Where I've Been

Today Magpie wonders where her readers have been. Turns out I've been to a lot more states than I'd thought: only 6 more to go to have been in all 50! Still a lot of work to do on the Canadian provinces, though (although it's hard to see the Maritime provinces I've been to on that small map).  I've always wanted to ride VIA Rail across the plains and the Canadian Rockies.

Where are your travel dreams focused on? (Maps made here.)

Quick Vacation Blogging

• Why is it that long days full of vacation activities are making it harder for Curious Girl to sleep? At least our vacation digs have some very lovely king-sized beds so drawn-out bedtimes are comfortable affairs.
• Politica and I are doing a little happy dance about the Prop 8 ruling. Well, we would be doing a happy dance if she hadn't been glued to the iPad for the past hour reading through the text of the decision. The decision got announced just before dinnertime here, and I ran back to our apartment to download the decision so she could be scanning it between bites.  That's what passes for lovingkindness in a politically geeky family enjoying their latest technology.
• There are more than 20 states in which it is legal to fire employees because they are gay, lesbian, or transgendered.  There are millions of Americans--gay or straight or bi--who are not partnered, who don't have good health insurance connected to their own job or to a partner's job.  If--and it's a big if--the Prop 8 ruling withstands the two or three levels of appeal that will follow (9th circuit, 9th circuit en banc, and potential US Supreme Court), the slow tide of marriage reform will do nothing for those problems.  Marriage reform isn't the only sort of change we need to make a safety net for all families.
• But still: marriage reform is a nice step for some families, and I can't help but smile as Politica reads or summarizes parts of Judge Walker's amazingly detailed decision. (He--and doubtless hardworking clerks--did a thorough job putting a clear record of the trial testimony into the decision, with an eye toward the scrutiny that the decision will get on appeal.)
• Vacation is a wonderful thing, even if Curious Girl keeps announcing that she is homesick because 11! days! is too long! to be away from her very own bed.  And even if she is not sleeping well. I am loving the smell of the sea air, and I am loving all the ice cream.
• Happy summer!

It's My Birthday and I'll List if I Want to

• I'm a prime number again!
• I'm a prime number on vacation, which means that I'll be getting some late presents from Politica and Curious Girl because a) Politica packed one of them so secretly that she couldn't find it upon arrival and b)there's so much to do in Very Crowded, Very Beautiful Town on the End of the Cape that we just didn't fit all our birthday activities in. As Curious Girl said when it was time to go to bed, "So Mama, that means the party isn't really over yet!"
• CG is just dying to tell me what my presents are, but so far, she's keeping a secret. We were all thrilled with present #1, thought, which was Season 2 of the Muppet Show on DVD. We watched the Rudolf Nureyev episode twice today and the Bernadette Peters episode once (much as I remembered loving the Swine Lake number, both Politica and I thought it a tad misogynist upon later viewing--and the cane-as-machine-gun closing doesn't quite seem so funny, either. I guess the Muppet Show isn't as completely timeless as I thought).
• Very Crowded, Very Beautiful Town on the End of the Cape has quite the mix of people here. Tons of folks in town for Family Week, so lots of kids of all ages with various constellations of parental units. Lots of young, beautiful gay boyz, lots of muscle shirts. Lots of lesbians with long baggy shorts, sensible shoes, and short hair. Lots and lots of kids. Curious Girl is quite taken with the show hawkers who play with hula hoops on the main drag, and she's enjoying the spectacle of it all.
• I don't have long baggy shorts, and I'm glad at my prime number age that I don't much care. Although really, I have never cared too much about my fashion (which is probably an after effect of the fact that I don't have much fashion sense).
• There's a lot of ice cream here. I think a milkshake a day on vacation is a good thing.
• Travel tip: if you're thinking that you might eat lunch soon on a long car trip, don't say, "well, we'll eat just on the other side of Major Urban Area." Eat first, so that if you run into traffic in said urban area, no one will get grumpy.
  
• I spent much of the day walking around with a girl wearing black high-heeled shoes with a bow on the tie. Nothing says summer birthday celebration than a pair of fancy shoes.
• Spectacle overwhelms me, but CG and Politica seem to groove on it. I'm rooting for some quieter exploring one of these days. Although I do enjoy watching people do hula hoops that light up. I'm glad we have a quiet place to retreat to.
  
• I had some Bigger Ideas in my head, but I'm so tired I'm simply going to wish you all a good night.
  

The Best Years of Our Lives

Notes from the road, written after our first day (blogger locked me out of the blog last night and I couldn't post these then):

• OK, this was only a day, and it only occasionally felt like a year, but I lost count of how many times Curious Girl and I listened to "The Best Years..." from the Shrek soundtrack. I figured if she was happy, I was happy. And we were both happy. Shrek had some darn fine driving music.
  
• CG does have an ability to entertain herself. We didn't even play music for the first 2 hours of the drive--she was very busy talking to the cats, singing to herself, and doing Important Things on her Dora the Explorer lap desk I found at a used bookstore.
• The trip was really lots of fun, except for the last 20 minutes of whiny wondering if we were at the hotel yet, and the 20 minutes of tears associated with The Tragic Accident of Beloved Baby Blankie. She made a tiny cut in the blanket when she was cutting strips of paper. I think it's repairable.
• CG gave the cats awards (foam stickers on their cat carriers) because they were so good in the car. She also made up a game involving stickers and points for spotting cars ("Mama! look on the other side of the road. There are a lot of cars there. I know you can find a red one. You can!"). Keeping track of my points, stickers, and eligibility for prizes she was designing took up a lot of time back there in the rear of the car.
• Really, it was the valium. I shudder to think what the drive would be like without the cats on valium. The cats are now taking up most of the king-sized bed in our hotel room (this sociability also due to the 1/2 dose of valium I gave them earlier this evening).
• I had to adjudicate one argument between Curious Girl and Baby Sis, but eventually, Baby Sis helped CG with her coloring homework and all was fine. At the hotel, I met Belle in the elevator, and we magically got transported to Belle's castle to sleep. CG never goes anywhere without imagination.
• We went swimming in the hotel pool when we got here. There was a little girl watching us swim, and she exclaimed to CG, "You are a beautiful mermaid! I know you are! You're a mermaid!" CG is quite delightful in water, it is true.
• We at lunch at the Restaurant of Ronald McD. I told CG she designate one day of our trip for such a meal, and she was pretty darn happy about it. (me, I realized that eating a fil3t o' f!sh sandwich once every 20 years is too frequent.) But for dinner, she picked Japanese, and we had sushi and udon soup.
• All our stuff is on the truck. Actually two trucks, as the ridiculously large truck the movers brought didn't hold all our stuff. And this after we have downsized! Ridiculous.
• Younger cat is seriously picking on Elder (Very Aged) Cat. That is no fun.
  
• At the dinner restaurant, there was a fountain. CG wanted a penny, but all I had were quarters, and I didn't want to sacrifice quarters for the fountain. "Have an imaginary penny," I said. She demurred, and I sadly thought that reality was crashing her fantasy world. "I can throw it?" she asked, though, reconsidering. "Imaginary pennies can make real wishes. Take this imaginary penny and throw it." Off she went, and came back somewhat outraged: "I made a wish and it didn't come!" What had she wished for? "I wished for Mommy to be here, and she didn't come!" I said wishes don't always come true right away, but we'll see Mommy soon. Just a few more days.

Now I'm visiting friends, and will take the weekend to relax and let CG get some energy out (while Politica toils on the new house, which is getting our stuff delivered in the morning. yikes!)

German Houses

Curious Girl continues to confuse Germany (the real thing) with Germany (the place we're moving, where we are right now, looking for houses and me doing some preliminary set up for next year). "Can we go to the Hello Kitty street?" she asked last night as we drove home from dinner. The Hello Kitty street is in Berlin, near the Hackesche Markt: there's a Hello Kitty store near by, with a sign on a lamppost close to the train station. We used that sign to guide us down the street to the apartment we rented for a week last summer.

We are also house hunting. We know what neighborhood we want to live in, but there aren't any houses for sale there. Well, there are two for sale, but one is on a majorly busy street and the other just doesn't have the kind of layout we want. So we can't decide whether to wait and see whether more houses come on the market in this neighborhood, or whether to set our sights on another neighborhood.

So we've been looking in other neighborhoods, trying to decide whether we should live someplace more suburban (where the housing is much cheaper), whether we should live in a cute small town 15-20 minutes away from the campus we'll be working at (and whether we should live in the suburban part of said cute town, or in the center, in a smaller house that's walking distance to the center of small cute town). Or would it be better to be closer to the area's Distinguishing Geographic Characteristic? Or to have a view of that Characteristic?

Germany isn't the most diverse spot in the US, but the cute small town is less diverse than the not-so-diverse-and-way-more-expensive city. Tough choices.

Maybe this means we've just not yet found the right house. And we're definitely overthinking this all. I hope some clarity will emerge when we sleep on it.

Fish on TV and Ice Cream for Breakfast

I'm loving Bardiac these days--well, I've loved Bardiac for a long time, but her recent posts on life in Japan fascinate me because I love the ins and outs of just living somewhere else. Reading about learning to decipher the pictographs on toilets or kitchen appliances, learning about how snack food is packaged somewhere else, learning about negotiating the daily-ness of life somewhere else has always fascinated me. I enjoy the gorgeous photos that the NY Times Sunday Travel section now ends with, but I miss the first-person essays that used to appear in that space. I love personal travel stories about negotiating regular activities in another place.

When we visited Budapest several years ago, we found a TV station whose camera was, 24/7, trained on a fish tank. Always the same fish tank. I watched it a little every day. What a delightfully weird piece of public programming. Fish tanks reduce stress in real life--who knows what watching one on TV will do. I sure enjoyed it in our Danube and Parliament-view hotel room.

Curious Girl and I just got back from a weekend of visiting friends and (for me) a conference. I'm happy to be home (even if the dishwasher didn't magically empty itself while I was gone). It was a great little visit, with friends who have two kids, one a little older than CG, the other a little younger. We'd never stayed at their house before, but we fit right in, and CG was pretty excited to discover some new toys (like an indoor basketball hoop and the wondrous playmobil). We stayed up until almost 11 one night--something that is a rare event around here, where bedtime can start at 6:30 as the week goes on and CG gets increasingly tired. We ate breakfast a while after waking, instead of right away. We had ice cream for breakfast one day (because the friends we visited are also people who've worked at getting kids to gain weight--what a joy to have friends who can swap calorie tips rather than wondering, "but won't that be creating bad habits later in life?"). The kids invented a few new games,heavily influenced by CG's home classics "Pet Shop" and "Office" crossed with our friends' favorite pretends. They played basketball even when people were sitting on the couch, a big treat given our lack of hoops and general lack of enthusiasm for indoor ball throwing. We sang one of our home Shabbat melodies (which led to a lot of questions about why our melody wasn't the same as our friends' usual melody).

It's easy to get off-routine when traveling. As long as Curious Girl knows where Politica or I will be, and as long as she knows she doesn't have to put herself to sleep, she's usually a pretty happy camper. She's a partying girl--despite the fact that she's ready for bed quite early on most nights, she invariably rises to the occasion and happily stays up late as long as there's good company. In the afternoon following our very late night, she had a weird little fit, a product of fatigue and perhaps hunger. But that passed (with a bit of mood management on my part), and she was back to her party-hearty self, happy to stay up not-quite-so-late-but-still-pretty-late that night. And I loved it.

I'm happy to give CG some later nights with other kids to play with, some lazy mornings and even some grumpy afternoons as a consequence. It's fun to try on being someone who stays up a little late, someone who does Shabbat a little different, someone who eats a little later or organizes the day a little different. Some things from this visit will probably stick around. Ice cream for breakfast? Why not? (CG modeled eating pizza for breakfast while we were there, something I don't think our friends will be imitating anytime soon, but one never knows....) Other things, I'm happy to leave on the road. CG was happy to fall asleep around 7:30 tonight after a batch. We're getting back into our usual routines, and that feels good. But I like knowing that our usual routines could be different, that we can be people who sleep later, eat differently, use our time a little differently. There are a lot of ways to move through the world, and I like to try moving differently every now and again.

So ice cream or pizza for breakfast: try it. It's good to know things don't always need to be the same old way we love them to be. We might love the new ways, too, even just for a weekend.

Season's Greetings

We've arrived at part one of our trip, and had an amazing dinner with Graduate School Friends (one of whom grew up in South Texas, hence the menu), and opened a bottle of wine Politica and I had brought back from South Australia six years ago. It aged well, and GSFs were the perfect people to share it with. Politica's dad joined us for dinner (although he ate swedish meatballs rather than tamales), and CG collected clothing from GSFs' daughter, including a fancy blue dressup dress. I love the comfort of old friendships, and I love watching our kids play together. When CG was falling asleep, she rolled over and said, "I wasn't even shy at the beginning tonight. Because, I thought, I remember this place." I'm so glad we have good friends living near here--it makes our visits to Politica's dad feel much more homey than they might otherwise.

So life is good. (Although Politica, who just returned from her father's, where she was wrapping gifts, observes that Christmas is easier when you're a kid.) I finished CG's stocking, and it's by the fireplace in our hotel room in all its pink, purple, yellow, and rose glory. What's in it? A Miss Piggy journal, some glittery kid makeup, some lotion from my last hotel stay in a really cool shaped bottle, a clementine. I hope she likes it.

Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating tomorrow.

Travels with Curious Girl

I really admire bloggers like niobe and jo(e) who are able to travel and blog so thoroughly (jo(e) even while camping!). That said, it was surprisingly enjoyable to be offline so much in our recent travels. I kept blogging in my head, though, and aspire to get those posts actually typed--but at the moment, trying to get the school year off to a good start and trying to pack for our upcoming visit to Politica's father have not been good for blogging. So in the grand tradition of bloggers trying to get their posts flowing again, I give you a bulleted list, of travel tips and observations gleaned from three weeks on the road with Curious Girl:

• small beach balls rock. We got one on the plane from a high school kid who was coming back from a big protestant youth rally/camp or something. It had a sticker on it from a presbytry in south Jersey. Even though it had a hole in it, we had a lot of fun with it on the plane and on line at the airport baggage office where we and lots of other people had to go when Northwurst lost our luggage. We got an even bigger beach ball from the duty free shop in Ancestral Homeland. Beach balls deflate for carrying around, they're light, and they can't hurt anyone. Fun for catch, fun for rolling, just fun.
• double decker buses also rock. CG calls them "decker buses," and we spent one morning simply riding around on a decker bus, sitting in the front seat up top. It was a bit hot, but CG was quite amused. And I got a pretty good view of the city.
• underground trains, also quite amusing. CG was willing to let me choose a few sights if the mode of transport to and from them fit her mood. One day, she was all about the underground trains. She can haul herself up the floor-to-ceiling poles with her hands and feet. Grownups pay lots of money for abdominal muscles that good.
• playgrounds in other countries are cool. In one place, we saw a lot of pingpong tables in the parks, and lots of steel mesh tubes for climbing. I do like watching kids play.
• Children off their routines are not always fun to play with. CG is no exception. If you were in a major European city a couple of weeks ago and saw a nice lesbian couple walking down the street with their daughter, and then their daughter just suddenly turned into a screaming, crying, spitting, biting alien, you saw us. Two nights running. It was bizarre, all the more so for CG saying on the second night, "I'm being just like I was last night!" We thought if she was self-conscious of the resemblance, surely she was able to control it. Um, no. When we got back into our apartment on the first night with our alien-resembling-Curious-Girl, she was still sobbing. When she went into the bathroom to get ready for bed, we heard her wailing, "Wah, wah, wah. And the toilet paper doesn't even feel like toilet paper. It's too thick!" That cracked me up.
  
• Fortunately, CG regained her travel groove. It probably helped that there was a Hello Kitty sign on our street, on a streetlight pole. We didn't actually visit the HK store itself, but we had a lot of conversations with the Hello Kitty sign as we came to and from our apartment (the sign invariably voiced by me).
• I packed way more travel-fun stuff for Curious Girl than we used. The video-on-demand in the plane was very attractive to her (even though she didn't actually watch that much, because the earphones were too big for her and that annoyed her. And she doesn't really have a good attention span. On the way back, we watched Shrek 3. "The one with the babies," she informed me, when I told her what the options were. But while we were watching (she had me watch the same movie, so we could talk about it), she kept mixing up Arthur and Prince Charming, and she kept thinking Prince Charming was good. So she clapped with joy whenever he appeared, and towards the end, when Rapunzel appeared, she said, "Yay! Punzel! You're in my movie." Totally missing the point. We have not trained her to be a very careful media watcher. Is this normal 5 year old, to be so inattentive?
• imagination is wonderful. On our trip, CG invented various new games. One, Team Strawberry, requires Str@aberry Shortc@ke pajamas and competitions held in the bathtub in swiming and diving, and the presentation of (imaginary) medals in a complex ceremony with (imaginary) accordion music and bouqets of flowers presented by baby sisters. The teams process into bed at the end and have a sleepover. Another game, office, involves the audiotours that came free in a couple of museums we went to. You and your travel companions get to be colleagues, and the person who is the boss assigns Important Tasks (like counting people in a frieze or counting how many tiles in a gate on display). The smallest colleague gets to determine which exhibit is the printer space and you all have to wave your hands a lot to send e-mail. So if you were in an antiquities museum a few weeks ago and saw Americans appearing to talk to themselves while waving their hands, that was us.
• pajamas on the plane are good. CG put her PJs on and then fell promptly asleep. On the plane home, when it was daylight, I suggested she might simply sleep wearing her clothes. She looked at me as though I were crazy. PJs, a lullaby, and she was asleep in my lap.

I'll tell some stories from our trip, but now it's time to pack for the next one.

Nothing Shall Stand in Our Way

We're starting to get ready for our big trip to Politica's Ancestral Homeland and Another Large European Country (ALEC! what a pseudonymous acronym) and I am mightily amused by the various websites (some commercial, others by ALEC's tourist board, that say things like

• Nothing gets now in the way of romping at the jungle gym or on the slide and of hiding in the small tunnel. Nothing, I say, nothing shall stand between me and fun on the playground. That web translator clearly has Curious Girl's number when it comes to playground fun. One of the things I enjoy most about travelling with CG is the way I end up spending time in, say, playgrounds when we travel, rather than museums. I expect on this trip I'll miss a few of the museums, but I'll get a better feel for some ordinary moments in ALEC. And that will be good.
  

• All fans of spook must pass through a labyrinth, to elude scary physiques, or to go across a weirdly cemetery. I am so not a fan of spook. And I am not a fan of the weirdly, really. But the syntax here amuses me.

It's really not fair to poke fun at web translators when I can say maybe five phrases in ALEC's native language. Web translating is what I'd turn to if I had to explain my hometown to someone who didn't speak English. Still....

A piece of practical advice for any readers venturing to Europe anytime soon: access to money has totally changed since last Politica and I were in western Europe. Credit cards are now levying transaction fees for transactions abroad, and those fees vary widely (C@pit@l 1 cards have no such fee; one of Politica's cards charges 3% (or a minimum of $10) while my main card is only 2%. It pays to research the details in advance. I was dimly aware of this but didn't know how much variation there was between banks. Knowledge is power.

Cuteness, Food, Wiggles

We were on the road a bit earlier this week, and Curious Girl and I were on our own for dinner one night. She was tired, so I took her to the sushi bar. The food comes quickly and she likes getting to see what the sushi chefs are doing. We were seated right in front of the octopus and the salmon, and she asked me to identify all the fish we could see. "I want some octopus," she said, after first wondering whether the octopus could sting the chefs. She insisted she wanted to try some octopus. I don't actually like it, so I didn't want to order it--I tried getting her to wait until we could eat with Politica, who does like it. But as I didn't want to 'fess up to not liking octopus myself (the most we ever say around here is "I'm not up for that tonight"), and as the menu said it was only $2.00 for a single piece of sushi, I went ahead and ordered a piece.

"Is that tape?" CG wondered, pointing to the piece of seaweed that was wrapped around the octopus and its bed of rice. Then she wanted to know where the tentacles were, whether it could sting, and pronounced herself too nervous to try it. I ended up insisting that she try a bite. Usually, we don't direct her eating much, but in this case, I thought it was OK: she had pushed me to order this food, and I'd gotten it just for her, so I thought she should try it. Eventually, she did. And she liked it! The sushi chefs were really enjoying her running banter about it.

Things got a bit surreal when Curious Girl asked me if this octopus was Henry. "Of course not, Henry is underwater with Henry's Big Band," I answered. "No, I think this is Henry." (This is CG's latest play pattern: she allegedly invites us to interact or make choices in play, but she knows what she wants all along. You can see why this is my and Politica's favorite knock knock joke these days--CG doesn't get it at all, but Politica and I think it's way funny.) So then we had to talk to Henry about how he was doing, how she was eating him, how she likes his music. Quite surreal. But she had a few bites, and used the octopus to lap up a ton of soy sauce. I heard her on the phone talking to my mother about eating octopus today, and the story she tells is that she was nervous and didn't like it at all. She was nervous--but at the time, she liked it OK. I'm sure my parents weren't saying anything positive about her experience. But I thought it was pretty darn cool that my girl tried the octopus. And I thought Dr. Corndog, among others, would get a kick out of the Wiggles/food juxtaposition.

It was an interesting evening: the sushi chef started talking to me about how she had three children, but she had lost eight babies, and how even now when her kids are grown up, when she sees people with babies, she cries. Curious Girl was having trouble following the conversation in the moment, but she asked me what we were talking about. "That's so sad!" she kept saying. It was. But I was glad to know a little more about the woman who was making our food.

Bonus conversation: one day last week Politica said to Curious Girl, "You're my favorite!" Curious Girl replied, "You're my favorite, too!" And then a few seconds later, she said, "So that works out well, then."

Heading Southeast from Panda World

We're on the road again, spending the night in Hippieville en route to Posh Beach Resort where I will soon be learning all about the newest new ideas in the world of academic administration while Curious Girl and Politica play on the beach (although I foresee several beach afternoons in my own future both before and after the conference).

We got caught in a traffic jam today and turned off the highway, threading our way through residental neighborhoods as we searched for a restaurant. We passed businesses with great names--The Organic Mechanic, The Lazy Susan--and ended up eating a lovely meal in a vegetarian restaurant. One house we stopped in front of had a panda in a tree in the front yard. Upon closer inspection, the tree proved to have three pandas. There were stuffed pandas, wooden pandas, painted pandas. Pandas on the lawn, pandas on a bench, pandas hanging from the shutters. "Maybe it's Panda World!" Curious Girl cried.

I like getting glimpses into the weirdness of everyday life when I travel. The Posh Beach Resort is not the sort of place we usually travel to (its website advises that we can arrange a luxury package which will get us the use of a Lexus while we are there!). Here in Hippieville, things seem more familiar, echoes of my college days. We saw a man in a skirt dancing with joy, waving a big tie-dyed cloth, while the drumming circle played in a public amphitheatre. Children danced, grownups swayed, fireflies came out. The mountain air smells sweet, and I'm going to fall asleep very happily (even if part of the happy is drug-induced: I managed to get poison ivy before we left town, and benadr*l is making me sleepy).

It's dark here, atop a small mountain. I wonder what's going on at Panda World now. Here, the Granola family is sleepy. 'night, all!

We're Home

• We have returned from a very fun weekend in Grad School City. "There are a lot of things to climb on here," Curious Girl observed. We got to meet the brown dogs, we moseyed around (well, CG and I moseyed while Politica got all geeky in a reunion of Fancy Public Pants Fellowship holders, and then today Politica and CG moseyed while I did some work in the archives).
• I love working in archives. It's very soothing. I don't do it very much, but I do like it.
  
• I was looking at old minutes, among other things. People don't write minutes like they used to. Or, they don't archive minutes like they used to. Note to self: find department minutes written in verse--I think this has happened twice in my current department--and make sure they end up in our university archives. I found minutes that, while regrettably unrelated to my research question, contained minutes of a conversation that erupted in a committee on teacher education. It went something like this, coming after several rambling paragraphs in praise of the most senior committee member's trip down memory lane, chronicling all the things that the department had done which finally led to the establishment of a program that was clearly marginalized in the larger department, but beloved of the committee members. Then they turned their attention to high school teachers and relations with the university committee:
  
• Professor 1: Well, what do you want our committee to do?
• Professor 2: I want to see what's going on out there!
• Professor 3: We need to have a focus.
• Professor 2: I want to take them [high school teachers] to lunch!
I didn't actually transcribe the conversation as it wasn't relevant to my article, but I was mightily amused by this. Perhaps you had to be there. But one of my friends does say, still, that the best thing writing directors can do is get out on campus and schmooze. Lunch is a great political strategy

Curious Girl gave us Mother's Day presents when we got home today. (I guess around here it's Mothers' Day!) She was all excited when she came in the house and saw the wrapped presents (sent home from school) on the table. "Happy Mothers' Day to you!" she sang. "Let's go do it on the couch." So we went to the couch. "Can I open it for you?" she asked, "because I made it for you, so it's mine, except it's for you." I said she could open it. So she started opening it it, and Politica came in. "Hey, those are our presents. Shouldn't we get to open them?" I allowed as how I'd said CG could open it. "I am teh fun mama," I reminded Politica. CG chimed in, "She is a great mama!" So there you have it.

Curious Girl is teh fun travel companion. For about half an hour today, in the car, we played that she was a puppy named Claire and I was her person, and we played fetch. Except for the little while when she minded my baby while I had to do something else. "Like Carl the Dog," I said. "Except I'm not Carl. I'm Claire."

I know Mother's Day is not easy for many people. So I wish gentleness for everyone reading this, no matter what their relationships to mothers and children, wished for, found, lost, here, not here.

October on the Beach

I grew up on the ocean. My father's family moved to my hometown when he was a teenager, I think, and he and my mother moved back to my hometown when I was three. Even though I left to go to college and never really moved back, and even though I've not been back to my hometown all that much in recent years, the ocean is the place I feel at home. So it was with a sad heart that Curious Girl and I traveled back to my hometown last week, for one last weekend there before my parents move to Massachusetts, to live near my sister.

Curious Girl desperately wanted to put her toes in the ocean. None too surprisingly, putting her toes in the ocean turned into putting her calves in, too, and then once the bottom of her pants got wet there was little reason to worry about the tops getting wet, too. We walked a lot on the beach, we picked up shells, and Curious Girl made up stories about them. "Look! little baby shells! We have to take them home, they're babies, they have no family." I love watching her run on the beach, the same beach I ran on when I was four. We don't have a lot of family traditions in our small and scattered family, and I liked seeing CG in the same place I was, once.

My parents are in their early 80s, and in quite good health. They're active. They're moving, as my dad says, while they still can make their own choices. And I know this is a good thing. Politica's father has been in declining health for several years and it's been hard for us to be so far away from him; it was hard to see him living alone past the point we thought he was really on top of his own needs. My parents will be moving quite close to my sister, and they'll be moving when they're able to make new friends. Rationally, I think it's a great move. But my needy inner child thinks "Ack! They love her more than me!" I'll get over that, I know.

But I'm really going to miss that ocean. I grew up a block from the bay, 8 blocks from the ocean. My grandmother ended up living in an apartment right on the beach, and my parents moved into that apartment after she died. So for the past 10 years they've been living right on the boardwalk, with a terrace and a den that overlooked the ocean. We could see the barges headed for New York's ports, we could see the waves breaking on the jetties, we could see the water changing color, the surfers out in all kinds of weather. It was a great place to grow up. And I'll miss it.