The surest way to get the Girl to do something she’s reluctant to do? Turn it into a game.
Say you’re on the third floor of a building. (Which would be the second floor in Poland — the ground floor doesn’t count I guess.) Say you’re not keen on using the elevator because it’s so painfully slow. Say the Girl complains about being tired. How do you get her to go along with your scheme to use the stairs?
Simple. Turn it into a race.
It helps if Nana is there to be the opponent, of course.
Of late, the Girl really enjoys playing with the Boy. Not pestering him; not hanging on him; not kissing him mercilessly. Playing with him. Granted, she still does all those things: she gets a little carried away with her affection. (But then, who doesn’t?) Still, there’s been more developmental play of late, trying to get the Boy to do this or that. More gently some days than others, but still. Improvement is improvement.
The Boy wants to stand. Just like the Girl at this age, he pushes up into a wobbly standing position any and every time he has enough support.
We discovered tonight, though, that unlike L, the Boy loves the strange, hang-in-the-doorway bouncer that we got from who knows where or whom.
He liked the effect of jumping, bouncing here and there. He liked the effect of swinging, the gentle motion causing him to squeal his “I’m thrilled silly” squeal.
But mostly, he liked to swing his legs wildly. That boy’s going to be a runner, I tell you.
“Our Father, who art in heaven,” we all intoned together during Mass this morning, and as I recited the prayer, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass separating us in the sadly named “Crying Room” from the rest of the parishioners. For a second, I stared. It’s not that I didn’t recognize myself — that would be silly. But it struck me that the reflection had aged some, that the reflection was somehow not a true image of the real me, the young me, the just getting started me, the “me” we all invest so much energy into. Then, seeing a reflection of L, standing beside me, I realized I was paying less attention to myself of late and more attention to more important things. At least that was the reflection I wanted to see. Ask others and they’re likely to say I haven’t changed that much at all. Or maybe they won’t.
The funny thing about reflections is that they often “distort” because we’ve already distorted our own self-image. Perhaps that’s why so many don’t like having their picture taken: the photo shows them an individual they hardly recognize because it is so misaligned with how they see themselves, or want to see themselves. It’s a reflection they can’t manipulate by turning their good side or altering the light. It’s time and reflection frozen, and those little slices of existence can be very unflattering when taken completely out of the contextual stream of our lives.
In some ways, then, the ultimate mirror is our children. By the time a child is L’s age, she’s reflecting much more than what we show her, and that’s always of concern. Yet children always act as a mirror for parents, and if we parents pay attention, the reflection our children provide can be a self-correction device.
It’s easy to get caught up with this reflected light, though, and think it’s the real thing. Plato and St. Paul both talk about this from different directions but with the same effect: we see ourselves reflected in the crying room glass (what a metaphor for the world — a crying room) and think that reflection is all there is to it. We forget to look through the glass to see what’s on the other side.
The same could happen with our children. When we live too vicariously through our children, when we try to force them to reflect the light we want in all situations, we’re doing the same thing. We’re not looking through the pane of our children’s achievements but merely at our reflection within it.
Looking at my reflection this morning, I thought back to an earlier point in the Mass when the Fr. Joe was swinging the thurible over the altar, with great wafts of smoke rising and curling, slowly creating a haze around the altar that we could have not only seen but smelled had our family not been in self-exile in the crying room. Fr. Joe’s words, too, were altered, coming through speakers that made him sound remote and artificial.
That somehow seems to be a metaphor for all the things we miss out on when we get too caught up in all those reflections. And one of the dangers of always carrying around a camera is the tendency to increase that separation, to view what’s going on around as cliche director in one of those films about films, always going around with his thumbs and forefingers making a rough frame for imagining life to be a film, a two-dimensional projection of one’s own overly-hyped interpretations.
At the very least, we can wait to impose a storyline on life until we are home, the kids are in bed, and we’re sitting a keyboard.
When the Girl was much younger, much smaller, and much lighter, we spent a lot of time down at the swing. L could pass whole afternoons in the swing if she would have had someone there patient enough to push her that long. If took the time, I could find pictures of me pushing her, Papa pushing her, Dziadek pushing her, friends pushing her — anyone who came for a visit, down there by the small creek that forms the boundary between our property and the neighbor’s, pushing, pushing, pushing. Higher, higher, higher. That was the formula.
Today, we took the Boy down for the first time.
It must be genetic — his love and fascination were instantaneous.
One day, a day of brilliant sun and warmth. A day of walking and running on boardwalks and paved paths throughout Conestee Park.
A day of friends giggling laughing freely.
A day of a little boy standing a little taller.
A day of friends.
Another day, a day of rainy departures.
I think we all agree: the first day was better.
When you’re colorblind, certain doors are most definitely shut to you. Being a fighter pilot, as I understand it, is out. Being an interior decorator or fashion designer, also out, though I don’t really care much about either one of those exclusions. The fighter pilot thing would upset me if I hadn’t already understood that my nearsightedness disqualified me.
I’ve recently learned, though, that certain games are immeasurably more difficult for us colorblind folk. Like Bubble Pop on the Nexus. With dark blue and purple, I’m lost. With shades of green, red, and brown that blend into an identical blob, it’s hopeless for me.
The girls are enjoying it, though.
After several days of rain, days of grey skies that look identical at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon, days of — let’s be honest — Polish-looking skies, the bright light of the dawn this morning literally stopped me mid-step. A ribbon of yellowish, pinkish, orange light (at least to this colorblind fellow) stretched across the backyard, with a muted blue sky rising above.
It was a day of clarity. The Girl, clearly growing older, conquered her first extended Lego-building session. Sure, there was a lot of help, but that was to be expected: the lower age on the box is still a year beyond Lena’s experience. We worked together, exploring the wonder of perspective drawings in instructions, how one could position the in-progress creation just right beside the instructions and see exactly where the next blocks belonged. By the end, I was only checking; she was doing the building.
Relationships clarified themselves further. That the Girl loves her little brother has been obvious from the start, but today she was able to sit and actually play with him for extended periods without the silly five-year-old drama (after all, she’s six now) that made every other playtime an exercise in self-entertainment for the Girl. Today, she seemed truly interested in helping E enjoy himself. Until the end, when the silly L returned. But still, progress. Growth.
And in the evening, with the clouds still at bay (they’re scheduled to return this weekend), the moon shone clearly through the branches of the trees, turning this morning’s watercolor into an etching. I went out with the intention of doing some bracketed shots for an HDR shot.
In the end, after merging the photos and doing the requisite tone mapping, I realized the original was better. It whispered the hints of mystery that have kept the generations looking upward and feeling comforted by the clarity.
We start the day like we ended the evening: the Boy in a great mood. He wakes up like this; he spends his day like this; he spends his evening like this. The only time there’s fussing is if there’s hunger or sleepiness involved.
The Christmas fun begins, though, as soon as the Boy and I wake up the Girl and urge her to come downstairs. “There’s something you need to check,” I say, feeling a little strange at the thought of the inevitable: reading my own letter as if I’ve never seen it before. Is it lying? Yes, and no. It’s no more lying, I suppose, than “Dance with me Prince!” was a couple of years ago.
It’s become a common refrain in our house the last few days, dancing to this or that carol. “Dance with me, Prince!” we laugh to each other, giving that British long-A in “dance” that the Girl somehow developed when she was only three. The last few days, we’ve been dancing to everything, but mainly carols. We have our favorites, but for now, it’s not time to dance. It’s time to watch a small moment of surprised discovery.
The letter waits, and the Girl comes down, still in her PJs and clutching her beloved Baby, not quite sure if she’s seeing what she thinks she’s seeing: an empty plate and a handwritten letter.
Of course I ate the cake and drank the milk last night, sitting by the tree as K wrapped the last presents. Perhaps next year we can leave Santa a cigar instead. Maybe a new camera lens.
She sits to read what she can. “Dear L,” she begins, and unwilling to work further, brings it to me to read. As I read, I’m mindful of two things: the color ink and the last paragraph. She notices the former right away.
“It’s in red!” Indeed it is, because I used my fountain pen that I use to grade papers with. (Yes, I’m old-school and use red when marking papers. I’m not so worried about supposed psychological effects of the color. Content trumps form, doesn’t it?) Will she put the two together and observe, “Tata, you’re the only person I know who uses red”?
I decide to strike preemptively: “Well, Santa wears red, right? I guess he uses red ink.” Simple.
The last paragraph is not so simple. What was I thinking when I wrote that? I told her in the last paragraph what’s in her stocking. So I just switch antecedents: “What was Santa thinking?!” I ask as I get to the end. “I can’t read that final paragraph: he tells you too much about your stocking surprise.”
And this reminds her that she hasn’t checked her stocking. It seems, from a distance, to be empty. “I think there’s paper inside,” she infers. Perhaps it could be like Babcia and Dziadek’s generous birthday gift from Poland: a single bill that is bigger than anything she’d seen before.
Breakfast is a simple affair — a couple of bagels and some strong coffee — before we begin more peeling, cutting, slicing, ironing, scrubbing, vacuuming, entertaining, and rocking. We take a break for some carols.
Among them, my all-time favorite, the most perfectly beautiful carol ever written, with a text by Christina Rossetti put to music by the very-English Holst.
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.
After a while, the Boy is tired. It’s time for the morning nap, so I begin putting the Boy to sleep to the accompaniment of a Polish lullaby to the infant Jesus,
then go back downstairs to dance with L to this one:
Yet the simple joy is bound not to last: K comes to me with a small shopping list of things that are absolutely necessary yet have somehow been overlooked during the last three days of sporadic shopping. With a steady rain falling and the prospect of hoards of Christmas barbarians, I’m not thrilled with the idea of heading out. Still, necessity is necessity, and as I get in the car and hear the sirens of approaching rescue vehicles, I’m reminded that such “problems” are relatively insignificant.
The shopping is relatively painless, and I return to find M has arrived. Like family, M spends almost every Christmas with us lately. She is the Boy’s godmother and plays the part well, encouraging him literally to walk before he can crawl. As if he needs much encouragement: simply picking him up slightly puts a wiggly bounce in his legs and he’s ready to hop, walk, and wobble.
M isn’t the only thing that awaits me. As a sort of merry Christmas surprise, the CDs of Polish Christmas music we’d ordered and not expected until, say, Easter arrived. More versions of the same songs we’ve listened to every year. It’s sort of appropriate, though: we’re always doing the same thing at the same time of year.
The only things that change are the details — the arrangements. The jazzy feel to some of the carols make a perfect accompaniment to the final cutting and slicing for the inevitable Polish salad. No Polish meal can be complete without raw veggies in some form — surowka in Polish. At the very least, one can grate a couple of carrots, add salt and pepper, and call it a salad. We even have a Polish cookbook with a recipe for that! It’s a tough one to master, I hear.
The Girl might manage, but she’s not into grating we’re not into letting her grate — too dangerous for little fingers. She does enjoy using the veggie cuber that looks like something off some infomercial. Arrange, press, presto: instant cubes. (Some pre-slicing required.)
Finally, we reach a certain critical mass. Most everything that can be done early is done; the remaining food that will taste best freshly cooked is ready to be cooked; the table is set. It’s time to relax. There’s a perfect storm of dumplings and trout, toddies and gifts, cake and giggles that is waiting on the other side of sunset.
And of course, take a few pictures of the table.
“Make sure you get a good shot of the embroidery along the edges,” K tells me, justifiably proud of her mother’s work. Of course I promptly forget. Still, there it is in the middle, a touch of blues and greens in an impossibly perfect circle that is impossibly perfectly centered in the table cloth, all perfectly measured to fit our table. Such a covering would cost hundreds — one of the countless family treasures we have.
Soon, the guests — Nana and Papa — arrive, and it’s time to start.
The soups are warm; the onion is browned; the scallops are ready to saute; the potatoes are boiled and ready for mashing. And so we begin. Papa reads St. Luke’s nativity account:
And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city.
Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child. So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”
Some things are difficult to translate, but traditions such as these flow from one language and culture to another easily enough.
The highlight of the Polish Wigilia tradition, though, is the sharing of the opłatek, which comes after the prayer, after the nativity reading, after the carol singing (we chose “Silent Night” this evening). It’s a tradition as old as civilization itself: the breaking of the bread. The thin sheets of unleavened bread have the flavor and consistency of communion wafers (and I’m sure they’re of the same recipe), but this is a broader communion, a communion between flawed mortals.
We mingle, breaking off bits of each other’s bread and wishing each other well for the year. Probably we end up saying the same things, or something similar, every single year. But this is a time when the gesture outshines the words in many ways, and besides, as Catholics (or most of us present are Catholic), we’re used to saying the same things year after year, week after week. It gives us a certain continuity, a certain surety and comfort.
The meal itself paradoxically brings few surprises yet one shock, and that’s always for the best. The menu has been set for years: barszcz z uszkami, pierogi z kapust… i pieczarkami, zupa grzybowa, and some kind of fish (trout this year) serve as the basic  elements of the meal. As I said, thankfully no surprises there. However, when the Girl begins eating her mushroom-filled dumplings in her barszcz, the shock is palpable. The little girl is growing up in so many ways it’s difficult to keep track of all the changes.
The pierogi are a different story, though. At first she seems willing to give them a try, provided we play the yum game, a semi-clever trick I’ve been using to get her to eat broccoli. We take a bite and then see who can do the better job of savoring the food, chewing slowly with great and dramatic “Ummm!” and “Ooooh!” and similar silliness.
We get the first one down like this. Papa joins in on the second dumpling but has no better luck than I: L out-savors us both, though with an expression that makes me think a third is doubtful. But she’s already tried more in a few minutes than she’s tried in the last six months, so we say “Sure!” when the Girl asks if she can pass on the last two dumplings.
Just as it’s time for the main course, the Boy wakes. It’s almost perfect timing: we’re able to relax for a bit while K changes the Boy and puts on his holiday outfit.
“Now you can’t tell me that’s not a handsome boy!” K proclaims as she walks down the stairs, and who could deny it?
We sit down to the main course: whole broiled trout, scallops sauteed with lemon, basil, and garlic, a salad of leeks, raisins, gherkins, red onions, and a dozen mysteries, and (what Polish meal would be complete without) potatoes. Mid-meal I take a fish head and a bit of skin down to the cat, who sensed it apparently when I was at the top of the stairs, for she’s meowing madly and winding through my legs as I reach the basement where she’s sequestered herself during this time of seeming chaos.
As I clean up the kitchen with Nana and M’s help, K takes the kids into the living room for some portraits. As often happens these days, the Girl gets carried away with the Boy, making wild and crazy faces, whooping and hollering. (Have I mentioned she’s fond of her little brother?) Still, K manages to get one semi-decent shot of the two of them.
Yet when it comes time for the individual shots, the Boy shows why I often call him Little Man. He sits still, looking as serious as a banker. It ends as quickly as it begins, for there’s such a joy within him that it bubbles up at the slightest provocation: a funny face, goofy voice, a smile. If I had had the chance to break the opłatek with him, my wish would have been simple: I hope that the joy you experience now follows you throughout your entire life.
Finally, it’s present time. “Should we start with the stockings and have some fun?” K asks, and thinking of what I’ve set up for our little princess, I nod enthusiastically.
L reaches into her stocking to discover…a slip of paper: “You’ve found a clue; now what to do? I’m in a shoe, but which one? Where do all the shoes live?” She heads straight to the hall closet and begins rifling through shoes. I realize the error I’d created, though, and suggested she look by the summer shoes in their box.
She takes it to M for assistance. “Well, you’ve made the logical guess, which is much better than a mess. Where would you go to clean up a mess on your clothes?” She thinks for a moment then rushes to the laundry room, opening the washing machine lid.
And what does she find there? The present? Certainly not — Santa would never make it so easy for her. It’s another clue. Her excitement at this point is building, and just as I was hoping, she seems to be enjoying the hunt as much as the prospect of getting some little something.
“That crazy Santa!” she comments,
heading this time to Nana for help. “Very good! You’re getting close! Now, we need some music, but not just any kind. We need some music from just one finger: where could you get that music?” This is most certainly my worst clue.
She comes up with several false starts before figuring out it’s among my sheet music on the piano.
Papa helps with this clue: “I see we can’t trick you. I guess we’ll just have to tell. Your gifts are in the place you most fear, in two things that smell.” The place she fears most is, of course, the basement. Even though we play pool down there together, go to feed Bida, the cat, there together, and do a hundred and one things there, she’s often reluctant to go down into the basement. That’s only natural, I suppose.
This time, though, she has no trouble heading down to find, in my stinky work boots (no, they don’t really stink — it was just a way to clue her into the shoe notion) two Barbie movies she’s been dying to watch for months. Netflix always has their status set as “Very long wait,” so when K and I found them in Target the other evening, we knew what the stocking stuffer had to be. And when we remembered how very small the stocking is, we knew a treasure hunt was the only answer.
Now I fear I’ll have to do it every year.
The rest of the presents are a blur. The Girl passes out presents to us all, conscientious of spreading the joy. One for her, one for her brother, one for Nana, and so on.
Finally, the last present. The biggest, so to speak. The Girl tears open a smallish package to find…a small slip cover.
“I think that’s for your little laptop. I think Santa brought you a protective cover for it,” I say, using an old trick Nana and Papa used with me several times when I was a kid. “Shall we go and find it?” We had to her room, locate the pink laptop and bring it back down. She looks at the case, looks at her computer, and frowns.
“Won’t it fit?” I ask her, standing behind her.
“No,” she pouts.
Putting the small tablet we bought for her (really, for the family) in front of her, I say, “Here, maybe this one will fit.”
For a while, the rest of the presents fade. We sit together, exploring all the new flicks and twists of the fingers that will bring her an entirely new world.
“She’s big enough for a real computer now,” K suggested months ago when we were thinking about presents. It turns out, she was right.
The Boy inherits the old one. It’s something he’ll have to get used to, but he doesn’t seem to mind too much. It makes noise; it has buttons to press; and it tastes good. What else could he ask for?
He lies on the floor, punching and squeezing, tasting and squealing, and once again, we get one of those rare gifts: a glimpse of the future.
Wigilia 2003
Wigilia 2004
Wigilia 2005
Wigilia 2006
Wigilia 2007
Wigilia 2008
Wigilia 2009
https://matchingtracksuits.com/2010/12/25/wigilia-2010/
Wigilia 2011
It’s one of the ironies we seem never really to pay attention to, but we’re always aiming at perfection. Granted, the apathetic eighth-grader’s bar is significantly lower than many adults’, but there exists for even the most uninspired a standard, despite his protests to the contrary.
Perhaps there’s even an element of national identity in this. I know from experience that the average Pole’s definition of “perfectly clean” is several steps above my own. And my own definition is several degrees more severe than the Girl’s, whose idea of cleaning up consists of stacking everything that was on the floor into piles on the two tables — one ostensibly for drawing and reading, the other for playing — in her room. And so yesterday, we began our first nudges to the perfection implicit in Wigilia (the traditional Polish Christmas Eve meal) by cleaning the Girl’s room.
The Boy, in the meantime, cooed and cackled as he played with one of L’s old toys, oblivious to the Girl’s struggle, yet to be completed, against chaos. His standard for perfection is at the most elementary level: clean diaper, rested soul, full belly. Any one of those three perfections drop out of alignment and we all know about it. It’s really very simple, though. There’s no guessing, no games. No misleading. No implication. He cries and we do two things: sniff and look at the clock.
It’s all about the little steps to perfection, the little steps that often leave a bit of a mess. Like in the Girl’s mouth.
“Tata, my new tooth still hasn’t begun to grow,” she bemoaned yesterday. It takes time, like any perfecting, but what can I tell her? I don’t remember how long it took for my own teeth to grow back, and since she’s the oldest in the family, there’s no familial metric. Still, reassurances were in order.
“It will take time,” was about the only thing one could say. Not nearly as much time as the other things in life you’ll try to perfect: your temper (still working on mine); your restlessness when bored (ditto); your frustration when things don’t work as you think they should (hey, did you inherit all my flaws?).
“Certainly my impatience costs me,” I thought to myself leaving L to more cleaning. Just the other day, I’d rushed to mulch the leaves in the lower portion of our backyard before going through and checking for hazards. The result was mind- and blade-bending. And so today, before I could really even begin much of anything on my list, I went to a big box hardware to get a replacement.
The girls, though, had other duties. It seems the twenty-second is baking day in our house. It was, at least, last year — to the day — and it was probably the same day the year before and the year before that. I was just probably too lazy to write about it. Or perhaps, looking for perfection, I wanted to write about something new. “Who wants to write about the same thing every year?” I might have muttered. But those cycles are, themselves, somehow signals of perfection, concentric circles that bear down on perhaps the perfect sugar cookie.
The Girl’s skills, certainly, are improving. Coupled with her imagination, she often creates things that leave me astounded. Her cookies today, for instance, are portraits.
“That’s me,” she says, pointing to the smiling cookie with chocolate hair. “That’s H,” she says, pointing to the cooking with dirty-walnut blond hair, referring to the daughter of our sitter. “And that’s W,” she says of the little boy cookie with a tuft of blond nuts.
The Boy, meanwhile, spent the evening working on perfecting locomotion. At twenty-five pounds, he’s a very heavy seven-month-old, and we’ve wondered if his arms will be up to the challenge of holding up that amount of weight. Tonight, he improvised a bit of locomotion, pushing with his toes and wiggling his body as he supported as much of himself as possible on his elbows. Nudges toward crawling. Nudges toward walking. Nudges toward independence. It starts so early, and before I know it, he too will be informing me of things that are inappropriate, as the Girl likes to do; suggesting that hisideas are really, in fact, better than mine, as the Girl is beginning to do.
Still, for now, I’m boss. When I say, “time for bed,” it is. I still make reality with my words. For now.
I end my evening with its own little bit of perfection, including Zimmerman’s performance of Chopin’s four ballades, but most especially his “Ballade No. 2.”
Perfection, and due to the fact that Zimmerman can play this again and again, without missing a single not, without a flaw of any kind, it is true perfection, not just some euphemism for “very, very good.”
Today our daughter turned six.
“When exactly?” the Girl asked during breakfast.
“About an hour and forty-one minutes ago,” K laughed. It seems that little more than that hour and forty-some minutes has passed since then — certainly not six years. Certainly not 2,191 days. In hours, it seems even more daunting: 52,594.
Our day ended with the Polish community’s traditional Christmas pageant. The Girl played an angel, and K and the Boy were Mary and Jesus — a Baby Jesus who already sits and claps, and squeals.
And so the Christmas season feels as if it’s officially begun.
The performance from 2011 is here.
The performance from 2010 is here.
The plan was simple: it was Sunday; the Girl and the Boy had been inside most of the day; there was still a bit of light left and some power in our small camera’s battery — a walk seemed in order. We reached to top of the driveway and it became immediately obvious that the walk wouldn’t occur.
It had nothing to do with the impromptu photo session; the weather wasn’t a factor; the Girl wasn’t complaining that she was too tired. No, nothing as complicated as any of that. It was simply that Max, the neighbor’s dog, was out, taking his owner for a walk. Max would make the perfect companion for L: they’re both hyper, hyper, hyper, to the point of carelessness and frustration.
And so they leaped and ran, rolled and barked (yes, both of them), and the walk never got any further. I stood chatting with our neighbor, a retired gentleman who seems more like a third grandfather to L at times than anything else, and we both remarked at how quickly both the kids are growing.
“We’ll be heading out to Missouri,” he said as the conversation drew to a close, “to spend Christmas with our son and his family.” And I realized again — how many times will I realize this? probably countless — that within two blinks, we’ll be saying the same thing about L and/or E.
“We’ll be heading out to X to spend Christmas with our daughter and her family. Our son and his family are supposed to meet us there as well,” I’ll tell our neighbor, asking him to keep an eye on our place.
And marveling as he turns to walk away at how recently I did the same.
All photos by the Girl.
The Girl has surprised us of late with her generosity, spending her own money to by a copy of her favorite non-fiction book — she’s always keen to point out that it’s non-fiction — for her friend. She continued today, buying presents for a handful of friends and family from the school Gingerbread House Gift Shop (I guess a Christmas time fundraiser).
When we returned home, she was eager to dig out the wrapping paper and begin layering sheet after sheet on the gifts.
The Boy, on the other hand, is still exploring the more basic giving: the gift of joy.
Hoards of little girls in their Sunday best roaming about downtown on a Sunday afternoon could mean only one thing: the Nutcracker is in town. The Girl and I had a father-daughter day out, and what an outing: a professional ballet company performing the Christmas classic. We sat in the center of the third row, and L sat on the edge of her seat for most of the performance — until the end, when she fell asleep.
Maybe next year…
Aunt L, passing through on her way back home in Tennessee, stopped by for a visit. It was the first time she’d met the Boy, but certainly not the first time she’d chatted with the Girl.
This was quickly obvious as the Girl began monopolizing Aunt L’s attention. “Look at this!” became the common refrain, which I suppose is to be expected of a five-year-old.
Papa, of course, was preoccupied with the Boy.
I grew up in a closed environment, literally. There was one way in or out of our housing subdivision, a fact that was of great solace to my mother as I was growing up: now strangers just “passing through.” And so I had almost complete freedom to go wherever I wanted in our neighborhood while growing up.
The only rule was that I had to be able to hear Dad whistle and get back within a reasonable amount of time.
I wish we lived in such a neighborhood now, for every time the Girl is outside playing alone, I’m a little edgy. It’s unlikely anyone would be just “passing through,” and it’s unlikely that anything would happen to her. Yet Amber Alerts, urban legend, and the Jaycee Lee Dugard case make a slightly paranoid father like me more so.
And so when she heads up the street to visit a friend, I stand at the end of our driveway and watch her head up. The friend’s parents do the same when he (or they) come back down to our place. It’s a simple enough matter, but I watch her bouncing up the street and realize, not for the first or last time, that she’s growing up, that she’s journeying from home and toward independence with a rapidity I’d been warned about but doubted for myself. And it will all repeat itself with the Boy, but I’ll be more prepared by then. I hope.
A pile of leaves in the backyard cannot go to waste. It calls — begs — for family photos.
It’s not big, but it’s all we’ve got.
When you have a backyard like ours, with so many huge trees with so many thousands upon thousands of leaves, there’s only one thing to do on a late-November afternoon. It takes a bit of work at first, but the Girl loves work when it’s play — a sort of Tom Sawyer in reverse.
Yet quickly enough, the fun begins.
The Girl remembers from last year the fun of jumping in the leaves, but she’s forgotten — or simply not realized — the fact that she weighs significantly more this year. And this means a harder impact, for leaves don’t provide as much cushion as a five-year-old might assume.
The Boy, on the other hand, takes a totally different approach. Calm, curious he sits among the leaves and wiggles his feet, swings his arms, and enjoys the newness of the situation.
It’s easy to credit this to his age, but there’s a personality difference that’s indisputable.
There’s a certain explosiveness to the Girl (“You think?” responds everyone who’s ever met her.) that finally finds direction, throwing leaves here, there, and just about everywhere.
The amount of leaves in her hair after this little adventure astounds. And we haven’t even begun burying each other.
Still, we sometimes manage to get her calmed down within the near proximity of the Boy for a portrait.
But the calm doesn’t last.
Still, it wouldn’t be the same family if it did.