matching tracksuits

The passage of time has always fascinated me. “X years ago today, this happened,” I would think, marveling at all the things that happened in the meantime. Often, it wasn’t an exact day, but instead, within a month or so of the actual anniversary, I would find myself thinking such nostalgic thoughts.

Many of those events later turned out to be insignificant, of little more importance than what one had for breakfast nine days ago.

Today’s is the most significant of my — and K’s — life.

When I reflect on the patience necessary for us to get married (a  non-Catholic American getting married in Poland requires only slightly less bureaucracy than starting a war or passing a stimulus bill) and the patience necessary to put up with my foolishness for six years, I realize how fortunate I am.

Six years – an awfully short time. Wars and debates have lasted much longer — and marriages. But when I look to the next six years, and the six years after that, and the six years after that (ad infinitum),

when I think of a time when my few remaining hairs have turned gray and migrated to my nose and ears, when my mind moves slowly and my body more so,

I will still have the most intelligent, beautiful, and thoughtful (among countless other superlatives) woman at my side. Perhaps only then will I truly understand the significance of our love.

Or maybe it’s to remain our ultimate mystery.

In the first installment of the Toy Story series, Woody, thinking he’s been left behind, falls to the ground and decries his new, depressing status: “I’m a lost toy!”

Surely there can be many things more terrifying than being lost. One of our great childhood fears is getting lost, being separated from our parents and unable to find them. It’s the stuff of every child’s nightmares, and in a modified way, the plot of great books of the past.

Losing something dear to us is like losing a part of us.

Today, before Mass, somewhere between getting out of the car and walking out of the restroom, L lost her Madeline doll. “She may be teeny tiny, diminutive, petite.” L’s Madeline doll was all those things, and she even had a scar from having her appendectomy.

I walked back to the car, looking for the doll that I thought surely would be easy to find. No such luck. K and L went back to the restroom. No doll. After Mass, I talked to the ushers. Sadly, there’s no lost and found bin anymore, but they informed me that people often leave lost items on the tables outside the sanctuary. No Madeline. We checked the bathroom once more and looked carefully as we went back to the car.

No luck; no Madeline.

Fortunately, L was not terribly attached to the dolls, so a few tears and it was all fine.

But I’m genuinely curious about what happened to that doll. Did someone take it? If so, why? Isn’t it obviously a lost toy? If someone found it in the parking lot, isn’t it a reasonable assumption that the owner will return to look for it? In short, who would simply take a toy when it’s obvious where the owner is? Who would take a doll from a church parking lot?

Perhaps it will show up next week. There’s always that hope — the idealism that led me to be a teacher still says, “Someone will play with it for a week, then return it.”

Shortly after she woke up, L declared, “I’m ready! Let’s go to the zoo!” Never mind that she was still in her pajamas, still unbreakfasted, and still rubbing sleep out of her eyes. We’d promised a trip to the Atlanta zoo (K wanted to go to Ikea, see?), and she was ready.

Much larger than our quaint (but lovely) zoo in Greenville, the Atlanta zoo has many species that L had never seen before. The first new friends: warthogs.

I’d never seen them myself except in The Lion King, which hardly counts.

They were shockingly ugly, like the product of some kind of cross-breeding experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong. Yet like most things we deem “ugly,” they were oblivious to their decided lack of charm.

Then again, these creatures must certainly enchant someone.

Just down the path, though, were animals whose grace and beauty were inversely proportional to the warthogs’. Black horses with white stripes or vice versa, the zebras were lovely in a stark and simple way. Supposedly they are very difficult to domesticate, but certainly many have tried: who could resist?

For me, though, the highlight of any trip to a zoo is the great apes. It’s as if we’re watching ourselves, they’re so intelligent and anthropomorphic.

They seem to stop and think. They fight. They play. They’re among the closest to humans biologically and behaviorally among the whole animal kingdom. I always get the feeling they’re the ones watching us.

During today’s visit, we were privileged – if that’s the correct term — to watch two enormous males contend for the attention of a female. They chased each other about a bit, then fell into violence. One smack echoed, and I shuddered as I realized the certain impossibility of a human surviving such a blow.

They calmed down a fairly quickly, and they even decided to pose for a few pictures.

In between hygiene breaks, of course.

At the serpentarium it was feeding time, and a small constrictor — some kind of boa, if memory serves — swallowed a bird whole. Those who’d arrived first assured those of us who arrived only to see the last few inches of the bird, “It was dead when the keeper put it in the cage.” What irony: some would have been appalled by what goes on everyday in nature. Animal cruelty.

Giant pandas were having their dinner as well, but it was a considerably more benign process: after all, bamboo doesn’t register pain, does it?

Despite all the new animals we saw, L’s response to the on-the-way-home question, “What was your favorite part?” was really quite predictable.

Who could put silly warthogs, zebras, constrictors, or pandas above an elephant ride?

Even though the heat was unbearable, the elephant ride was blissful.

If she could, she would have ridden into the night, I’m sure.

The first steps usually happen simultaneously: learn the pieces and the layout of the board. The next step: learning how individual pieces move. L’s got two of the three done, and she’s started on the third, with the most basic: the pawns.

(I might add that L has taken the initiative entirely on this. I’m not some freakish dad pushing his own obsession on his child.)

Do much course work in education and you’ll soon find yourself covering some of the same names in various classes: Piaget, Vygotsky, Erikson, Binet, Skinner, Kohlberg, and the list goes on.

It’s frustrating to cover the same material in course after course, but the advantage is that it sits solidly in your head, and you find yourself thinking about it at the oddest times.

For example, L and I sit down to play chess. Our chess is usually random motions of random pieces, but instructive all the same: she learns that we take turns, and that the object of the game is to defeat your opponent by taking pieces. It’s fun, but her attention span usually only last a few minutes before it’s time to have “tea” or feed her baby or any number of other priorities.

Today, we try something new. I tell her I’m going to set up pieces on my end of the board, and she needs to try to copy them on her end. A real challenge, to be sure. It is quite taxing on her spacial intelligence, for I am asking her to create a mirror image, which requires quite a bit of mental spacial manipulation.

I think of Piaget and Erikson — does she have the mental development for the task at hand. Technically, those gentlemen would probably say, “No.”

“She’s still at the very beginning of the preoperational state,” Piaget says.

Forget ed psych — let’s have some challenging fun.

The beginning is slow, and it takes her a good ten minutes to figure out that she’s supposed to be mirroring my pieces. But she puts everything together slowly, and it’s obvious she can do it.

More importantly,  she loves it. And I figure it must be in her “zone of proximal development,” for she’s having great difficulty, but slowly she’s mastering it.

“Let’s do it again!”

And so we do it many times. Each time, I alter the order in which I put the pieces on the board. First one pawn, then the other, then a knight and bishop beside each other before moving to the other side. Sometimes a mix of major pieces and pawns.

Toward the end, I give her the real challenge: most of the major pieces and some of the pawns are on the board when I tell her, “Figure it out.”

She looks at my pieces, looks at her own, back at mine, and suddenly, in a flash, her side of the board is perfect.

Once we get the piece positioning down, we’ll start learning how the pawns move.