Yes, This Is Becoming The "Things My Kid Says" Blog

On the way to the car after school last week, 2 stops to read a sign.

2: What does D-R-U-G spell?
Me: Drug.
2: "Drug-free School Zone." So, no drugs in school?
Me: Yep.
2: [pondering] Is caffiene a drug?

Well, my almost-6-year-old, let's make a deal. If you say caffiene's not a drug, I'll say the Disney Channel isn't, either.

Such Sport

1 and I have gone jogging the past two mornings-- spring fever. I've never been a jogger, never sustained the resolution more than a week or so. We don't go far or fast yet, and tomorrow morning's 6 a.m. temperature will be the real test.

But I know I'll do it, and here's why: On Monday morning as we turned west, the just-full moon hung huge and creamy over the city. It was stunning. This morning, it was perceptibly higher in the sky, full and alabaster. I can't wait to see it tomorrow morning, so I can note its new angle and color and see the curve of its waning side.

M- said tonight, "The moon is beautiful." So I will sleep and let the moon step over me, then I'll wake up and run after it.

All the Things I Don't Know

"Would people still be good if there weren't any polices?" 2 asked me.

We drove in silence for a few moments: me, astonished; 2, patient.

I told her it was an excellent question. I blathered like a parent.

"I was asking, would people be good, not can people be good," she said.

Signs

1. Of the times

My eye swept across a small sign stuck in the grassy median strip: Panic Contest. In the next moment of approach, I saw that it actually said: Fabric Outlet.

2. Of my age

I was driving a car in which the steering function and the throttle shared the same equipment, meaning that the curvier the road, the faster the car went. This was tiring, so I pulled off the road at an open, park-like field.

I sat on the grass and watched some gathering storm clouds of kitchen utensils. A sudden wind caught the clouds and whipped them toward the west, driving spatulas and spoons across the sky. By some trick of perspective, they were much lower and larger than they first appeared.

A giant soup dipper crashed into the second floor of a nearby house, bowl-first, smashing out a wall. The handle ripped open a first-floor sun porch before the wind caught the utensil and swiveled it around the house to join the others.

I laughed at the absurdity, and noticed that some teens walking by had seen it, too, and were laughing.

“That’s nice, that kids today can see the humor in something simple and silly like that,” I thought.

I woke soon after, smiling, this time at myself, for dreaming in language like "kids today."

For Dust You Are

The yellow crocuses 1 planted around the grave of the baby quail have bloomed in this warm spell. I'm sitting near them, in the back yard, reading in the sunshine. 2 plays her standard repertoire of 5-year-old games: restaurant, house, ballet, sporting event.

Then she slides half-way onto a chair beside me and grins.

2: I have a question for you. If you get it right, you'll get my very best trophy. Who made us: God... or Mother Nature?

Me: Is there really a right answer?

2: Yes! [expectant pause] If you think about what we are... you'll know ...

We speak at nearly the same moment.

Me: Mother Nature?
2: Mother Nature!

2: I thought about it and figured it out for myself. --I don't know if it's truth or not, but it's what I think.

I pretended I had to go blow my nose and ran into the house so I could scribble the conversation on a piece of scrap paper. For the record, I never speak about a "Mother Nature" figure; I'm not sure where she got it from, but she's been mulling over the different between the two characters for over a year now.

What was happening in her brain as she pondered this? What does she think God is that we are not?

Why I Love My Neighborhood, Again

I stepped out of my front door, set my cello on the porch, closed the door behind me, reached into my pocket for my keys, and remembered they were on the little stand in the hall.

Fortunately, I do this often enough that I keep a spare house key in the car.

Unfortunately, I've recently gotten into the habit of locking my car doors, even though it took me five years after finding part of a broken pipe on the floor one morning.

Fortunately, I could see that I had left the driver's side unlocked this time.

I smiled at the sun, took up my cello and got ready to go to N-'s house to practice a duet we'll perform in February.

In the next two minutes of loading in, I started to daydream about planting the seeds I bought last week, which led me to think about my new knowledge that regular dirt is unhealthy for some seeds, which made me wonder if M- would believe me, which got me thinking about whether it's women he doesn't like to agree with, or just me, which made me think about M-G-'s husband and how he probably agrees with her lots but I wouldn't want to be married to him anyway.

I shut the passenger side door with my cello in place, walked around the front of the car, and was struck by the hazy memory of having pressed the lock button.

Yup, I was now locked out of house and car. A quick mental inventory of our home's windows revealed that my typical break-in routes were no-gos. Miraculously, I had not left the phone inside either house or car, so I called N- to tell her I would be very, very late.

And here's why this post is about my neighborhood: I walked down the street to C-'s house, where she took me in and offered me a cup of tea. (Note to self: give C- a spare house key.) We sat at her kitchen table, drank Rooibos tea, rubbed the dog's head, and talked about jobs, the economy, our kids' schools. The sun shone through a cut glass pendant in the window and made a rainbow on the floor.

Even the small act of getting up to wash the dogsmell off my hands at her kitchen sink without interrupting our conversation made me feel happy. No need for those funny gestures, aiming one's hands in the direction of the sink while airwashing them, raising one's eyebrows, saying "May I?" as one would do in a mere acquaintance's house. The kitchen sink, sort of a personal altar, is not something to use lightly.

Eventually 1 came home from school with a key and I went along to my duet practice.

Flight

I entered the desolate stairwell at work and saw a lone little brown leaf on the floor, then had that odd feeling, when knowledge overlaps perception, for in the next demi-instant I saw that it was a bat, too dark brown to be a leaf; also, somehow I felt it was still alive.

I nudged it with my toe, and it gave a crackling hiss, feebly twisted its angular wings. It was clearly injured, and angry. I wanted either to gently scoot it out of the way or to kill it bloodlessly. I touched it again with my boot, to make sure it wasn't going to suddenly spring into flight. It hissed again. I would have been afraid if I were a small animal, and as it was, I felt so unsettled by this bat, even though I knew it couldn't hurt me, that I left it where it was and went up to the office.

Someone took a box down, turned it over the bat and pushed it off to the side. Later, after a call to Animal Control ("What I'm gonna need for you to do is to put it in a plastic bag"), I found a Dollar Tree bag and a vague determination to be decisive. No one in the office had leather gloves.

The bat was weaker. I leaned closer and saw its tiny pointed ears and flat nose shaped like the roof of a pagoda. Its wings and pillowy body were crushed indeterminately together. This flying mammal: how different from me. It turned its head back toward me, just barely, and gave a hiss more like a sigh.

It took me three or four tries to grab the small bundle of its body without flinching, my hand inside the bag like a glove. Such an ugly shroud. I tried to jostle the bag slightly so the bat wouldn't be on its back as it waited to die.

Adrift at The End of December

• Geez, I had a curl in the middle of my forehead when I wrote that last post, eh? Now, with a glass of red wine and Mendelssohn's octet for strings on the stereo, I'm not so horrid.


• I saw Across the Universe at the movie palace the other night and here's my review: Better than Hairspray.


• I took 1 and 2 to see Enchanted this morning. (Who the heck knew there was such a thing as a 10 a.m. Sunday matinee??? -must've been the oddest movie-going experience ever.) Here's my review: Better than I thought it would be.


• Actually, I thought Enchanted was a superb example of narrative a la mode: slip directly from parody into the the form being parodied. It was like The Daily Show for 8- to 12-year-old girls.


• Don't get me wrong: I like The Daily Show. But at its heart, it is Establishment.


• The rain, the rain.


• We went to the art museum today and managed to look at some things between asking the girls not to play combat hide-and-seek around the statuary pedestals. I liked "The Watering Pond at Marly with Hoarfrost" by Alfred Sisley, for its precise capturing of winter afternoon light and shade. I couldn't find that image, but here's his "Hoarfrost, Saint Martin's Summer," with what I think is morning light.

I Like You, Really I Do

M- wants to have a poker night this Friday. "Invite all your friends," he says.

Some days I just don't have any friends. At least not any with whom I would enjoy a convivial evening of drunken gambling, if we're talking about my sanctioned friends, as in: wives of his friends. (Note: these are women I like very much between the hours of 8 am and 8 pm.) Most of my friends are friends only in my imagination, which is to say, if I knew them better, we probably wouldn't be friends, by mutual decision.

Really-- I am a friendly person, not at all overtly misanthropic. People seem to like me. I don't know why I'm feeling so grouchy about this concept of "friends" right now.


I can barely touch my own self
How can I touch someone else?
I am just an advertisement
for a version of myself.

-"Angels," David Byrne, David Byrne

Now I'll have to read the darn book.

I still can't believe I actually bought these earrings. Wore them, too. Aren't they great?

The Blues

This Saturday is my birthday. I'm so tired of thinking about my life, I have nothing left to write.

Here's a rhetorical question: What the hell is up with my child?

Scene: Mid-afternoon. Child 2 walks up the stairs, making up a cheery little 4-note tune as she goes, unaware that I can hear her. The words:

I'm going upstairs and when I get to the top
that's when I say
My dad is always right and I'm always wrong
My dad is always right and I'm always wrong
My mom is always right
My big sister is always right
And I'm always wrong
Everybody is always right and I'm always wrong


I shouldn't have, but I ran into her room and asked, almost laughing, "What are you saying?" She looked at me guiltily, I think--it was as if an adult were staring out of a 4-year-old's eyes--and tried to pretend she thought I was talking about something else. I pressed her once and she became clearly annoyed, so I left.

At the rate I'm working through it, I will finish the book "Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano" when I'm 67.

The epigraph for the chapter on Beethoven will carry me for several years:

"Beethoven is Lucifer's good son, the demon guide to the last things." -Ernst Bloch

So, some days I want to be the Trout Quintet and some days I want to be Beethoven.

East of Town

I love visiting N- and J-, who live east of town, down a long gravel driveway with grass between the wheeltracks. Their small house is calm and simple, heated only by a woodstove and surrounded by semi-tamed meadow and forest.

As I drove down the lane, I slowed so I could hear H-, their dog, galloping alongside the car. Laundry hung on the line and little watercolor drawings lay on the back porch table, where N-, J- and baby C- must have eaten all summer, as they had no usable dining room until recently.

While C-napped upstairs, N- made cups of peppermint tea and served mine in Fiestaware that matched my blouse. Sometimes talking with her is hard, because we have so much to say and I change subjects more slowly than she. Pauses in the conversation--which I need--are rare. But today was slower. The dog nuzzled my legs and we both watched her for a moment. The fire whispered and then it was time for me to drive west, back to the city.

The November afternoon lay down its sun and shadows across the road. If music has geometry, Loreena McKennit's voice on my car's stereo was the same angle as the slanted light. I was late picking up 1 from school, but not so late that it mattered.

Two Cute Stories About a 4-Year-Old That Happen To Be Entirely Different in Tone

At supper last night 2 asked, out of the blue, "Do you know what I wish for most, besides Thanksgiving going on forever, and wings?"

I was so disarmed by the question, I can't even remember what her answer was.

---
About a week ago, 2 was pestering 1 to get off the toilet so she could use it. 1 finally finished and hastily flushed, but it didn't take. From the living room, I heard some commotion in the bathroom, then little footsteps tearing down the hall and a panicky voice, "SOMEBODY GET A PLUNGER!"

Some Chicks

These are the survivors of the science class incubator. 1 brought them home over Thanksgiving break, and even dug a few worms out of the compost pile for them.

Clockwise from top: Ronnie, Nolan, and Too Cute To Name

Bailey was the lone quail hatchling. Dwarfed by his boxmates, he would try to clamber up on their backs when they sat down to sleep and push his head under their wings.

Bailey died as Thanksgiving day dawned, lay in state in a tin breathmint box for two days, and was buried beneath a daffodil bulb on Sunday morning.

My Absolute All-Time Favorite Liner Notes

This is the last paragraph of the anonymously written notes that accompany a recording of Schubert's Trout Quintet by the Endres Quartet with Rolf Reinhardt:

"It is amusing to note how almost every commentator, severely picking holes in the formal structure of the Trout, abjectly surrenders to its musical charm. In short, Schubert may not have made the greatest intellectual or emotional contribution to music with the Trout Quintet--but he went ahead and composed a work of genius, one that is so spontaneous, so lyric and free-flowing, that criticism remains pedantic and impertinent."


You may guess for yourselves why this analysis is so dear to me, with the italics-added portions standing as your clues.

No Returns

Last fall as I drove down M- Ave. under the yellow and red maples backlit by afternoon sun, I passed a hearse waiting to enter the street from the parking lot of a church. It pulled out behind me, then two blocks later, a different hearse crossed the street in front of me.

"A hearse in front, a hearse behind," I thought, and it sounded so good that I wrote it down on the back of a receipt at the next stoplight. It was an easy lyric to let flit through the air, what with all the sunshine and autumnal color.

I rarely think about death, not even my parents', and I'm not going to now. I'm glad that hearses pass by on our public roads, so I can remember death without having to consider it. But I have kept the receipt.

Does Your Forehead Hurt From Slapping It? Try Using Our New, Patented Sof-Touch Hammer!

This arrived in my Inbox with the subject heading "Quick Story Idea":

MEDIA ALERT
Do Your Children Have More Friends Online Than They Do in Their Own Town?

Some social experts are taking a closer look at the toll social networking is taking on human interactions and the eroding framework of local communities. The issue of social capital has [blah blah blah] role in its perceived demise. "Most social scientists acknowledge [blah blah] society as a whole [wah-wah wah wah] ,” said Dr. [of what?], Dean, Newbury College. "The potential benefits of these bonds [blah blah] often referred to as 'social capital.' Some experts worry that cyberspace or virtual networks are replacing the more traditional community or neighborhood interactions and eroding our 'social capital.'”

An Alternative: New Website Aims to Slow the Erosion of Social Capital

Today is the official launch of [hammer.com], an exclusive, private online service that organizes and connects families to people, activities and organizations in the towns in which they live. [Hammer]'s founder believes that because today's families juggle [expensive power tools], they can easily lose touch with the people and activities in their towns. The site intends to brings people together to create stronger communities…the ultimate goal is not to make "online friends,” but to connect people—in person—with likeminded individuals and organizations in their own town. In other words, while social networking technology has allowed people around the world to connect virtually, TownConnect uses similar technology to bring local people together, literally.


Believe it or not, the MEDIA ALERT continues for another 500 words or so. But nowhere does it explain how this website will allow me to step into my computer to literally get together--in person--with people in my own town. I am disappointed.

Evasion

For the first time in my life, I was inside a federal court building on Monday. The public entrance is astonishingly unimpressive. (On the back side of the building, along the street where we lucked into a free parking spot, are several grand old doors, one set of which I think is for prisoners.) A few steps sidle up to a single set of glass doors, which open into a bootroom-sized entry. Another set of glass doors led us to a small security desk and its accoutrements.

K- and I were cleared for entry--we were asked to show ID; I had considered leaving mine in the car, for the very reason that I wanted to be able to protest if I were asked to show it, but I didn't really think we'd be asked; I was then glad I had it with me, since we were running late and I didn't want to waste time with a production. A short older man in a wilting uniform gave us directions to Judge S-'s courtroom, third floor.

It was a silent hallway. The dark-wood-of-course-paneled walls and wine-colored carpet might have had a soporific effect, had I not been so focused on the events about to unfold in the courtroom we aimed toward. No one sat, morose, on the few benches; no suited lawyers strode by with 14-inch legal pads; no fervent voices and shadowy figures haunted the grainy glass windows of all the doors we passed.

The windows of the doors to Judge S-'s courtroom were of clear glass, and K- and I could immediately see M- sitting beside his lawyer at the table on the left. This was the day of his sentencing, and we brought equal parts curiousity and desire to be supportive. He is, after all, our employer.

The judge arrived soon after we did. Before M-'s case, a prisoner in a gray and black striped uniform was led into the courtroom from the rear. He was cuffed at the feet and hands. It took one minute to grant him a continuance--through the lawyer, of course; he didn't speak at all--then he was led back out.

As he moved down the carpet, he glanced past me to some family members or friends farther down the bench--a long moment of something: sorrow? apology? request for understanding? His forehead was not wrinkled, there was no tightness in his face. His eyes were dark hazel, but seemed lighter in contrast to his skin. He had another month of being somehow a hole in the lives of those people.

M-, unshackled, in a suit of his own choosing with a lawyer and letters from doctors, received 5 months in prison, 150 days of monitored house arrest and 3 years of probation. K- and I tried to console his lady friend in the hallway afterward. Some man was handing her a business card as she began to cry. M- and his lawyer sat down in a little room, made for the purpose of lawyer and client deliberation. We left quickly. Behind us, in Judge S-'s courtroom, another man in black and grey shuffled down the aisle.

Message to the World

Please, everyone, please listen to Brahms' "A German Requiem." Take it in segments if you want: one or two movements a day. Turn it up really loud when no one's in the house. Sit on the sofa and stare at the wind-rustled leaves outside.

(I have John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, but only by circumstance; I didn't search out any particular recording.)