Ess, you’ve been pushing everyone’s limits lately. Seeing what you can get away with, asking for things you’ve never asked for before. And tantrums — those are something else. But then we get to share a magical evening with you — one where we play at the kitchen table and build with dominoes together. One where you are smiling at us and imagining worlds and telling us you love us and giving HUGE hugs. Your mama had this Christmas instrumental channel on in the background and it kind of set the stage for thinking about the experiential and the remembering self at the same time: it was a rare gift to simultaneously enjoy the time with you while also experiencing the meta part. How important the memory of tonight will be in the future. We love you Ess. Forever and ever. Thanks for spending 2017 with us.
Eighteen years of serving this website over insecure HTTP are over: I installed a certificate for HTTPS, though I suppose the purpose is more not wanting to be left behind than any true need. I’ve read it could make the site go faster, and I’ve read it might make it go slower, too. I suppose both could be true.
Some vignettes. I’m going back through random text files, where I’ve littered little phrases to jog my memory:
There’s this one: you come into Essie’s bedroom in the morning, and you see that she has extricated herself from her sheets, carefully arranged and folded them, and is sitting very carefully in the small bit of mattress that remains uncovered. She may have her father’s penchant for orderliness.
“Mama, where a pizza go?”
“We ate it, Ess.”
“Get it outta my tummy. I need to eat it back up.”
Essie has woken up. Singing a song by herself in her room. She’s singing Baby Beluga. She doesn’t have those ‘s’ sounds yet, so we hear “Baby beluga in the deep blue shhee.”
“What did you dream about, Ess?”
“Mama!”
I put Ess on my shoulders, which is a great way to carry her. I’m sure I’ll look back and regret the times I asked her to stop pulling my hair and flopping over my head because though it does hurt, there’s a lot more joy to carrying her than pain. Anyway, she was sitting up there and suddenly got really agitated. “Dada! Put me down, put me down!” I was initially unconvinced that anything was actually wrong, but she carried on, and so I set her down. “My leg feels funny!” Then I realized it had fallen asleep. The first time she’d ever felt that — and we were there for it. She walked it off in the aisles of Whole Foods. She’s reluctant to sit on my shoulders, now.
In the summer, Mykala told Ess we were going to see the Okee Dokee Brothers, a lovely, folksy, local group of kid’s musicians. Ess thought that would be fine, but she had one question: “are they humans… or animals?” Of course, when Ess says it, it is more like “amimals” which, coincidentally, is quite close to Wanda Gág’s made-up word (“aminals”) for a story about a dragon called “The Funny Thing.” Ess hadn’t heard that story yet, though. Maybe “amimal” is more of a universal word, the way “mama” is pretty universal because stopping the air with your lips is one of the first things we learn to do, so “mama” is one of the first things we are coordinated enough to say.
Years ago (like, 2004, the time we first met), Mykala gave me Genevieve the Owl. I never would’ve imagined that our daughter would be playing with that little owl, 13 years later, calling her “my favorite toy in the whole world.”
Or how about this, watching your daughter… gently… flap… her imaginary butterfly wings while watching a scene in The Secret World of Arrietty.
Or this: let’s say Ess is driving you crazy, refusing dinner yet demanding food later, running about knocking things over, literally making eye contact with you while she does precisely what you are asking her not to do. Or, as Mykala would describe it, “Tuesday.” But imagine all that, and then you peek around the corner, and now she’s singing an original song to the Christmas tree about how beautiful it is. She asks that you leave the room, because it is a private tree-only performance.
At a certain point, we have had enough of conversations
that take us away from our own thought processes, enough
of external demands that stop us heeding our inner
tremors, enough of the pressure for superficial
cheerfulness that denies the legitimacy of our latent
inner melancholy – and enough of robust common-sense that
flattens our peculiarities and less well-charted
appetites.
We need to be alone because life among other
people unfolds too quickly. The pace is relentless: the
jokes, the insights, the excitements. There can sometimes
be enough in five minutes of social life to take up an
hour of analysis. It is a quirk of our minds that not
every emotion that impacts us is at once fully
acknowledged, understood or even – as it were – truly
felt. After time among others, there are a myriad of
sensations that exist in an ‘unprocessed’ form within us.
Perhaps an idea that someone raised made us anxious,
prompting inchoate impulses for changes in our lives.
Perhaps an anecdote sparked off an envious ambition that
is worth decoding and listening to in order to grow.
Maybe someone subtly fired an aggressive dart at us, and
we haven’t had the chance to realise we are hurt. We need
some quiet time to console ourselves by formulating an
explanation of where the nastiness might have come from.
We are more vulnerable and tender-skinned than we’re
encouraged to imagine.
I quote this at length because it is so-so good and if it ever disappears from the internet, I’d like to have some of it here. A great, brief, read.
Another round of library books Ess is reading — she is rapidly moving beyond board books and into these easy-reader ones. Basic plot seems to hold her attention now, and we see the storylines incorporated into her imaginative play.
Those Mo Willems ‘Elephant and Piggy’ books are a hoot. Also, does anyone know how to pronounce “Bob Staake”?
With the recent dusting of snow and the consistently cold temperatures, I think biking season is over. This means I have already taken my last ride with Ess on the front handlebars. It gives a dad watery eyes: the first realization of this, and then typing up the thought now. It’s hard to see something that brought so much joy be taken away by dispassionate, objective time. It makes you feel small, powerless, helpless. Mykala anticipated this day six months ago, and when I wasn’t thinking of taking a bike ride this past summer, she was, and got us out for jaunts I wouldn’t have even thought of. Even Ess helped out: asking to go on rides when I least expected it.
I was walking yesterday along the path of our longest route: an 11 mile tour of the parks and stream in Woodbury, and something caught my eye: 20 saplings in a row! I’d heard autumn was a good time to plant trees, and here they were. Strange, though, a closer look revealed potting soil and seeds between each young tree. Then I remembered: this was an entire line of pretty big trees just earlier this year! Which tripped my memory about something else. Earlier this year, Ess and I spent multiple bike rides talking about how these trees don’t quite touch yet, but someday they will. And we could go back there and see their branches reaching out towards one another. We could go see these very trees, and with just the passing time, they’d be bigger and someday form a solid line of shade. Now, they’re gone.
There’s no big truth here — I have no overarching philosophical conclusion from the anecdote. But it does show me that, sometimes time goes by and things proceed exactly as you think and sometimes not.
It was sadness that gripped him, far more than the fear
That, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year.
When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”
Become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.
A new, fierce attachment to all of this world
Now pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurled
Lightning bolt lancing him, sent from above,
Left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.
He’d thought of himself as uniquely proficient
At seeing, but now that sense felt insufficient.
He wanted to grab, to possess, to devour
To eat with his eyes, how he needed that power.
Lauren Wilford makes the case that not only children’s film, but film in general needn’t always follow narrative, that doing so is a restriction of its potential. More in her piece Towards a True Children’s Cinema: on ‘My Neighbor Totoro’:
As cinema grew up and learned to talk in the 1930s, it
developed more rules and conventions. And as children
grow, they learn how a movie is “supposed” to go; they
internalize the beats of the structure. Most people spend
the rest of their lives watching a type of film they were
taught to enjoy in their childhood. Those who venture
into the world of international film, art film, and
counter-cinema may find that it’s not just about
developing a taste for the slow or unusual, or getting
out ahead of our desire for traditional narrative—it’s
about getting back to our cinematic state of nature.
Perhaps our mistake is in wanting to use films, to have
them cater to us and keep us from boredom, rather than to
see them, love them, and respect them as the free,
precious, ephemeral things that they are.
All this may
make it sound like I’m making an “eat your vegetables”
argument for watching My Neighbor Totoro. I do think that
most children’s entertainment has been pumped with a kind
of spiritual and aesthetic corn syrup, in a desperate
effort to make it go down easy. But I think the
desperation is unnecessary, and has resulted in a sort of
“Dorito effect” in children’s media: louder, faster,
higher-stimulus, partially-hydrogenated entertainment is
addictive, and tends to crowd out quieter pleasures.
And this sums up a scene that, after 1.5 viewings has already stuck fast in my mind, far better than I can:
I remember how Mei first met the giant Totoro—innocently,
awkwardly climbing onto the belly of this unknown beast,
but somehow sensing in the cadence and rumble of his
powerful breath that he was good. As I watched Mei’s
delicate physical and emotional arc over the scene—she
goes from giggling delight to apprehension to
full-throated roaring to, at last, a deep and peaceful
sleep—I could feel love emanating from the frame. Love for
Totoro, love for Mei, love for the forest, love for the
viewer.
A few days ago, Ess and I were walking through the garage to get the watering cans so she could play her current favorite outdoor game: mashing tiny toy ladybugs and ducks and geese in the dirt so she can rinse them off in the watering can water. She’ll do this for the better part of an hour before losing interest. So anyway, Ess starts conversations on her own. I love her topics:
*cough cough*
I ate some bugs there on the bike ride.
