Meditations on a pacifier

"Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, "grow, grow."

I am watching him through some newfangled, hi-tech monitor thing that my husband set up and tested on the dogs a good six months before he joined us. Twenty three minutes after putting him down for his nap, he is awake. I don't love that he regards naps with a casual disdain typically reserved for things like aspic. I do love that with each thought and impression, his entire body moves in response.

Everything really is that mind-blowing at six months old.

Yesterday, at his six month wellness visit, he wriggled happily on the examination table, bunching the paper on the table beneath him with his eager chubby baby hands, listening to the crinkle, the tear, the shhhhhhh sound it made. His need to touch everything is astounding. His feet (two of his very favorite things), my cup of tea, the Buddha bell that hangs on our doorknob, the stream of water at bath time, the ears of the dogs, my lips, my cheeks, sunglasses, hair, necklaces...all of these little tactile moments recording and transcribing some sense of order in his little world.

Today, he takes his pacifier out of his mouth. With his left hand. He does most things with his left hand, a source of pride for his southpaw mama. He studies it, turning it over and upside down, his eyes widening at each turn. He marvels that he does this. He marvels at his command of his hands in their ability to master the pacifier. He lets out several long "eeeeeeeahhhhhhhhhh" exclamations that remind me of Tibetan monk chants. He kicks his legs, and exclaims with a grunting staccato "Eh Meh Eh" that has the precision and force of Genghis Khan behind it. He makes raspberries, resumes his monk chants and then remembers the pacifier he holds in his hand. He smiles fondly at it, cooing love at a familiar piece of plastic with a joy I wish we didn't ever lose.

Several attempts, and the pacifier is back in his mouth, and his cherub lips purse and suck, smacking gladly at this accomplishment. Triumph.

Such moments of sweet victory pass quickly in the busy life of a baby. And for his sleepless, awestruck parents, there is always some moment of rediscovery and the accompanying wonder at how it was ever lost. How to pull back the curtains and let in the light. He does this now from his changing table, gleefully flapping the fabric and watching it fall again. "Embrace this moment, mama" he seems to say. "Look at the way the curtain moves, and the hippos on it dance." With his own little hands, he does this. He creates his happiness. He lets in his own light.

Sometimes he stops whatever it is that he is doing and with an awareness that belies his relatively few days, he looks at me, silently. With dark liquid eyes that reflect so much light, he stares at me intently. Such moments are profoundly moving. "I know you. I see you." "I see you!" I often respond, with want for something more fitting to say.

As parents and as people, we look backward and forward in a seesaw motion that can give one whiplash. I don't want to do this. This moment right now is pretty perfect. And as we turn a corner and greet 2012, I am thankful that 2011 has reminded me of this one truth.

Ezra. Thank you for being here, you imperfectly perfect you.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Yesterday my students and I talked about Abraham.  Our seventy minute class turned into a full 90 minutes, as we processed how timely this discussion was in light of other discussions about burning Qu'rans and building sacred centers near hallowed ground. We interrogated the meaning of the word covenant and that unbroken thread of faith that acts as a cord, tying our hearts and our actions to something bigger and older than ourselves.  We looked at a family tree, tracing with our fingertips the lines from Abraham to Levi and Dinah, and stopping with Moses. We spent a good bit of time unraveling the story of two sons, Isaac and Ishmael who went their separate ways and never looked back.  We chewed on the meaning of sacrifice, compassion, and ownership over words and stories. We studied images of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Mosque of Abraham, contemplating the meaning of sacred space.  We had a discussion about the now-frequently used phrase this time of the year: "Never Forget."  As one student said, "If we haven't forgotten about all of this history we are learning, how could we forget this?"


I asked one girl who had visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem to read these words from a Muslim text recounting the story of Abraham's sacrifice to God, which she did beautifully:

                            As the boy lies stunned on the altar, God gazes down with pride and compassion and promises to grant his  any prayer. "0 Lord, I pray this," the boy says. "When any person in any era meets you at 

\the gates of heaven-so long as they believe in one God-I ask that you allow them to enter paradise."

She commented after reading this, "You know, I am a devout Jew.  And my name is Arab.  When I went to Jerusalem, we visited a famous Muslim bakery that bore our family name.  And the family gave us sweets and welcomed us into their kitchen.  So I guess what this means to me is that we are all family after all, whether we are descended from Isaac or Ishmael.  And maybe that is why the Muslim text doesn't identify the boy as  one or the other.  Maybe like me, he is both."

Spiritual inquiry at its finest. 

I thought of  the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, set to song by Joni Mitchell with the title, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I have always loved this song and the urgent imperative behind the title phrase.  So we listened to it - an impromptu exposure to two artists with whom the girls were not familiar.  What a lovely way to meet both at once:

THE SECOND COMING
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
                                                 -William Butler Yeats

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joni Mitchell

"Wow," said another of my students, "will we ever learn how to stand up straight?"  I looked at the girl who is both Isaac and Ishmael.  She shook her head slowly and said "Maybe it is the burden of faith that makes us slouch."

In praise of Piper

This is Piper:

Piper at rest. Which is adorable. And deceiving. And I fall for the adorable quotient every single time, in love with her sweet mug.  Just to give you an idea, a photo essay of sorts detailing her beguiling cuteness:

Piper: the early days

Moxa deserves sainthood. Piper adores him. As we all should.

With cunning intellect, she has the unique penchant 
for sticking her head

through/between/under narrow spaces. It's a special talent.

She also possesses the gift of climbing into things
(i.e. a trashcan, or in this case an empty box) 

that require special talents to free herself. Special talents that she does not have.

Piper is all kinds of things, and she is nothing like our other two dogs, who basically live to be near us, and hang on our every intonation, every trip up and down the stairs, every room we enter and leave. Moxa is always in the same room as I am. Mia goes wherever there is a lap, but really, namely one lap belonging to Alex. Piper goes...somewhere...depending upon her whims, which are fleeting and have the added bonus of being completely out of left field. The drummer to which she marches has no rhyme, rhythm, or reason. And I'm not entirely convinced that there is a drummer, even.  I am convinced that she spends most of her waking hours trying to relocate her Mother Ship. She isn't what we would dub as "normal" (a good thing) and we wondered for a while whether she was deaf. Nope.  She's just in her own orbit, spinning happily through her carefree life with a casual regard for most things.  This is as vexing as it is endearing. 

Piper bounces through the house as cavalierly as a loose-limbed sailor; flopping on cushions, the rug, your face, your newly folded laundry, the coffee table even (case in point: this morning, when she did a flying leap onto the coffee table, stood in stunned stillness for a millisecond, lapped from my iced coffee, and kept cruising). She is as unaware of her surroundings as anyone could be. She soars full throttle through the cat door, only to find herself fabulously stuck in the process. I watched and laughed for a good few minutes as she barked at the dark basement on her end, her little corkscrew tail indignant and her back legs boinging up and down on mine. She skids around corners. She screeches to stops, sliding on rugs  and biting at the AIR (?!) like Aladdin on an acid trip.

She is nothing if not an adventure of mishaps. And she seems to be totally okay with that fact.  I respect her for it, even.


And though she frustrates me to no end, she is also one of my greatest sources of amusement.

Having a dog who licks the air as she makes her approach to licking you never gets old. And she is absolutely indiscriminate in this regard, assailing her humans, her canine compadres, the couch, the wall, the odd throw pillow, even the cat - with all the audible slopping sounds of a toddler diving into his/her first ice cream cone. Mia, ever so dainty and deliberate in her licks, is horrified when Piper assaults her out of nowhere with the force of a frog hurling its tongue out in an effort to ensnare its nearest snack.

There is absolutely nothing subtle about this dog.

If she's bored, she barks. Or jumps. Or pulls every single toy out of the toy bin.

If she's in pain, she whines like a wee banshee.

If she's frisky, she becomes a whirling dervish of chocolate brown and white, and she whirs around you until you are dizzy.  This happens at least three times a day - five, if you're lucky.

She hassles the other dogs, tugging at their ears, nipping their legs, coaxing them into a game of rough house. Sometimes I feel as though I have landed in the midst of a three-way wrestling match. There are no innocent bystanders when this happens. And for three very different dogs, their "pack" is cemented. They are loving, tolerant, and considerate of one another (Piper even waits for Mia before bounding outside in the morning). It's very warm and fuzzy.

She LOVES children, and will kiss them and wag at them, and want to melt into them with no visible signs of fatigue. This can go on for hours.  Children love her back. My niece calls her "Hyper" (an apt description), and carries her around like a rag doll, while Piper smiles away, limbs loose and trusting, her head cocked sideways looking up at something no one else can see (the Mother Ship perhaps?). She loves effortlessly - not at all earnestly, but with an enthusiastic blunt force that I kind of equate to a bear hug that goes on for too long.

The thing about Piper is that she loves us when she feels like it. It's completely spontaneous, her patterns are for the most part unpredictable, but the end result is always the same. She can chew my favorite sandals, demolish a thumb drive, rip holes in carpets, and leave her nose prints all over the glass door.  She can take the stuffing out of each and every toy and scatter it throughout the house, she can topple trashcans and eat the tissues, and she can ignore me with all the intellectual might of a maggot (though our trainer swears she is brilliant). She can curl up to my side, nuzzle my neck, and fall sound asleep in a nanosecond. She can bat me with her paw when she wants attention, and stare at me wide-eyed and alert, ready for whatever I have to give her. She can sit for treats, and bury her nose in my hair (as she is right now). And in all of these ways, she makes her own Piper-esque mark on our hearts.  Our house without her antics would seem somehow less alive.  Even Moxa and Mia agree:

You

You have a million-watt smile, and very beautiful teeth.

Your eyes are exactly the color of seaglass, and sometimes they are green.  Other times, they turn blue. They almost always sparkle.

You have few outward fears.

You have the ability to speak your mind, and hold your ground.

Whenever there is a piano within a fifty foot radius, you are drawn to play it. In Vienna, a crowd of listeners cheered after you were finished. And the Viennese know a thing or two about music.

You brought me homemade apple strudel on our first date. Good move.

You don't like spicy food, or beans, or coconut milk, or ginger - all things I love. Somehow this doesn't get in our way.

You always give me the heart of your artichoke when we make them. You claim it is because you are full, but I know it is because you know how much I love them.

You always cut your juice with still or sparkling water, and you are right. It tastes better that way.

You have the ability to make people roar with laughter.

You are unafraid to try something new, or to make an adventure out of a mundane task.

You put music on for me when I cook.

You sleep very strange hours, and sometimes don't go to bed at all. As an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, I don't get this.

Come to think of it, there are a number of things about you that remain utter mysteries.

And the same is true of me, like why I open the cereal box upside down. Or why I leave cabinets open.

You love to ask questions, even when you already have the answers.

You are frustrated with the state of the basement. I don't blame you.

You love animals. Animals love you. It's a win-win situation.

You notice everything about everyone. You are very observant, sometimes annoyingly so.

You are a perfectionist.  Sometimes this gets in your way; most of the time it means that our pictures are hung straight. Which they wouldn't be if I had the nail and the hammer.

You are fiercely loyal to your friends and family.

You sometimes sacrifice your time and happiness for them.

You worked your way into the heart of our ten year old nephew, who needed a male role model. And who loves you enormously.

You abhor the expression "Shut up." More people should - you're on to something with that one.

You can sit at your desk and work for, like, EVER. I can't stay still that long. I don't know how you do it.

You take the most beautiful photographs. We can be looking at the very same thing, two cameras pointing at it. My photo looks like my two year old nephew took it; yours looks like it should be on the cover of National Geographic.

You remind me to take my vitamins.

You are sensitive.

You are a much better vacuumer than I am.

Bless your soul, you are so very allergic to mosquito bites and poison ivy.

You are irreverent.

Sometimes you will walk by me, or check on me when I am sleeping and ruffle my hair.  It's very soothing. You can do that more often if you would like.

You always want me to try a bite of whatever you are eating.

You had an awkward phase in high school when you wore burgundy turtlenecks. I call it your Masterpiece Theatre years.

You are patently not "one of the guys" and don't enjoy competitive sports- I like this.

You brush your teeth for exactly two minutes. This cracks me up.

You really want me to learn how to scuba dive, but I might just like to stay a snorkler.

You walk with a little spring in your step - did you know this?

You are nothing if not a realist, though you seem to enjoy my flights of fancy and day-dreaming ways. Most of the time.

You remember my students, their stories, and their struggles.

You can take apart and put a computer back together. To me, this is magic.

You chaperone high school dances with me and after the dance is over, you always order a pizza to share at midnight.

You enjoy rituals.

You would happily eat whipped cream straight. I don't think I have ever met someone who loves whipped cream as much as you do.

You always want to help people. Always.

 You are particular.

You patiently follow me around in nurseries as I look at plants. For hours. And hours.

You are very left-brained but you have a right-brainedness about you too.

You switched out the fireplace so I could breathe more easily.

You put away the dishes that are too high for me to reach.

You always know where I am in a crowded room.

I know you are always thinking of me.

And I, of you.

Happy Anniversary, Alexander.  I adore sharing a life with you.

The fatted calf

"Chi troppo vuole, nulla stringe."

-He who wants too much doesn't catch anything"

-Italian proverb

For various reasons, I have an odd relationship with things and with want.

There are places in this world that feel like home to me, but I fear becoming attached to them.  This can be hard.

I have a lovely little bungalow with signs of age and need for improvement, and although we have done a number of minor changes to make it more habitable, I fear wanting too much. I find myself growing overly fond of my home, and feel as though I am jinxing myself.  What if something happens and I lose it?  What will I do?

Truth be told, I would probably cry for a little while, look for four-leaf clovers, gather my animals around me, and eat a sandwich.

I have art on the walls, books in my shelves, clothes in my closet, a competitively impressive amount of bubble bath, and I know that if I had to, I could leave it all behind, save a few things.  I know this because I have done so. And it wasn't hard. I can't even remember the treasures I summarily took leave of, and I have no desire to do so. There are things in my home - mostly memories saved: a four leaf clover, a special rock, a book from a dear friend's grandfather, a ribbon from Brazil, a stack of postcard love letters from my husband, a cherry pit, a letter from a deceased friend, my first book of poetry from my Gran that holds the memory of reading the poems with her - things that I would miss. They would fit in a medium-ish sized box.

Some have noted my detachment from things to be a curious part of my personality, given the fact that I do have a bit of a crush on shoes; others (my husband, bless his patient soul) have found it slightly frustrating in that I could probably take better care of some of the possessions I have...

...that cost money.

Which doesn't grow on trees.

Which is really the source of my frustration today. 

I work hard for what I have, but that isn't what drives me to work.  And what I have is more than enough.  It's actually quite a lot, compared to the rest of the world. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wake up and feel lucky: a job I love, a husband I adore, animals that provide endless amusement and joie de vivre, and as I climb up on my soapbox (fair warning given), I am kind of sad that a long walk at sunset doesn't offer the same happiness to people as, say, a new lamp. How could a lamp possibly capture the same kind of light that a sunset does? This is bothering me.  It is bothering me on some level deep in my belly. Despite my hard work and money earned, it makes me want to throw all of my things out of the window in protest.

(One time, when I lived in an apartment a few years ago, the neighbor living above me had the unfortunate habit of throwing things out of her window.  She was on the frayed side of lunacy. She threw money out her windows, mostly quarters.  Jewelry. Clothing, including lots of socks. And also tuna fish, which stuck to my window.  I was bothered by her daily purgings mostly because I could hear her stomping to and from the window in the middle of the night. In clogs. It was kind of annoying and more than a little unsettling. But another part of me celebrated that she did this. Even in her frantic, delusional state, it must have felt awfully good. I collected all of her quarters -a useful commodity for doing laundry- and slipped money under her door for the exact amount. She promptly threw the money out of her living room window. I wrote her family a check for the amount when they came to move her out and into a hospital. It was never cashed. I have always felt guilty about this.)

I can't recall feeling envious of someone else for having "bigger, better, more" - the unofficial motto of the United States, where people are so used to their creature comforts that they refuse to entertain what it must be like to downsize. But now in this economy, people are.

I am all for it. Downsize away.  Most of us haven't lived with food rations, with being permanently displaced from homes and families and towns.  And as an historian, I think about these people who lived on a jar of Marmite and a loaf of bread that was intended to last a week.  I read stories of the fun they had, because they were not focused on what they didn't have.  And I read of people today being displaced and living in makeshift tents. And they don't feel sorry for themselves. They want to know where their loved ones are. That seems a legitimate wish.

All of this sort of came to some fever pitch to me today as I sit in my new office, which is GREEN. Which I love. I have a green office chair. And it is quite possibly the most comfortable thing ever. And a soft green throw for winter. And a really cool map of the world. I started thinking about how much I love my office, and then was reflecting on the color green and why I love it so. Green will always be here.  If I go blind, green will be something I can still have. Its ineffable greenness will go on.  As a child, I stumbled out of my bed in full sleep and leaned precariously over our balcony, asking my mother, "What is green?"  After explaining to me that it was a color (apparently not a satisfactory answer for a sleepwalking four-year-old), my mother said, "It's not a thing. It's everywhere." Or some such philosophical reasoning. This apparently satisfied me and I went back to sleep. This may be why I ADORE Noam Chomsky's oft-quoted "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."  Why, yes they do.

And that's pretty much the coolest thing about green, sunsets, animals, and other things - like double rainbows.  Hey, I've seen a few.  That YouTube guy had a reason to be totally psyched. He made meaning out of what to many, is meaningless. And I would argue that GREEN has more meaning to me than the green chair, the green vase, the green throw on my velvet couch..and so on...

The fatted calf was for homecomings, reunions, the prodigal son returneth...that sort of thing. It wasn't for every day life. Neither are double rainbows, for that matter - but for that we make no claims to own them. And if you don't want a double rainbow, you have a far better chance of catching one.

In the Minor Key

I often wake up with a song buzzing about in my head.  I don't know if this is normal or not, but most of the time, it's an awfully pleasant way to greet the day. I have started connecting it to that whole question of  "What songs would you include in the soundtrack of your life?", to which I would likely respond, "Ummm, it varies on the day..and also the song that happens to appear to me for whatever reason in the morning...put them all together and you have a soundtrack. Is that an answer?" Or, to put it more simply, "That is a very difficult question."

At 5:30 this morning, I woke up humming Lou Reed's Perfect Day, a maudlin ballad with some pretty nice little piano sections and a wonderfully impassioned Lou Reed belting out "Oh, it's such a perfect day," a sentiment I can almost always get behind. Alex pointed out that it is actually "kind of a really sad song".  Alex is not a morning person, and I made the premature assumption that he just wasn't quite on my "mornings with Lou" wavelength. Alas. The briefest bit of internet research yielded the popularly-held opinion that the song is about heroin. I suppose it should be somewhat obvious:

This disturbs me. On a few levels. For starters, as someone who can sort of groove with the bittersweet love ballad genre, I fully embraced the whole "you just keep me hanging on" bit...life can be about those moments, after all. But heroin?  A love song about heroin?  Having never even entertained the thought of experimenting with heroin, I can't really claim to know anything at all about its powers of seduction and the soporific effect that it apparently induces in musicians, thus rendering them lovesick.  Truly I only know what I witness on an all-too-frequent basis in the streets of Baltimore (if you don't live in Baltimore, watch The Wire - it will give you some insight into heroin use and its damaging dream-state). It wouldn't have even occurred to me, honestly. Which in itself is ridiculous, given the number of songs dedicated to "the altered state."  And I consider myself someone who knows a fair bit about music.

Pregnant pause.

I happen to have two other songs (among others) that would join the ranks of the hypothetical Paige soundtrack.  One is a poignant reminder of a particularly low point in my life and the sort of breathless effort it took for me to clear a couple of  Everest-sized hurdles: Running to Stand Still.  Which was kind of what my life felt like then.  I once listened to this song no less than ten times on repeat. That bit:

"You got to cry without weeping
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice"

Well, it was my anthem. In my naivete, the "needle chill" was my own personal reference to the many injections, shots, blood draws etc...I underwent when I was very sick. For all of my love of nuance and the layers of the onion and all of that hooey, I can be remarkably literal. Apparently.

The song is about heroin.

The second is a song that Alex often hums: Golden Brown.  This particular version is a cover by Cult With No Name; it was originally written and performed by the Stranglers.  I falsely assumed that it was a love song and thought that it was sweet that Alex so frequently sings this (as an accomplished pianist, he tends to like songs foregrounding the piano), because I guess you could sort of call my hair that color...in the summer...after I've been in the sun for a while.  Okay, it's a stretch.  But it is a pretty song and the piano gets me every time.

And it too is about heroin.

I have to ruefully chuckle at this, and find myself again bemused by my all-too-frequently naive impression of things in general. And though I am somewhat dismayed that my songs of love and human might and triumph actually share a slightly different story, I suppose we choose our soundtracks for what each song offers each of us...which varies, even in our disillusionment. Alex offered the logical explanation that I tend to prefer songs in the minor key, which are evocative of a certain "mood".  That could be the case. Woody Guthrie's lovely conclusion to this (as performed by Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant) explains it better than I - and thankfully, without any references to heroin. I hope.

Way Over Yonder In the Minor Key

written by this guy, who knew what was up.  The smile says it all:

Catch

"The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in."

It is not humid in Baltimore today.  Which is no small miracle - and this from someone who loves heat most of the time. This morning, I saw goldfinches dancing in my pond (they have their own permanent gold unitards, lucky ones). The air feels more like Maine air. And it's clear and blue. A gorgeous day. My husband just sent me this photo, with the message: "Look outside. I love you." It kind of sums things up nicely:

I live in a neighborhood that embraces summer with an optimism that is as startling as it is familiar to me in some weird way. It is sort of unreal in its genuine civility and warmth.  When we moved here, we were greeted with homemade cookies, preserves, muffins, and so many heartfelt welcomes. My next door neighbors, whom I adore and whose son I wish I could call my own, just stopped over and invited me to spend his second birthday with them on Wednesday at the National Aquarium.  I'm their plus one guest. This little angel boy is quite surely the subject of an entry all his own; suffice to say that we sat on my porch swing this evening as he battled a newly diagnosed bout with the terrible twos and I, my own long and difficult day when I wished I could have used the terrible twos as an excuse for a wee temper tantrum on the floor. And he rested his darling cherub hand on my knee and the world felt alright.

That's the thing about my neighborhood - even though the world isn't alright, I live in this little slice of I don't know - Eden? - where people say hello from their bungalow stoops and remind my heart to quiet a moment and be mindful of what a home really is. Neighbors stop and chat and wave at joggers. My new friend Beth (I really like Beth) waves at me as she drives by. Lucas, the recent high school graduate, asks me about my garden and how my grass is growing. He falls asleep at night listening to our waterfall through his open window. That makes me enormously happy. The shy, sweet girl down the street walks her beloved rescue dog while two boys who live a few houses in the opposite direction race by on their bikes, wearing Batman and cowboy Halloween costumes.  Awesome. The boy with the mop of wildly curly hair swings from a tree branch, and part of me wants to stand under him to catch him if he falls. But that child is nothing if not indestructible. He has perfected the art of swinging, and running barefoot --and jumping on the pogo stick, which he continued to do one evening with such abandon that he didn't immediately notice the blood pouring out of a spectacularly scraped big toe after a spill. Ten minutes with some hydrogen peroxide, Neosporin and a Band-Aid, and he was back outside. Tonight, I did a double take. He must have grown a foot since I saw him at  the (wait for it....) Root Beer Float Social that the neighborhood children had at the end of the school year. When he perfected his pogo stick skills. And when he seemed so much younger.

Behind our house, there are two houses with families, each of which have three little girls. It is a constant slumber party, and the girls walk to and from the backyards in their bathing suits, their nightgowns, their sundresses.  They call to my dogs from the top of their fort and they giggle and chase one another and swing in their swings and sing songs. And the parents sit on the porch, drinking a beer, and sometimes admonishing whichever wayward child (not necessarily their own) has hurt another child's feelings. Which you know, with six girls, is easy to do...

And then as I was closing my blinds this evening, I looked out to see a father teaching his son how to catch a ball. I thought of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.  I thought of how much I wished, at various points in my life having read and reread the book over a series of  New York and then Baltimore summers, I lived in such a place, troubled though it was in ways only Bradbury can put into words. And now I do. I also thought of Douglas Spaulding (the young boy in the novel), who declares that his summer will be a time of firsts: first root beer float, first run through the grass barefoot, first firefly caught, and so on...these firsts and lasts that define Green Town as a place where Nature and technology collide, sometimes in miraculous ways and sometimes in ways that point to evil, to a loss of something pure, to overlooking happiness when it sits right in front of you. We are lucky in this neighborhood that at this juncture, living as we do in Baltimore of all places, that a child can still have this, and that selfishly, I can witness it:

"I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really."

Sort of like catch.