Wuss

There were Two Little Bears who lived in a Wood,
And one of them was Bad and the other was Good.
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times One -
But Bad Bear left all his buttons undone.

I think I've mentioned once or twice that parenting is one of those things that are not for the fainthearted.

I'm not really thinking of the physical sort of issues that greenlighting the Kid Project will raise, although between back pain, frequent urination, night sweats, and stretch marks the gross physical problems begin early and continue right through into childhood. This adorable baby toes you kissed in his cradle will stank right through the sneakers when he's eight. Just sayin'.

Disgorging dinner at midnight, frantic nosebleeds, random incontinence; puke, blood, and shit - as a parent you are and will be expected to deal with every loathsome aspect of our human frailty and do so with the sort of revoltingly cheerful perkiness that you thought was the province of Cherry Ames, the student nurse in the old hospital stories.

They lived in a Tree when the weather was hot,
And one of them was Good, and the other was Not.
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Two -
But Bad Bear's thingummies were worn right through.

Then there's the time-management aspect of parenting.

Which is; you won't have any when the little eyes are open, from birth to about age fourteen...at which time you'll spend that time worrying about whether the little eyes are looking into a beer bong, or down the barrel of a gun, or at a naked fourteen-year-old promising to love her forever if she just lets him...

Let's not go there.

You will become a warm-blooded entertainment system and jungle gym. You will read a million stories, tickle a thousand tummies, run a hundred races. You will be soccer team, bridge partner, video-game target.

Plus there's the whole "get through the day" question. Sadly, the genetic programming of hairless monkeys does not include the instincts to tie shoes, comb hair, find classrooms, eat lunch, complete homework, pick up clothing, brush teeth, or invent bedtime stories. So you, the Potentially Responsible Party, need to be on hand to make sure that the progeny do not show up at the classroom door looking like a shoeless inbred from Hootin' Holler trailing a scrap of paper and a broken stick.

They lived in a Cave when the weather was cold,
And they Did, and they Didn't Do, what they were told.
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Three -
But Bad Bear never had his hand-ker-chee.

And this never stops.

I think I've told you the story about asking my mother when she stopped worrying about me (and I was a difficult and fretful child, I should say; there was never an instance when I had the opportunity to do something that I didn't choose the most fraught, difficult, and fatheaded way to go about it and then insist, when advised that there WAS an easier, simpler, less chancy way to do whatever the thing was jam my fingers in my ears and chant "lalalalalala" as I went on my hardheaded and difficult way) and the look that I got in return which would have curdled fresh milk.

We never stop being parents. When our kids are adults we'll STILL be fretting about their choices, just unable to do more than suggest an alternative.

And what seems like the most unkind and unfair part of the transaction is that we don't get the guarantee of a Happy Ending.

They lived in the Wood with a Kind Old Aunt,
And one said "Yes'm," and the other said "Shan't!"
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Four -
But Bad Bear's knicketies were terrible tore.

I have a friend; a truly brilliant, put-together woman, funny, inventive, just a great woman. She was cursed with a fairly worthless bag of stupid for a husband but put up with him for twenty years to raise two kids. And one of them, the older girl, is a shifty, treacherous grifter. Charming in her way, much like her father with the ability to deploy a certain amiability as long as it doesn't cost her any effort, but an untrustworthy slacker who lied and cheated her way to getting locked out of her own home.

I have another friend whose son has just stopped giving a shit about his schoolwork. He's a great kid; not dangerous, not angry, or mean, or rebellious, but he just stopped caring about his grades. She has been unable to convince him that in three years he's going to have to earn a living and that without a high school diploma that will be somewhere between difficult and nightmarish.

And then quite suddenly (just like Us)
One got Better and the other got Wuss.
Good Bear muddled his Twice Times Three -
But Bad Bear coughed in his hand-ker-chee!

I could go on and on...the ordinary tales of domestic woe that seem to visit every family in some way or another. When you think about it, it's rather amazing that any kid manages to get into young adulthood sane, unmaimed, and without an arrest record.

My littles are, thank Zoroaster, too small yet for me to have those sorts of worries.

And yet, there are always enough troubles in the world to spawn more.

In their cases, I look at them and try to peer down the road towards adolescence to divine who will have an easy puberty, who a hard one? Who will find themselves the narrow road through the mountains of teen age to the broad, sunlit uplands of a happy and prosperous adulthood, who the broad path down to the hell of trouble and pain?

If you'd asked me a year ago I'd have said the Girl was a likely candidate for the former and the Boy the latter.

Good Bear muddled his Twice Times Two -
But Bad Bear's thingummies looked like new.
Good Bear muddled his Twice Times One -
But Bad Bear never left his buttons undone.

Because Missy had the happy, sunny, open, loving sort of personality that lends itself to happiness. People loved her easily, were charmed by her instantly. The black keys of bossiness and touchiness were well hidden as she cheerfully played her preschool arpeggios.

The Boy, at seven, was already showing the kinds of things that made me such a heart-attack for my parents back in the day. Sulky, hard-headed, touchy, easily angered and disappointed, easily frustrated and discouraged. Those two touchstones of school failure; laziness and combativeness.

The negatives tended to outfight the positives for the Peep; his loving, clever, artistic, creative side would just get buried under the weight of the miserable little guy who seemed to lack the facility for happiness.

I dreaded his walking the same road I had, and, yet, seemed unable to do anything about that.But.

(And you knew there was a "but" coming, didn't you?)

Lately the little Bears have been trading places.

Take yesterday.

The Boy and I had a terrific day. We went all around Portland in the truck, spent time together looking through Pokemons and buying a new game at our favorite hobby store, agreed that the line at OMSI was, like, crazy long so went down to the Nickel Arcade and shot the hell out of some Terminators (where the Boy drove home the fact that twenty years of military service doesn't make you a better shot than ten months of playing first-person shooter games) and then stopped off at Burgerville for some fries.

Back home we ran down to his school and had a chilly kickabout under the covered training area where he showed me how to head the ball (grin...) and then out for coffee and cocoa and bowling(!) - the only blip; he didn't do well and was pretty sullen about it.

But then we went home for dinner, a movie, and then a couple of games, which he won with glee and good sportsmanship.

He was a great kid and a good companionWhilst we were about that, The Girl and her mom were having a truly difficult day. They went to our little North Portland consignment craft store, Scrap, where Missy was clingy and sulky, then home, to where she was whiny and cranky. She glumped, fussed, and whined through most of the day, only perking up in the evening to become more like her happy self.

She snarled and complained about being asked to pick up her toys and clothes. She was instantly sullen if she was denied a moment's attention from her mom. She was, more than she had ever been, much as she had been lately, something of a jagged little pill.

There may be a Moral, though some say not;
I think there's a moral, though I don't know what.
But if one gets better, as the other gets wuss,
These Two Little Bears are just like Us.

So I think I've come all this way just to settle upon another Hazard of Parenting they don't tell you about in "What To Expect When You're Expecting"; the uncertainty of it all.

Not only can they not promise you the happy ending, I'm starting to think there's no real way to figure out where the damn thing is, or how to get there, or to feel confident you'll know when you have arrived, or even whether you've already achieved it and are coasting into the winner's circle.

In short, we're back where we started; parenting is a contact sport, and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.

For Christopher remembers up to Twice Times Ten ...
But I keep forgetting where I put my pen.*

*So I have had to write this one in pencil.

~ A.A. Milne

Oh, and the last picture? That's the church where Mojo and I were married ten years ago this October.

Full circle.

Or, let's hope, at least halfway.

Dude.

So we're watching this truly bad kaiju movie last night; the kiddos and I (Mojo is somewhere spending her time more productively, picking lint out of her navel or something)."Rebirth of Mothra 3" is REALLY bad. Epically bad. Even-for-kaiju-monster-movie-bad. There's been a whole lot of really confusing, bizarre plot (which we've laughed at) and really confusing, bad acting until at one point one of the excrable Japanese kid actors (EJKA) gives another EJKA a stunned look as he tries to get an explanation for just what the hell has happened (which I'm still not sure about involving time-travel and multiple kaiju monsters) by asking his pal;

"Mothra?"And as the second EJKA looks back dumbly my son turns to us and drawls what should be his line:

"Dude. It's complicated."

You know your kids are growing up when they crack you up.

I giggled my ass off, the Boy preened for the rest of the night for winning the Snarkiest Comment Award, and his little sister was totally confused.

The Boy can be a pretty an awesome kid sometimes.

Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la

I'm beginning to understand my own parents' confusion a little.

I don't recall being a particularly mercurial child. But I know I went through...phases?...when I was in my grade school years of "liking" certain things and then abandoning them. So every year my folks had to use their parental intel skills to suss out whatever it was that I was liking and wanting as gifts for Christmas.And as a kid, that was critical. Without ready cash or access to a way of making cash - since I was too small to work and too cowardly to steal - anything I wanted to possess had to come from someone else.

And it's amazing, now that I think of it, how that made that "stuff" seem incredibly important.

Now that I do have the ability to work and steal (or both, my employer might opine) that notion of accumulating "stuff" seems kind of louche. There are physical objects that I enjoy holding for the pleasure or utility I derive from them. Books, particularly; my bride lacks the same greed for the printed page. Books to me are like friends; if I like them I enjoy returning to visit with them. A genuinely good work of fiction yields new pleasures to me when I re-read it; the work may have not changed but I have, and the words reach me in different ways as the person I am changes.

But the objects are valuable to me for the use of them.

My son, however, is still in the place I was when I was his age. Objects - toys, mostly, since childhood is still about play and play for most children in our material world means playthings - are of value to him for themselves, for the look or the size or shape; the "coolness" of them.

For example, for all that he enjoys playing certain electronic games he has never asked for any of them as gifts. I think this is because they are not tactile enough for him to picture them as desirable swag. He doesn't "see" them enough to desire them, they don't give him the rich feeling of possession that more gross toys seem to.

This year his lusts are all about LEGO kits.Now I will be forthright; I hate these damn LEGO toys.

They're expensive as sin, first of all. And they are wretched as "toys"; heavy, delicate, and breakable even with great care, and an eight-year-old is nothing if not careless. We have a massive plastic bin full of LEGO bits from various spendy LEGO contraptions that lasted less than a week or so from contruction to destruction. If the Romans had built with fucking LEGOs Rome might have been built in a day but would have lasted less than a month.

But this isn't about me, but my son, and what he wants and cannot get for himself.

Mind you, he is required to earn through household chores the money for most of the smaller LEGO kits he wants. I had hoped that would inspire him to treat the things with less brio, but no. The small LEGO sets he buys with his hard-earned (because the Boy is a huge martyr about working for his pleasures, and you'd think that raking leaves was invented for the torment of prisoner's on Devil's Island or the punishment for deadly Sin rather than a way to make a buck or three and keep the goddamn grass from dying) last no longer than the big ones he gets as presents.

Regardless of the particular kit, though, this year is all about the LEGOs and, to a lesser extent, military toys, because the Boy has moved on almost completely from his Star Wars Period.

I say almost because he still enjoys watching the Clone Wars series on television when he remembers to watch it - which is in itself an indication of how far the mighty franchise has fallen, since a year ago he knew to the minute when his beloved show would begin.

So we still have a tenuous connection to the world George Lucas created, although that connection is dwindling as I watch. I fear that my son will not be a lifelong sci-fi geek. Which is a little chastening because I am, a bit, and I see that I have not passed on this particular part of me.

And what's been fun is that his understanding of the stories we watch has grown noticibly deeper and more sophisticated over the short space of a year. When we last talked about this he was just beginning to appreciate that the "clone wars" stories weren't as simple as they were being told to him, and that there were deep difficulties with the simplistic "Jedi good/Sith evil/clones tools" way that Lucas has been telling his story.

The most interesting so far was the "Umbara" series of stories that aired in October.To cut to the nitty, the deal was that you're introduced to this fictional battlefield on this creepily-dim planet, "Umbara". The context is minimal other than that Lucas' "Republic" soldiers have to take this place and the locals (and the local wildlife) resist. The usual military hi-jinks ensue, delighting the Boy who is still all about things that shoot, go fast, and blow shit up.

For me it was another chance to watch the Lucas organization biff another one.

Because there was a potentially terrific story there.

The macguffin was that the clone soldiers you've been introduced to, Captain Rex, "Fives", the blue-and-white Boys of the 501st Legion - the future "Vader's Fist" - are placed under the command of a Jedi they don't know. And who seems to be either utterly whack or tactically insane, because he continually orders them into fatal attacks or pointless and dangerous movements and then threatens them with military justice when they protest. This mook, a four-armed gitch called "Pong Krell", is presented as a fiercely strict commander who gives orders and then refuses to hear any questions about them.The Peep was puzzled by this.

"Why is he doing this?" he kept asking, "Why is he so mean?"

I wondered that myself. Because Peep's question lies at the heart of a great, terrible story, a story as old as fighting men; which is the danger - obeying a commander who might be a fool, or a savage, or a madman...or disobeying a commander who may be seeing tactical or strategic levels not visible to the squad-level grunts? Where is the line that can't be crossed? Where does obedience to military order become suicide or, worse, homicide?

Great fiction has been made around this very question; films like "Paths of Glory", novels like "Catch-22", tales like the "Illiad", focus completely or in part on the complex relationship between fighters and commanders.

And in this case there's this huge rock in the story-stream up ahead; the moment that Lucas' just-self-elevated Emperor orders his army to kill all their Jedi officers; "Order 66".

You might think that this could have been a story fraught with brilliant opportunities to examine the relationship between these men - slave soldiers bred to die for a Republic that gave and owed them nothing - and the leaders placed over them. To look inside a man like "Captain Rex"; a veteran professional, a created-man bred and trained to obey, but already a survivor of dozens of Lucas-battles where he and his friends and fellow-troopers are taught to stand without cover and shoot or move until killed, and scores of them are, and get to understand how he thinks and feels about beings like his new general.And, in particular, you'd suspect that he'd have figured out by this time that his Jedi "officers" have none of the tactical training he's received. They have certain psychic skills but even those are not by nature useful in battle. So there's no real reason for a man like that to trust another being whose primary qualification for combat leadership is some sort of participation in a woo-woo Force religion and the ability to twirl a laser-sword.

You might also think that this would be a terrific opportunity to look at the relationship from the other side; from a member of a semimonastic Order instructed to avoid "relationships" suddenly placed in the most intimate of relationships - of deciding who lives and who dies. Of being a being gifted with mental powers who is thrust into war and told to command soldiers whose skills are merely physical to overcome physical fear and death in order to win sordid, gross political objectives.You'd be thinking that the story had a chance to examine the same things that Karen Traviss did such a hell of a good job developing in her "Republic Commando" books with special effects no more sophisticated than damn good writing and an adult sensibility; what is obedience, and what is responsibility? What is courage and what is cowardice, what is the way of a man with other man, and what are the ways of men and women?For if fiction, regardless of genre, has any value other than as brain-candy it gives us a chance to step out of ourselves into other people, other places, even other worlds and enjoy thinking about the galactic range of choices we all face, about the consequences of those choices that we make or those that are forced upon us. It can entertain while it makes us more thoughtful, more humane people.

But you'd be thinking without reckoning with Lucas & Co.

The man must be an eight-year-old in the body of a grown-up. I swear.

I'm not going to give you a review of the whole magilla; it's not really germane to my post and, besides, Peter over at "Lightsaber Rattling" does a better job than I ever could at discussing the whole story. But basically, after a ton of time spent on relatively aimless (but visually cool) thud and blunder, the clone soldiers in the television story finally turned on their Jedi master - the near-impossibility they found the task of subduing him made a subtle point about the mechanics of "Order 66", though I'm not sure that was Lucas' intent - but it turned out that he was neither a sadistic fool nor a misunderstood genius but that weakest of cinematic conventions, the Hidden Enemy. He was a "Sith", not a "Jedi" at all, not a bad officer, not a clueless but insecure fucktard, not an incompetent promoted above his abilities and furious at the innocent soldiers that forced him to demonstrate just how incapable he was...but a simple Black Hat, a cartoon baddie, a cardboard villain who has been murdering his troops because he can and because he likes it.

And the soldiers didn't have to confront the questions they raised about their commander, about what they would have done if he HAD been an incompetent commander, a brute, a fool, or a power-mad rogue. He was just Evil. So they killed him.The Boy was fine with that; they're surprisingly callous at eight. But I wasn't, and I found myself regretting again that the creator of this facile universe was not a better father to his creation that I was to my own. I just wish that ol' George had a little more Karen Traviss in him.

I'm still a retired clone trooper at heart, and I will always have a soft spot for the boys in the white armor. But my son, hard-hearted little realist that he is, knows that clone troopers are born to be used up and forgotten.

So while this Christmas there's still some lingering affection for the clones and their world I get the sense that soon we will not visit Rex and his comrades, still fighting their eternal war in the pages of books and on the screen, forever new to some boy somewhere else but soon to be lost to us, my big son and I; nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la.Not gone, just marching far away.

I Am a Camera: Sunny Black Friday

Nothing profound. Just had some nice snapshots of this past week.

We had our first frost last Saturday morning. I wanted to capture some of the images.
Love the delicate frost tracery on the grass. But this sort of thing is terribly ephemeral here - by ten o'clock it was raining again and all the fragile beauty was gone.
Last bit of frost-art, this one from "Lake Amherst", the low spot in the curb where the rainwater pools up.
The Peep took this on the way down Hawthorne from Grand Central Bakery. That's the "Bluebird of Death" hanging from the mirror, by the way.
a very Portland sort of November - stone and rain and fallen leaves.
Missy loves her some ginkoes. "They come from China, like me!" she enthuses;
This is another of Missy's snaps, and a good one to close with; our shadows toddling companionably along the street towards a sunny day together...
Hope you and yours are also enjoying this time together.

Crime and Punishment

I was not happy when my cell phone started singing as I was heading south on I-205.

The early dark had caught Portland's evening rush hour in a rain-slick chaos of a Tuesday.

For all that we here get a tropical hundred-some inches of rain every winter we are really terrible drivers in it; speeding, tailgating, and weaving between lanes in a contemptuous hurry. Familiarity with the slippery roads breeds insurance claims, and I really wasn't in the mood to talk both because of the difficulty of the business at hand and the long day of cold, wet work I'd had.But the curse of the cell is that you're tethered to it; everyone knows you have one, and you can no longer pretend to be unable to respond every time some trivial crisis reaches for your collar.

But as soon as I flipped the phone open I realized the crisis was a different sort.

"Can you speak to Missy?" my wife asked in her you-don't-really-have-an-option voice.

"Sure." I replied, canny husband that I am, and was rewarded with the sound of a tiny, hiccup-sobbing little voice in my ear as some jackhole cut into the lane a half-chrome-bumper-plating-layer-thick width in front of me.

"I'msosorryDaddyIdidn't..." was all I could make out of the confusion of little-girl hysteria.

"Calm down, sweetie," I said, looking over my shoulder as I slid to the right into the vacant travel lane, "...and tell me. What happened?"

Out of the incoherent kidspeak - instantaneous translation is one of those parenting skills they don't tell you about in "What to Expect When You're Expecting" - I sussed out the tale. Little girl had done something unforgivable to something of mine and was now terrified to collapse by the fear of parental vengeance.

"Do you still love me, Daddy?" she asked between sobs.

One of the least-appreciated parental skills is the ability not to laugh at inappropriate times. Missy's fear was a live thing to her, for all that it might seem silly to me after fifty years of living and the hard knowledge of real wrongs done and forgiven. She was really terrified that I might love some object associated with me more than I loved her.

"Sweetie, I will ALWAYS love you. Always." I tapped the brakes to avoid an overloaded panel truck weaving ominously in and out of the center lane to my left "I might not be happy with what you did but I will never stop loving you."

I paused to let a gust of hiccuping pass and then asked the question that had been on my tongue since the phone rang;

"What DID you do?"

At that point I was transferred to my son, who explained that his little sister had drawn a beard and other additions on a picture I had stuck up on the refrigerator."It's really funny, it was wrong, but it's also kinda funny, but she's really, really sorry, Dada..." he expanded for his erring sister.

"Okay. Let me talk to your sister."

"Missy, sweetie, it's okay. I still love you. I will ALWAYS love you. Just ask next time, okay? I don't like when you take things without asking. But that will never make me not love you."

The assurance seemed to have its effect, as her sounds lost their bereft quality. By the time I closed the phone all I heard were small sniffles.


Where did we get this terrible power? What strange need in the human heart grants a man of average mind and no particular gifts the ability to reduce a little girl to helpless grief over some silly, trivial sin for no better reason than because they are father and daughter?

We sail so thoughtlessly through our emotions, these loves and likings, the complex shoals and deeps of need and desire, hope and hatred, freedom and dependence that we don't often stop and contemplate the ocean we sail upon. At least, I usually don't.

Until the brokenhearted crying of my little girl makes me look around me and marvel at the broad and mostly unexplored distances of that vast and perilous deep.

We have no charts to the passages of the heart.


When I finally walked up the night-wet steps to the door this was affixed under the knocker:My bride looked up from her book as I passed through the doorway reading this plea for forgiveness obviously penned for my daughter by her brother. Mojo frowned at me as I grinned at the amanuensis' addendum - "I still think that it looks funny" (I detected the likelihood that the smaller child had been led into temptation by the larger...)

"She really was very worried that you wouldn't love her anymore. They just went to bed. You might check on her and see if she's still awake and let her know everything's OK."

So I went softly barefooted down the darkened hallway to Missy's little shed-roofed room at the back of the house. The small figure was cuddled inside a muddle of pink little-girl blankets and stuffed bed-friends, and the cheek that was half-covered by a sheet of nightblack hair was warm and smelled faintly of her beloved strawberry "Pixie Hollow" shampoo. The skin under my lips was very soft. I ran one hand over her head, marveling at the rich complexity of this small person that life and Fate had brought here and to me.

"I love you, sweetheart, and I always, always will."

From somewhere deep in dreams she must have heard, because a tension I hadn't even noticed before went out of the small shoulders. She sighed and settled back into her pillow, and her lips curved ever so slightly upward.And I left her smiling into the silence of her darkened room.

With Their Shields or On Them

I'm sitting in front of the computer whilst the kiddos indulge in some truly reprehensible Saturday morning TV - a ritual as old as MY childhood, at least - and came across this Krugman column that ends with a comment that I thought went right to the heart of the discussions we had around here about what I considered the unfortunate narrowing of the social arc of military service in the U.S. circa 2011:

"If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

The Krugman essay is in reference to the apparent difference between "conservatives" - who seem willing to shove any sort of public-figure misbehavior down the memory hole so long as the offending politician continues to vote for their regressive policies - and liberals, who immediately defenestrate their own "leaders" if the personal lives of those leaders vary from the public positions.But in the course of his post Krugman brings up someone I had forgotten; Ed Luttwak, who wrote back in 1995 that any hope the U.S. (and other Western societies) had of returning to a widespread national service was doomed by the replacement-level birth rates of their peoples. Luttwak's "post-heroic" societies had developed such an attachment to their children "...(b)ecause most couples have only one or two children, the loss of any in warfare becomes intolerable, and conscription becomes unthinkable..."(and)"...child-centered Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) will be forced to rely in the future on allies, mercenaries, and maybe robots to fight on their behalf."So; here I am, looking at my own precious offspring (one inert on the couch, the other somewhere in the back of the house - I can hear her chatting to herself there, anyway...) and wondering - would I give them up if my country demanded it not for existential defense, but for some abtruse foreign policy objective? Would I be "convincible" that burying my son or daughter for some transient geopolitical advantage in part of my country's imperial corona was worth the end of my own personal immortality?And I honestly don't know the answer.

But it certainly raises some difficult questions for me.

Hey, hey, It's a Sunny Day

Last weekend we had a sunny Sunday

Sunny.

Do you understand what a wonderful thing that is?

We're deep in autumn here, and in the Northwest that means rain. And the winter is fast approaching and that means constant rain.

Tomorrow, for example, we're set to have a typical Northwest late autumn-early winter day; sunrise at 7:25, sunset at 5:30, overnight low, 42F, afternoon high, 46F.

It's a wonder that none of Lewis and Clark's GIs sucked the musket muzzle after 184 days of THAT shit. I've lived here twenty-one years and by February I'm twitchy and tend to make funny noises when I hear the gutters fill up. I can't imagine what it must have been like to experience our Black Months with no warning.

But it was sunny Sunday. Sunny, I say!The thing is, I've been working a LOT of long days; early mornings, late nights. This means that Mojo gets stuck with a lot of childcare. And as adorable as our little urchins are, they're also the sort of hard work that five and eight also are, and so when I can I like to try and give my bride some refit time. So Sunday I stuffed the kiddos into "Bob" the white Subaru and took them away.

We did All Things Kid; went to Chuck E. Cheese, went out for lunch at McDonalds

(or as our friend the Poet likes to call it, the Icky Clown House, which I consider pure genius and far above the sort of nickname that I recall from when my college chums and I thought we were being witty - "L'Arc dOr" and "Chez Ronald's" and that sort of thing)

and then off to our local hobby store to look over Pokemon cards. We ended up in the Hollywood district of Portland so the Young Padawan could go to his jujitsu class, and that left just Little Miss and I to pass a couple of hours together.And so we did.

We sauntered across the street to the Whole Foods market where the Girl found a teeny shopping cart Just Her Size and proceeded to have a wonderful time pushing it about.These "Whole Foods" places - you may well have them, I think they're a national chain - have all sorts of oddities and quarks. We dove deeply into the Asian aisle for some of what Missy calls "seaweed" - the dried nori she snacks on - and into the juice aisle for fresh apple cider. We came across a "nice lady" who gave us some delicious plum jam (from Hood River to the east up the Gorge) on a vanilla cookie, so of course we had to find some of that jam and those cookies.

Lamb, and some craft beer, and a couple of apples later we were heading out the door but stopped at the little tea kiosk (a coffee bar would be too...mainstream...for Whole Foods in Portland) for some savory oolong. Taking our paper cups we crossed back over the street and found a tiny parklet between the main road and Peep's gym to sit and enjoy the warm sun and sip our teas."This tea is spicy!" Missy reported. "I like it, but the tea at dim sum is better. Because it comes from China, like me."

So I had to tell her the story about her adoption, and how we met her. And she told me about how she knew Chinese words. And we looked up at the blue, blue sky through the saffron-yellow leaves above us. And talked about clouds, and dinosaurs, and why some birds are fat.And as I held her dear weight over my heart I felt the weight of the knowledge that this little girl was only mine for a moment.

And that our artless talk and random time together would slip away like the heat leaving the cup in my hand.

And I wanted to stop time, just stop it, and sit there forever in the slow autumn sunlight with my little girl on my lap, and hear her funny little voice, and stroke the anthracite sheen of her hair and just love her until the stars burnt to cinder and the world ended.And then we finished our tea, and I tossed her up on my shoulders, and she rode above my head all the way down to pick her brother up and go home.

Candy

For the third year in a row my children worked the University of Portland dorms for Halloween.First, let me say that I'm not sure why, as much as I get more surly and less festive every December as my kiddos rocket about in an advertising-fueled orgy of greedy anticipation, I get more happiness over watching them get equally greedy for sweets and all things spooky every October. But by Thanksgiving I'm already snarling at the latest repetition of "I hope Santa brings me that Mega-thruster Barbie with the Bolt-on Wings!" whilst I practically melted when my daughter cuddled up to me Sunday mornings and sighed "I can't WAIT for Halloween!"I'm not consistent, okay? But there's something about the Night Before The Day of The Dead that works for me. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.One part of it, I think, is that the kids are active participants in the holiday at the end of October. Christmas is all about passive greed; Halloween is all about doing things; making the house "scary", choosing and re-choosing the right costume.This year in keeping with his obsession with All Things Warlike the little man was a soldier. I didn't have the heart to tell him he looked like a post-Mission-Accomplished Iraqi child-conscript in his little five-color desert cammies and coverless Kevlar. He felt himself very martial, and raced about with his toy M-4 (minus the muzzle-end of the barrel, which somehow our friend's son had managed to snap off before he lent it to us...) blazing away at the Enemy Hordes.Little Miss went with the traditional; a fairy princess. The delightful thing about these small people is that unlike us putative grown-ups they are unwilling to endure the ridiculous to keep up appearances. So when the little silver slippers hurt her feet I suggested that sometimes fairies went for comfort over style and she changed over to her little tennie-runners without demur.

Sadly, however, the cruel predation of childhood has not changed, either. She left her garish fairy wings at home after "some big kids laughed at me". It's probably fortunate for our conceit of childhood that as adults we tend to forget the deliberate hurts that we inflict on each other as children.So it was with sparkly crowns and small arms we went over to the University to hunt for loot; Daddy (limping on his bad hip, which was playing up abominably), Sergeant Stryker and his companion, the Ammunition Fairy.The dorm halls brought back assorted memories of my own college residence halls, although many of the young men and women of the Catholic college on the Bluff had gone to far greater lengths than I and my contemporaries would have to entertain the minor children of townie neighbors. Many of the girls were in costume as well, although here Missy is thoroughly unimpressed at getting a photo-op with Ariel the Little Mermaid herself; I was impressed that the co-ed Ariel's attention to detail that extended to matching-mermaid-tail-aquamarine toenail polish. Either a future attorney general or the first female archbishop of Portland.We passed through the crowded halls following the Boy's nose for sugar. He was like a human sugar-hound, and we seldom missed a rich vein of loot. The students were very patient with all this hoo-raw, and, of course, the young women all cooed over the little girls.

I wondered as I listened to the happy glurge; is this feminine sentiment (the young men seemed as immune to sentiment in general as young men usually pretend to be) a fond memory of girlhood passing, or an eager anticipation of motherhood yet to come?Whatever the reason, Missy's amour-propre was restored by the number of compliments she received for her little costume. She WAS adorable, and even the callow youth of North Portland could see that.Eventually she tired of her pilgrimage - her brother, tireless Diogenes of Candy that he is, continued on with his friends - and I led her home. She went up to one doorway ("I don't want to go to any more houses where I don't know anyone", she declared after that) and then handed me her treat-bag and skipped alongside my uneven stride, chattering artlessly as all around us little groups of spectres, heroes, athletes, and household appliances scrambled shouting through the darkened streets.Portland Halloween is often a sodden business, but Monday was clear and chill. The drifts of yellow and orange stirred in the night wind whose cold kiss promised the end of autumn and the coming of winter. But the lights of our house were warm, and the scampering footsteps of my daughter's homecoming were in perfect time with the contentment in my heart.