We visited Kansas City two weeks ago. Crown Center has a children’s exhibit called ‘What Do You Want to Be?‘, running through the end of April. It’s a city built to kid-scale, where children can pretend to be doctors, teachers, astronauts, fire-fighters, surfers, mechanics, hair stylists, construction workers…seriously, the list goes on.
Ian took his turn at all of them, but seemed to really get into his role as President:
In his defense, I don’t think the Red Phone is ever used for good news.
We were blessed to have clear skies last week for Ian’s first lunar eclipse. He called it a ‘mooner eclipse’, which was close enough.
He had catechism that night, and made sure to remind everyone he saw that the eclipse was happening, and not to miss it. Celestial events always seem to happen in the middle of the night, or in Asia, so it was a treat to see the Earth’s stain spread slowly across the moon before bedtime.
We raced home, keeping an eye on the moon from the car windows. On the way we called Grandpa, because he likes space too, and has binoculars. Ian took a bath while I assembled and aimed and aimed and aimed the telescope. I’m terrible with telescopes. The only reason I can find the moon is because it shines, which is decreasingly the case during a lunar eclipse.
Ian joined me outside, freshly scrubbed and bundled, and Grandpa—with Grammie!—arrived in time to see the shadow shift from black to bronze. It amazes me that the Earth, too, casts a shadow on the sidewalk.
In thrall, as I always am when my Creator shows a few of his cards, I said to my son, his eye peering through the telescope, ‘Ian, say hello to God.’
He stood, waved, and shouted toward the moon, ‘Thank you, God!’
Ian has named his (latest) favorite stuffed animal ‘Johnny’, which reminded me of this little slice of Disney nostalgia. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this is performed by the Andrews Sisters, whom I now adore but didn’t know existed then.
A few things you won’t find in cartoons anymore: winos, blackjacks, and police brutality.
Words that have never been used to describe our furnishings:
- Noguchi
- floating
- flat-front
- lacquered
- Shantung
- molded-wood
- 18th-century
- pendant
- silk
Even as a guy whose bathroom register is held in place by duct tape (seriously), I just have to assume that the same must be said for most people, let alone most parents. Yet, as The New York Times attests, apparently the learning curve of parenting encircles more than sleep deprivation, diaper changes, and keeping your child alive. You also have to navigate the living room furniture:
‘Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman…were also determined not to let Harrison “take control of the house,” Ms. Brown said. They went ahead with putting in flat-front lacquered maple cabinets in the kitchen, even though they soon had to watch a professional babyproofer drill 300 holes in them for safety latches. (Ms. Brown still cringes.) They put up silk Shantung draperies in Harrison’s bedroom, knowing that they might well end up stained, as they soon did—with yogurt. And they held onto the molded-wood chairs, which were not an easy transition from the highchair.’
Read more →
The New York Times
This article from the Times goes into shocking detail of the plight of those whose children don’t match their carpet. It’s painful reading.
A woman traumatized after placing her ‘18th-century mahogany dining table and chair set in storage’. A man ‘vexed’ by the problem of how to keep both a toddler and chairs with ‘razor-blade’ corners. A design technologist and food activist who convert an old factory into a home ‘that would be kid-friendly as well as sensitive to [their] need to live in a well-designed adult environment’.
I know, I’m being petty and childish. But, really, if you’re the parent of a four-year-old, and you import a cherry dining table from France, and are surprised when that girl—your daughter—carves her name into that table, aren’t you asking for it?
(Thanks, Mr. Big Dubya!)
* For the record, Mr. Cheng, ’small-town guys’ don’t say things like ‘aesthetic point of view’ or ‘minimalist’ or ‘largely’.
Lament
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I’ll make you little jackets;
I’ll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There’ll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
Rough patch with Ian this morning. Like driving in Iowa, a rough patch with Ian can quickly turn into a ten-car pile-up. I’d tagged Kelly so I could finish dressing, and also not kill my son. He persisted, escalated, crossed lines.
I took a pair of pants from the closet, and heard Kelly’s strained voice, ‘Apparently you want a spanking this morning.’
And then, from the naughty-stool, ‘Apparently I don’t want to get dressed!’
Quick wit and a good vocabulary can’t always save you.
Father’s Old Blue Cardigan
By Anne Carson
Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.
I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.
I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.
His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.
He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon
but the look on his face—
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip
on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers
over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.
Our neighborhood is afflicted with an epidemic of inoperative doorbells. Friends and family are forced to huddle in the comfort of their drivers’ seats, parked in front of our neighbors’ homes, their car horns their only means of communication.
An imperfect means, too, because car horns are meant to be heard through windshields, at most, rather than brick, plaster, lath, and Dolby digital. The sound is not as penetrating as, say, a mobile phone, or a knock on the front door. And so well-meaning well-wishers are isolated, unheard in their Escalades, left to honk their horns repeatedly in a final, desperate attempt to get the attention of their loved ones.
I can’t imagine the pain, the suffering, because our doorbell works. As do, I might add, the feet, legs, and hands of our family and friends. I’ve expressed my thankfulness for this blessing many times, apparently quite often within Ian’s range of hearing.
Yesterday a particularly heart-wrenching episode occurred nearer our home, and Ian couldn’t restrain his sympathy.
Honk!
‘Ring the doorbell!’
Hooooonk!
‘Go…to…the…front…door!’
Doors in our home have been mysteriously closing. Bathroom doors. Which isn’t all that strange, I suppose: if you’d want any doors to be closed in your home, I imagine bathroom doors would follow a close second to the front.
Except that no one’s using these bathrooms while the doors are closed.
I knock and the doors swing inward. The lights are off. I don’t think our home’s old or its history sordid enough to have a poltergeist: no ancient burial grounds, no pet cemeteries. Still, it’s spooky.
I’ve spent the past few days at home, trapped in pajamas and surrounded by wadded tissues, strewn blankets, and mugs of tea. I made a brave attempt at work yesterday but came home a few hours later, after my computer monitors started to melt and I could no longer understand English.
Ian was home, so I changed into jammies and we played The Spiderwick Chronicles together. After a few minutes of battling goblins, he stood and went to use the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush, the faucet run, and then saw Ian slowly, carefully close the door behind him.
‘Ian, have you been shutting the bathroom doors?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘In case it floods.’
‘What? The bathroom? You think the bathroom’s going to flood?’
‘Yeah!’
Several weeks ago the downstairs toilet backed up; unfortunately, it happened on Ian’s watch. I’d forgotten about it.
‘Ian, toilets don’t usually flood. It only happened once, and we fixed it. But even if it does happen, the bathroom won’t fill with water.’ I didn’t mention that closing the door wouldn’t help. ‘Okay, kiddo?’
‘Okay.’ And he finished closing the door.
Janet’s tagged me, kicking and screaming, forcing me to be sociable even in this most isolated medium. For which I’m grateful.
- Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the next three sentences.
- Tag five people.
Coincidentally, I happen to have just finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, which is sitting on our dining room table waiting to be returned to the library. This is a chapterless book nearly devoid of punctuation, which a previous checker-outer obligingly inserted with a red colored pencil.
It’s a post-apocalyptic story of a man and his quite young son, crossing a desolated America, trying to find food, warmth, and safety. It is not the most uplifting depiction of fatherhood, but it is beautiful. Why I—a man disproportionately moved by Hallmark commercials—chose to read this book, I’ll never know.
‘He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis. He tipped the jar and drank and he drank slowly but still he drank nearly the whole jar.’
Let’s see what Mike (though I see he’s on ‘hiatus’), Jungle Pop, Phil, Jason, and, heck, why not the rest of the crew at DadBloggers have to say for themselves.
As tradition has been at Total Depravity, I’ll put a blogfatherly spin on this meme and limit it to children’s or young adult literature, if possible. The closest I can get is The Fellowship of the Ring:
‘They cased me all the way to the Ferry. I have never got over the fright—though I daresay the beasts knew their business and would not really have touched me. Pippin laughed.’
