Hard Work II: Electric Boogaloo

Apparently the latest D.C. flame war is the Ann-Romney-vs-Hillary-Rosen Chain-Cage Death Tweet Grudge Match.

This sucker kicked off after the Romneybot trotted out the Little Woman to try and display that, yes, indeedy, he DOES understand that Wimmens Are People, Too, and so they should vote for him because he married one of these women-things so he can do women-positive stuff like cut people off those oh-so-demeaning entitlement programs and refund the money saved to the wealthy (like...Ann Romney!).Ms. Rosen pointed out, rather obviously, that Mrs. Romney wasn't exactly wet-nursing a dozen toddlers in a go-down off of Gin Lane; she was (and is) an insanely rich housewife who could afford to "stay home and raise five boys", as opposed to 95% of the rest of the moms in the U.S., who would quickly be reduced to standing on a streetcorner with a baby on one hip and a basketful of matches on the other if their family lost their share of the income.

This pisses me off on a number of levels.

It pisses me off because of the ridiculous assumption that stay-home moms "work" harder than moms who, y'know, work.

Which is ridiculous, because stay-home moms are way at the bottom of the work food-chain, below the working moms and far, far below the single working moms, for whom there are simply not enough hours in the day.

It pisses me off because of the way it automatically genuflects to the "traditional" wife and mother without any thought of how difficult it is to "choose" to be a stay-home mom after the relentless thirty-year cramdown of wages for the non-two-yacht family.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about this.

That's the Twitter feed from Rosen's original post. Go and read the comments from the Obama people walking Rosen's comment about how Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life" back; "I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly.", "Families should remain off-limits" (because...Romney trotted out his little wifey for no reason other than personal pride?) and especially this one: "i personally believe stay at home moms work harder than most of us do."

To which I say; great gigongeous flaming titanic planetary-sized balls of horseshit.

And I speak with some authority because I've been a stay-at-home-dad. And a paratroop sergeant. And a diesel mechanic, a jumper stable undergroom, the downstairs guy in a JiffyLube^TM, a high school AND a community college teacher, and a professional geologist.

And I will freely tell you this; every single damn one of those jobs. Every one. Every fucking moment of every one.

Was harder than being a stay-at-home-dad.

Oh, there were things about being a SAHD that kinda sucked.

The hours often aren't great. The clientele is not always friendly. Flat-out the WORST thing is the fucking boredom; raising a kid is often like playing catch with a dog - trust me, you're going to get bored waaaaaayyyyyy before the dog (or the kid) does. Remind me I said that after reading "Thomas the Train and the Blustery Day" to your toddler for the eight zillionth time.

So at-home parenting is sort of like one of those brain-killing data entry jobs people with "computer science" degrees used to get in the Seventies and Eighties. Long, insanely dull, repetitive, occasionally panicky, sometimes stressful.


But "hard"?

Fuckety fuck, no.

And the reason this "Ohhh, those sweet stay-home mommies, they work so haaaard!" crap drives me so nuts is because - while they're doing their best to make things harder for the sort of people who don't have the Ann Romney kind of cash to hire nannies and au pairs and cleaning services and diaper services and all - the GOP sorts of people luuurves to talk about how wonderful and hard-working all those SAHMs and SAHDs are (though good luck expecting them to get excited about, you know, the people with penises staying home with the kiddos - how the hell you gonna hang with the Tea Party Commandos with that baby bag, there, dad?)

But here's the Big Reveal; staying at home with the kids really ain't hard work.Physically the worst nuisance is between about 18 months old and five or six; as babies they're basically noisy luggage - you can take them with you wherever you need to go as long as you remember their mountain of kit (diapers, wubbies, change of clothes, Cheerios...) - and after that they're in school most of the day. It's a pain again when they're older - starting in the late-grade-school tween years - because of the emotional headaches; you have to worry about herpes and smoking weed and drunk driving and on-line predators.

But the "work" part throughout pretty much consists of feeding 'em, cleaning them, and cleaning up AFTER them, and word up - nobody reading this is living in fricking "Little House on the Prairie".

And sure as HELL not Ann Romney. Little Mansion on the Hudson, probably.

Laundry? You got a machine for that. Dishes? You got a machine for that. Cleaning? How the hell long does it take to vacuum a floor and wipe down a countertop? You've got a fridge and a microwave and a range/over - you don't exactly have to hunt, kill, butcher, and roast a mammoth haunch over an open fire.

When my kid was little and I was out of work I swear, I could get pretty much all the housework done in the space it took for him to nap; maybe an hour, tops. I could toss him in the car and do the marketing, with stops on the way for the library and some coffee. Hang out at the bookstore, go to his fave indoor play place. I pretty much had a leisurely day with the kiddo, tantrums and the hour or so of housework aside.

Now...what I couldn't do was the stuff I liked doing; I couldn't sit and read (unless he was sleeping), or exercise, or watch a movie or a soccer match on television, or blog. And that was frustrating, no kidding.

But it was not effing hard work.

Nope.

So this pisses me off because it's a plain and simple attempt by a hereditary rich couple to try and con the marks suckers "independent" voters into believing that the RomneyTron 2000 is really a warm, empathetic humanoid that loves him some good ol' plain folks because he's, you know, a family man with a Hard-Working Li'l Woman just like them!

But instead it tells me the opposite.

Because as a guy who's been one; if this gomer and his wife think she was "working hard" when she was staying home with the kiddies and the nanny and the housekeeper and the gardener?

They need to go out and learn about real hard work.

'Cause hanging around the house vacuuming the carpets and wiping the baby's ass ain't it.

Nasty?Yep. I'll give you nasty.

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.

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.

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.

Please, sir, I want some more.

The other day the kids were a complete, utter pain in the fucking ass for the better part of the morning. By noon Mojo had just about had it as they were loading up the car to go home from downtown.At which point Missy decided she had had just about enough, too.Missy: "I wish I was an ORPHAN so you couldn't tell me what to do!"
Mojo: "Fine. You can stay here, then. Somebody should come along in a while and maybe they'll take you home with them." (Missy's eyes go wide) "So, Peep, do YOU want to be an orphan, too?"
Peep: Naw. The food sucks."For once, I was wise enough to say absolutely nothing.

Full-contact Birthdays

Not for the faint of heart.But eight years ago today a little guy came onto the scene and changed our world. He's gone through Elmos and Thomas Trains and Star Wars and now he's a fierce soldier fighting the cyberwars of otherwhere. But he's still my beloved Peep, and he and his little sister still rock my world.Your feet go so quickly now, and your strides are longer every evening. Every morning I wake and find that time has stolen away the little ones I put to bed the night before and replaced them with a bigger girl and older boy, a little taller, a little wiser, a little further from the soft, warm babies I held to be enfolded in the sweet baby smells and to touch the soft baby skin.

I love you both, my little hostages to Fortune. May tomorrow and tomorrow see us safe abed and all well.

Carnival!

I meant to post this last Friday but first life got in the way and then Osama bin Laden got in the headlines again and I've spent quite a bit of time over at MilPub talking about his sudden trip to nap with the fishes.

Real life here in Portland went on, regardless.

Friday evening was the annual Astor Elementary School carnival, one of the fundraisers that the school runs to pay for the things that the taxpayers of Portland choose to consider optional, such as gym classes and copy paper.The carnival is always madness, and this year was no exception. And we couldn't work our usual tactics, which is to show up right when it starts at six, run the kiddos through the games, and then grab a hat. We agreed to volunteer this year and our volunteer times were very late in the evening. So although we arrived early we had to linger throughout the evening, trying to find ways to evade the worst of the crush and entertain the littles.This year was odd, in that for some reason (lack of volunteers? Funding? I have no idea...) the school staff set out fewer games. Several parents I talked to commented about that being frustrating, although none of them would talk about volunteering to help with the things. In place of the missing games we had several additions that proved very popular; two teachers doing that twisting-balloon art, and the "sumo" thing that you tend to see at minor league ballgames complete with ginormous padded fake sumo suit. Here's Mojo the Yokozuna at work.I think the Emperor's Cup is safe for another year.The dunk tank was there; it always is, an evergreen favorite of the fractious youths. This year, as usual, a pet teacher or two condescends to be the target of a dozen or so initial throws, but then the task of dunkee is delegated to some hapless student-teacher like this poor girl.For some reason, either because of a misplaced launch line or improved throwing skills among the groundlings the girl was dunked repeatedly. The water itself seemed warm enough. But the evening was cool before dusk and grew rather chilly rather quickly. She seemed in some discomfort sitting there on her bench in the breeze, so I'm not sure if she didn't welcome getting dunked.

The crowd is always one of the best parts of carnival and this year was no exception; the people-watching is always more scenic when the weather is fair, and this past Friday the evening was an unexpectedly sunny and pleasant one.Astor draws from a very diverse group, for Portland. We have some relatively well-off Caucasians such as Mojo and I, although probably the majority of the white kids and their families are what I'd call "working class" rather than middle class, though they probably would insist that they, too, are "middle class", such is the great attraction and illusion of the Bourgeoisie, the Great Suburban Dream, even here in the People's Republic of Portland.We have a relatively small number of black kids, and I have to say that the black families show more social variety than any of the other groups at Astor. Many, probably most, are African-American versions of the working class white folks...but there are some genuine dog-ass po' folks and their offspring. Both Mojo and I were approached by the same little black girl who announced without preface; "Gimme some money!" Her parents, if any were present, were nowhere to be seen, and being good, reticent products of the middle class neither one of us could tell an eight-year-old kid to fuck off and get a job. But the temptation occurred to me.

The largest single non-Caucasian group (and Caucasians are the immense majority here in North as they are all over Portland and Oregon, as well...) are the Hispanic families, all of whom are virtually absorbed in Portlandyness except for the affectation for polyester fleece that afflicts all Caucasian Portlanders I have met.The look of the crowd is that peculiarly American mixture of inappropriately sloppy and dressy; ratty T-shirts with fuck-me pumps, sequined tops with scuffed and ratty sneakers. The men always look dumpier and scruffier than the women, although a truly obese American woman somehow manages to look less salubrious and less intelligent than her rotund sister in Latin America or Europe. I'm no better; I'm in my work clothes, jeans, T-shirt, light jacket, ballcap the same a half the other men. We're a bloody mess, really.I'm always amazed at the degree to which the notion of "public dress" completely delaminated in the United States after the Fifties. Look at pictures of earlier crowds, even in the depths of the Depression. Everyone has their "going outside" clothes on. Women are in dresses and hats, as chic as they can afford. All the men have jackets or suitcoats and ties. Everyone looks like they came from work, or church unless the photo is deliberately snapped in a coal mine or a factory floor. But Astor carnival is no different than any other modern public venue in the U.S.; a mismatched melange of dressed-up and dressed-down, a schizoid mess without any sort of notion of what the crowd wants to look like to others, and, I suspect, even what they want to look like to themselves.I should note that the hit of the evening was the balloon-benders, at least once the second- and third-graders discovered that they would make balloon swords, scabbards, and shields. In moments heavily-armed eight-year-olds were slashing their way through shrieking masses of unarmed civilians, slicing like a mad Ginsu chef with a new chopper.The boys and a handful of little girls played swordfight for most of the rest of the evening, happily solving the problem of "how do we entertain the children".Little Miss, being feisty in a more strategic way, opted for this balloon flower instead. "It's a flower that's a heart" she described it, which is nothing if not true. And as you can see, with or without flower she knows exactly how cute she is.My volunteer assignment was on the clean-up crew, and it was here that I encountered the peculiar disorganized organization that used to drive me utterly batshit when I worked in the teaching biz.

Work parties are fairly simple things. They need a place to assemble, someone to assign the tasks, the tools to do the work, and some simple direction. When I showed up at eight o'clock I wandered around until I found a group of teachers chatting and asked them where the person in charge of clean-up was. They pointed vaguely to one of their number, who lead me into the cafeteria and suggested I put away the materials from one of the games. That took me about ten minutes, after which I looked around for the supposed crew leader to find no one other than casual bystanders.

However, it was fairly obvious that nobody had been tasked to clean the cafeteria. This was a fairly simple job for a former GI, and I scrounged up a broom, dustpan, mop, and towels pretty quickly. I swept up the nachos, mopped the spilled juice, chipped the densified cotton candy off the linoleum and had everything in decent shape in half an hour.

No one came to check and see how I was doing or inspect my work; again, something I half-suspected based on my teaching experience. The goofy thing about this pedogogical haphazardness is that somehow, mostly, the tasks manage to get done. I can never figure out quite how. The sheer disorganization and randomness of the process offends my military soul. But this scattershot way of doing things seems to satisfy something in many teachers' sense of individuality or something. Any sort of more rigorous discipline seems to rub a lot of teachers the wrong way; I've seen it.Eventually I finished with the cleaning and wandered into the wonderful old Fifties kitchen. I love the clunky old mid-century equipment and the massive appointments, designed in a less-disposable time by people who expected the kitchen to stand up to years of hamfisted abuse from harried cooks and careless kiddos and keep working. There's a sort of sturdy grace in these creations that eludes the newer, sleeker models.

I stand in the night kitchen wondering how many other generations of parents and children have passed through here, through this most American of places, the public school. A waystation on their way to adolescence, then adulthood, and then as parents with children of their own. Did they feel this, this faintly surprised sort of possessiveness for a place they thought they'd left behind? This combination of childhood memory and middle-aged regret; the recollection of the dreams forgotten and the recognition of the realities ahead?But now the janitor passes jingling his keys, and the light streams out the doorway into the darkened playground beyond. It's time to cross the street, and walk down the block, through the soft Spring evening towards the warmly lighted windows of home.

Despicable Me

There was once a time when the early morning hours were mine alone.

Mojo and the Peep are sleepers. They love their sleep, they crave it, they cherish it like a rare, delightful treasure, and whenever possible they indulge themselves by drowsing on into the late forenoon. And that was always fine with me.
I could get up early and make coffee, savor the rich scent and the dark, earthy taste in silence. I could read, or exercise, or go on-line. It was my private world before the rest of the family got out of bed.

But now I have another early riser; Little Miss is seldom asleep past six and often awake before five. She's never noisy or fretful. She comes stumping out, her little legs determined as her eyes are still full of sleep. She wants to be cuddled, and happily crawls up in my arms and curls onto my lap.So I feel like a real heel resenting the loss of my private mornings.

But I do; as sweet and quiet as she is, the girl won't be ignored or put by; any attempt to park her on the couch or in front of the television results in a monumental sulk, and this girl is an expert sulker; once you've hit the "sulk" button it's nearly impossible to reset - she will fuss and fume for a good hour or so.And even the semi-silence of her immediate snuggling is transient. Soon she is fully awake and wants to play, or use the computer. And I'm reminded of the old saying about playing catch with a dog; you will tire of it long before the dog does. So with Barbies or ponies or LEGOs. There are only so many scenarios the girl can invent, and we usually run through them all inside of five minutes or so. After that the only variable is how durable my patience is; the eventual consuption of it is never in doubt.
So I feel like even more of a lout; I love my little girl and all she wants to do is share my time. But I resent, somewhere ranging from mildly to bitterly, the loss; like a miserly old curmudgeon, I am ungracious about dividing the early hours of the day with this child who loves and depends on me. God, how despicable can I be?

I suspect that this says something truly unflattering about me, and in my better moments I try and staple a smiling face over my bad attitude. But then comes the thumping of the little feet down the morning hallway and my smile fades like the stars in the sunrise.

Horses of the Night

I've been up since five a.m., and it's nearly midnight; I left the house this morning in darkness and returned in the dark, and I have not seen my family waking for more than a full day.

This is not to complain; this is the life I've chosen. My work is demanding on my time but it returns it to me by giving me good, tough problems to solve, and difficult tasks to master. I love doing geology for a living, and I accept freely that this means that sometimes I will have to put my work before my family.The part about this that slips the blade-tip of guilt into the hollow place in my throat is that it's not always so difficult putting that work first.

Because the work, you see, is grown-up work, an adult's profession, and my day is spent with other adults, many of them other professionals and scientists. The demands are always there, but so are the limits.

And children are, by design, born with vast emotional boundaries that are the bright mirror of their early physical limitations. Long before they can walk they can run you down, pull you back on your heels, shake you from sleep, and food, diversion, dissipation, from money making and lovemaking.My friend B has written a good little article about this neutron star of need; I feel the painful jab of truth when she says;

"Never enough of those perfect moments to store in our memories forever, or time away to take mental breaks so we can be fully rested for the continued onslaught of cleaning, cooking, straightening, and serving the little tyrants we love."

Because at the same moment I am feeling overwhelmed by the relentless sameness of my children's days (how many mermaid/Star Wars games can you play? How many times can you walk the same path, visit the same pool, the same arcade, the same playground?) I can feel far away a vibration, almost a sound but just below the edge of hearing; the distant drumming of the hooves of the horses of the night.

Faust's night-horses; the frantic spinning of the earth around its pole, of the planet around the sun, that will take those child-days and put them away forever. The little boy and little girl I loved yesterday, that I took to the Nickel Arcade Sunday, that I cuddled with last week, will be carried away in the turning race of the night-mares and gone from me, forever.The little people who take their places are almost the same...nearly perfect replicas...but just that tiny bit older, that microcosmic fraction smarter, more skeptical, less candid with that confiding, loving openness of their baby-days. They are another day, another week, closer to being adults. Perhaps loving, hopefully wise...but never again the sweet-smelling hugs of seven, or the chuckling cuddles of four.

So while I desperately want to claim those moments when I can be with adults and be an adult...I desperately want to hold on to those little people, the ones who can be, as B puts it, like ice cream, both too rich and yet a rich delight, an embarrassment of riches, a surfeit of love and loving. Because when the courses are run, the ice cream will thin away and be replaced with a more complex and more mature concoction; more tart, a tad astringent, perhaps. Not worse, not better, just...different. And without the vanilla sweetness of childhood.

So I sit at the screen tonight and wonder at the hint of vanilla at the back of my tongue. The seeds of tomorrow are already planted tonight, they lie in the dark ground unfruited and yet already reaching towards the light, and childhood is going as the night-runners hasten towards the morning. What is it I regret, I wonder; that in the hastening darkness there is never enough of me, or never enough of them?

"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."

(from "Frost at Midnight" by Coleridge)