. He had not moved the slightest in my absence. The woman either - her head had some motion to it; otherwise I could have believed she was a slouching mannequin. They were absolutely silent.
I drove home and ran the whole scene over again in my head. I didn't know why - I couldn't stop looking at my brand-new memories of them. They were familiar; I had seen them before. Maybe not these specific people, but people like them. Where?
I knew it before I arrived back at my driveway, a mile away: Indians. Ecuador, in the mountains. They were often similarly poor, similarly marginalized and resigned to it, similarly floating in what they saw as their lives and their lots. Ritually similar to each other in their clothing, whispering in their own language, aware of their poverty and of others' disdain for it, and for them; unable to hide either identity, their economic or their ethnic and cultural one, they endured on every trip in to town the stares and the insults of almost everyone around them with a stoicism that was equal parts selective deafness and jaded, numb indifference. Unwilling to talk to each other on these forays into the world that looks down on them - because, I always felt, the voice of each speaker would remind the other of his company, and of their station. So they stare silently, thinking more comforting thoughts, and wait until they are back among their own.
And I was reminded of what Bill Bryson wrote in "A Walk In the Woods", his book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He quotes a nineteenth-century visitor to the mountains of Georgia, describing its inhabitants as "cadaverous", and many other unkind things. But the one word that struck a chord with me was this:
"Melancholy."
The pathological, culturally institutionalized sadness of Andean Indians should have cemented that word for me for all time, but somehow it didn't. I didn't knowingly taste "melancholy" until I thought a while on my ride home about the hot, cramped wait, in that parking lot, in that truck, with a load of salvaged shit-pipes, in dead, deathly, accepting silence, at the age of maybe 20.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Films Out Yon Wazoo
A new movie for all fans of Q, T, furniture, baseball, drug-induced fantasies, and high school Spanish:
That should clear up a lot of memory on my computer...
That should clear up a lot of memory on my computer...
Meet The Robinses
These are the robins that are nesting outside our front door. Watch and be amazed!
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Sunday Evenin' Comin' Down
Took both kids to the home of one of Q’s baseball coaches this afternoon for a pool party to celebrate a successful season. Got to know the coaches a little better, a couple of the parents (some of whom are the coaches)…Nice time. Q and T both spent most of the three hours in the pool, playing around, having a ball despite the weather. Which wasn’t especially cold, just not the blazing sauna that makes pools the most fun to be in.
The coach (Coach Rand) also has a game room in his basement, where there’s a ping pong table. So after the pool got old, the boys were downstairs playing, and Q extracted a promise from me that we would play when we got home. I was glad to comply, as our table hasn’t seen nearly enough use lately.
So after supper, he and I went down to play while T set up her usual game in the downstairs bathroom, where she’s the mother and we’re both her children. She sallies forth into the area where we’re playing to bring us snacks and wipe our noses, and call us “Sweetie”. And we submit to being called in to sit down to dinner or lunch or copetín every few minutes. It’s fun.
As we played ping pong, Q’s growing athleticism just leapt up out of him and shocked me. I played with my left hand, inspired by Colton’s dad, who does that to keep it competitive, and it’s really not a contest. He smokes me. I was astonished at some of the amazing, leaning, stabbing gets he would pull out of the air somehow, slicing a ball back across the net to just barely clip the edge on my side, much too far for me to have a shot at…I would laugh and howl at each one, and he would cackle and mime the acrobatics involved again, and we’d launch into another point. After ten minutes or so, he just declared to the world, unable to control himself: “This is so much FUN!”
The game slowed down as the conversation got interesting – he wanted to know more about John Brown, with whom he’s got a growing fascination. I’ve narrated him any number of anecdotes about him now from the biography I got as a gift a year or two ago. Then he wanted more Civil War history – “Something about Wisconsin,” he specified. So I gave him the tale of Ol’ Abe, the bald eagle mascot of a regiment from Wisconsin, bought from an Indian for a sack of corn by one of their recruits as he walked to Madison to muster, how his bunch saw much action during the war and never suffered defeat, hoisting a screaming Abe above them on a perch mounted on a pole with a banner beneath, and how they carried Abe in triumph back to Madison, where he lived the rest of his days in the Governor’s mansion. He positively ate that up.
Back upstairs (T had misreported the time to me, so we ended the game before it was really necessary), T took the game of Mami to greater lengths, tucking us both in atop her own big girl bed and settling down beside us before announcing that it was morning, and that today was a special day because we were going to go swimming at the museum, so we had to pack out swimming trunks and our lunches before we got on the bus. Day after day whizzed by like that – we must have done a week in the space of about fifteen minutes. Q got tired of the game, and left, but I stayed on.
T woke me up yet another bright morning and told me that today was a special day because it was my birthday, and I was going to go to Kindergarten (“jardín de infantes”, which when she says it sounds like “jardín de elefantes”) for the very first time! “Y también,” she informed me, leaning close and nodding confidentially, “you’re a girl.”
“Do you want to wear a skirt, or a dress?”
I found the selection somewhat limited. I pouted. “I want to wear pants.”
She thought for a moment, then cocked her head and leaned in, smiling. “Sparkly pants?”
I played my (her) part, and pretended to be scared. “It’s a new place! I won’t know anyone! The teachers will be new!” And she assured me (her) by saying, “It’s OK, because the teachers are all nice, and you’ll have many friends there, and you’ll make new friends, and your friend Hazel will be there, and she’ll protect you.” So I sauntered around the corner to school in my sparkly pants with a big smile and a wave back over the shoulder, confident that my (her) future was bright, and our path secure, all the way over the horizon into adulthood.
Trembling to resist the temptation to mime, as I went around the door, that I was being grabbed and eaten alive by fanged and horrid creatures.
I do have these evil thoughts – but I’m at least somewhat redeemed in that I don’t actually do these things.
Often.
The coach (Coach Rand) also has a game room in his basement, where there’s a ping pong table. So after the pool got old, the boys were downstairs playing, and Q extracted a promise from me that we would play when we got home. I was glad to comply, as our table hasn’t seen nearly enough use lately.
So after supper, he and I went down to play while T set up her usual game in the downstairs bathroom, where she’s the mother and we’re both her children. She sallies forth into the area where we’re playing to bring us snacks and wipe our noses, and call us “Sweetie”. And we submit to being called in to sit down to dinner or lunch or copetín every few minutes. It’s fun.
As we played ping pong, Q’s growing athleticism just leapt up out of him and shocked me. I played with my left hand, inspired by Colton’s dad, who does that to keep it competitive, and it’s really not a contest. He smokes me. I was astonished at some of the amazing, leaning, stabbing gets he would pull out of the air somehow, slicing a ball back across the net to just barely clip the edge on my side, much too far for me to have a shot at…I would laugh and howl at each one, and he would cackle and mime the acrobatics involved again, and we’d launch into another point. After ten minutes or so, he just declared to the world, unable to control himself: “This is so much FUN!”
The game slowed down as the conversation got interesting – he wanted to know more about John Brown, with whom he’s got a growing fascination. I’ve narrated him any number of anecdotes about him now from the biography I got as a gift a year or two ago. Then he wanted more Civil War history – “Something about Wisconsin,” he specified. So I gave him the tale of Ol’ Abe, the bald eagle mascot of a regiment from Wisconsin, bought from an Indian for a sack of corn by one of their recruits as he walked to Madison to muster, how his bunch saw much action during the war and never suffered defeat, hoisting a screaming Abe above them on a perch mounted on a pole with a banner beneath, and how they carried Abe in triumph back to Madison, where he lived the rest of his days in the Governor’s mansion. He positively ate that up.
Back upstairs (T had misreported the time to me, so we ended the game before it was really necessary), T took the game of Mami to greater lengths, tucking us both in atop her own big girl bed and settling down beside us before announcing that it was morning, and that today was a special day because we were going to go swimming at the museum, so we had to pack out swimming trunks and our lunches before we got on the bus. Day after day whizzed by like that – we must have done a week in the space of about fifteen minutes. Q got tired of the game, and left, but I stayed on.
T woke me up yet another bright morning and told me that today was a special day because it was my birthday, and I was going to go to Kindergarten (“jardín de infantes”, which when she says it sounds like “jardín de elefantes”) for the very first time! “Y también,” she informed me, leaning close and nodding confidentially, “you’re a girl.”
“Do you want to wear a skirt, or a dress?”
I found the selection somewhat limited. I pouted. “I want to wear pants.”
She thought for a moment, then cocked her head and leaned in, smiling. “Sparkly pants?”
I played my (her) part, and pretended to be scared. “It’s a new place! I won’t know anyone! The teachers will be new!” And she assured me (her) by saying, “It’s OK, because the teachers are all nice, and you’ll have many friends there, and you’ll make new friends, and your friend Hazel will be there, and she’ll protect you.” So I sauntered around the corner to school in my sparkly pants with a big smile and a wave back over the shoulder, confident that my (her) future was bright, and our path secure, all the way over the horizon into adulthood.
Trembling to resist the temptation to mime, as I went around the door, that I was being grabbed and eaten alive by fanged and horrid creatures.
I do have these evil thoughts – but I’m at least somewhat redeemed in that I don’t actually do these things.
Often.
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