Get back to where you once belonged

Recent Conversation:

Papa to Beckett: What did you do at school today?

Beckett: Push Jojo, sometimes hit.

Papa:.....

A day or two later:

Beckett: Jojo says, "No head butting."

Papa:.....


Another day later:

Beckett: Alex bit you.

Mama (understanding that Beckett has not mastered personal pronouns yet, and meant "Alex bit me"): Where did Alex bite you?

Beckett: On back.

Mama:.....

(Jojo, is Joey. Beckett's friend, and grandson of the owner of the day care. Alex is Alexandra, also a friend.
Does Beckett know that this can't last?)

Better things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Once I read or heard of someone who said that even the most insignificant of human accomplishments is intrinsically better than anything in nature. At the time, I thought of this as overly demeaning of the wonderful world around us. I compared airplanes with birds, dolphins with submarines, and the color scheme on parrots with the tints and hues in a Monet painting and concluded that whoever thought that human accomplishments were better than nature obviously had addled brains. Then I stood on the shore of a lake with my niece Gena during a family reunion and skipped stones across the placid water. We were right smack in the middle of nature at its finest. Blue sky above, mountain rising from the opposite side of the lake, pine trees skewering the skyline, and in symmetry, half-reflection half-real pine tree-diamonds on the opposite shore of the lake. I was very satisfied with myself for selecting stones with the care of David and sending them bouncing across the top of the water as many as sixteen times. After having gotten my fill of feeling good about myself, I turned my attention to the fact that Gena could not skip a stone. I realized that while my prodigious efforts must have been duly enjoyable to her, she was bound to get more enjoyment out of participating in life than watching me fill the lake with all the best and flattest rocks. So I set out to teach her (and several of her cousins) how to skip a stone. This presented a whole slew of challenges. I had to down-size my definition of what constituted a perfect rock. Luckily, the rocks that were good for her, were the very ones that I had passed over as not the best for me, or they would have already been in the lake. Then I wanted to convey to her the necessity of spinning the rock. In the end, I am not sure that at the time she picked up on that crucial point. It often seemed to me that her rocks were more like knuckle-balls. They were heading to the water more or less flat (and often a lot less than flat—sometimes even end-over-end), but seemingly without spin. I adopted the second best strategy of getting her to place the rock flat in her hand and throw side armed. At some point, her little wavering knuckle-ball rock took one little bounce on the top of the water. She jumped up and down and squealed with delight. I thought about the joy that I got out the beautiful nature around me and out my sixteen skips, and the joy I got out of watching her skip a rock for the first time in her life. Then I realized that the person who said that that human accomplishments were intrinsically better than nature, did not have addled brains, s/he was merely looking at the world from a different viewpoint, that of a parent.

I thought of this twice recently. About a week ago, we went to the Mystic Aquarium. We watched the beluga whales, seals, and sea lions, but Beckett liked most the more interactive exhibits. One was plunging his hands into the tide pool and picking up star fish and crabs (which he was not supposed to pull out of the water) and also licking the salt water off his hands. (You would think he doesn’t have enough sodium in his diet, but considering the amount of cheese he eats, I can’t see how that is possible.) He also loved the tanks that were set down at his level, where he could peer into see the puffer fishes and the like. He really went gaga over the puffer fish. But what he liked most of all, was feeding and petting the rays and feeding the parakeets.

We paid two dollars and bought some sardines—the idea was to hold the sardine in your fist and put your fist under the water and let the ray come over the top of your fist and eat the sardine. So I would give him one to hold in his little chubby fist, and he would usually drop it right away and I would have to scoop it out of the water before it floated to the bottom. Despite the snags, we got to touch a lot of rays and feel their smooth skin. Then we went to the parakeet aviary where we bought little popsicle sticks with bird seed glued to them, and fed the birds. Beckett was so earnest in holding his popsicle stick out for the birds to eat, and so interested in them.

A week later, we went to the town commons for The Taste of Amherst Festival in which all the restaurants offer little amuse bouche in hopes of drawing you back to their establishments in the future if you like what they serve. Beckett acquitted himself admirably on the Tikka masala from the Indian restaurant, and then downed almost a full cup of a strawberry and yogurt concoction, and spilled plenty all over his shirt. We had dressed him this morning in a new outfit which is actually for 2 year olds and the pants were too long, so he ran around and dirtied the cuffs of his pants considerably. He was soon quite the sight with pink and curry-yellow dribbled down his front and soggy brown on the seat of his pants and cuffs.

There were also a few rides to go on, a climbing wall, and bungee jumping trampoline in which you get strapped into the bungees and with their aid can jump and do flips. Minimum weight is 30 pounds (and two years of age) and maximum weight is 160 (which meant that Jeanne could easily jump, but left me out), but Beckett was pestering us that he wanted to jump. So we went over to see how much he weighed. In an ultimate irony given that I was a wrestler and was always trying to weigh less, I had to put him on the scales and sort of lean while I steadied him to get him over 30 pounds, and I rounded up on his age by three months as well. The woman manning the scales didn’t seem in the mood to be too exacting about whether I was touching Beckett while I steadied him on the scales, or asking for any birth certificates, so in we went. Another worker then strapped him in to the harness, and Jeanne got to jump exactly across from him so he could see her and she could see him. However, Beckett cannot yet actually jump, let alone do flips. So I sat on the edge of the trampoline in front of him and got him bouncing and then each time he came down, I would grab under his crotch and push him upward so that after a bit, he was bouncing ten or so feet in the air. He squealed with joy, and sometimes when he was up in the air, bicycled his legs kicking furiously.

So there I was about every two or three seconds, in time with him bouncing up and coming back down, grabbing his soggy pants and slightly mushy diaper right at his crotch and giving him a heave upward and watching Beckett squeal and grin. And to tell you the truth, I was having the time of my life, just as I was when he was dropping his sardines into the water but squealing when he actually got to touch a ray. And then I was marveling at my capacity to enjoy his joys, which seems to exceed my capacity to enjoy my own joys. I am not sure you could even characterize what Beckett was doing as an accomplishment at all, (except that he didn’t get scared). All he did was get strapped into the bungees and then enjoy the ride up and down (or drop sardines). But for me it was better than anything in nature.

Treated Us Quite Famillionairely

Long time readers of the blog will know that one of the things on our bucket list was to visit Nantucket. (Newbies see Jan 10, 2008, item #25) The thing about bucket lists is that in theory they should contain things that are a little out of one’s league. No point taking up on spot on the bucket list with “accidentally spurting water out of your nose while laughing too much.” That is the kind of thing anyone on any budget can do. You just need a glass of water and MST 3000 (‘there go the piano lessons’) and you can cross that off your list. So you might wonder if we live in Massachusetts why Nantucket is on our bucket list. Its not like its half a world away, but our guidebook ominously says, “One need not be a millionaire to visit Nantucket, but it couldn’t hurt.” I hate to break it to you, but we don’t happen to belong to the millionaire category, so you see, its not such a stretch that Nantucket is on our list.

Fortuitously, our friends Kirsten and Marshall moved their for a year to teach chemistry and botany to the local high schoolers before med-school, and they have two extra rooms to share with visitors. So we decided to check one bucket off the list. The friday before Memorial Day weekend, we skipped out on work at the half-day mark and in time with Beckett’s nap headed off to Nantucket. We just managed to miss the 4:30 ferry and the next wasn’t until 7:30, so we used that as an excuse to pretend like were are millionaires and took the 10 passenger plane to Nantucket. Beckett loved the flight—he could actually feel like we were in a plane and taking off, rather than feeling like we were just in a narrow long room—and we were enchanted to see the arc of half-moon beaches in Nantucket Harbor from the air. On the taxi from the airport, we were further delighted by the mottled gray faded cedar shake shingles adorning all the houses. Its hard to convey how charming an entire town of gray houses is, and given my usual color preferences, perhaps even more difficult for you to imagine me liking an all-gray town, but the thing is that the shakes don’t fade to a uniform gray, but rather fade to a rich multihued modernist gray similar to the multihued white such as one might find on Malevich’s “White On White.” If you try to imagine colors as flavors, then the Nantucket ceder shake gray is like a mole sauce that keeps repaying your attention over and over as you realize the subtleties and over and undertones of the experience.

Marshall and Kirsten had dinner waiting for us when we arrived: pasta with tomato sauce and some out of this world collard greens. (I honestly never thought I would write that collard greens were out of this world!) Perhaps, I should compare the gray of the cedar shakes with Kirsten and Marshall’s tantalizing collard greens instead, with their nutty and creamy overtones. What with the flight and collard greens, we were already feeling quite like millionaires. They followed it up with conversation rich enough to certainly make us feel like billionaires.

Saturday morning we headed out for walk through Nantucket town ending at Brant Point Lighthouse and shell beach. Beckett enjoyed picking up the shells and throwing them into the water, (see the picture of him in the May 26th blog). Then he made friends with some other people on the beach so he could fly their kite and use their bottle and wand to blow bubbles. Kirsten and Marshall then treated us to another great meal of vegetarian Rubens with coleslaw and jarlsberg cheese. Beckett and I napped while Jeanne tried to keep pretending she was a millionaire and want out shopping with Kirsten, and returned with some Nantucket Reds. In the evening, we took a tour of the local high school where Marshall and Kirsten are trying to impart some knowledge to the next generation of Nantucketers, and then went to a friend’s house for Memorial Day/Figawi Race Barbeque.
[Beckett mauls the cat of Marshall and Kirsten's kind friend who treated us to Memorial Day BBQ]

The next day, we went to the whaling museum, which was billed as one of the ten things to do before one died. Since we were crossing off one item from our bucket list (#25), we were excited to find something so great that it should have been on our list and in the top ten!! After making our way through the museum, I think I’ll stick with our original bucket list, but I have to say that it was a pretty wonderful museum. The life the whalers lead sounded astronomically dangerous. Leaving home for 4-5 years to catch 60 whales; getting pulled behind a whale in a small boat, having to harvest all of the whale’s blubber and melt it down in a furnace right on the boat, and then coming home and receiving maybe 100 dollars. (I found a web page that gives five different ways of estimating inflation between 1840 and today, and the range was from 2100 dollars to 50,000 dollars, but even at the high range, if you had to go out on a boat for 4-5 years and you only got 50,000 when you came back, that would hardly be anything to shout about.)
After another nap for Beckett and his papa, we borrowed a Jeep from Kirsten and Marshall’s friends and headed to Siasconset. If you think that a Nantucket town’s gray houses are charming, wait until you see the gray capes of Siasconset with their grass roads between them. Of course there are some nods to civilization and car culture in that there are some paved roads in the town, but its clear that Siasconset is trying not to let too much spoil the enjoyment of their wealth. Along with walks along the roads, we went to the beach and flew kites, looked at seals or sea otters, and took a side-trip to the light-house. Our kite proved ideal for the mercurial nature of the wind because it would dive and swoop and attack people on the beach and we could blame it all on the fluctuations of the wind. Ever the naturalist, Kirsten called our attention to the quality of sand on the Siasconset beach. As opposed to the predominantly shell covered beach of the day before, this sand was somewhat was grainy and crumbly and composed of little particles of various colors. We were becoming Nantucket beach connoisseurs of sorts. For dinner, we were treated to a curry, chickpea casserole and delicate pannacota for dinner. Then over more stimulating conversation, Kirsten showed us the finer points of weaving and introduced us to some really delicious yarns and the textiles she was making from them. Each moment of our vacation was surpassing the next.

On Memorial Day, Kirsten and Marshall turned out to have a French toast recipe designed specifically for use on challah. Imagine someone who has one recipe for French toast on regular bread and one for challah! Talk about being culinarily spoiled with minute sensations. We took the jeep for a second day and went to Madaket beach on the other side of the island. As you might guess by now, the sand was different, much finer and more uniform of color. We sat out of the wind for a while watching the ocean and letting Beckett dig, and then walked along the beach to the narrow point where the waves crashed on one side and the water lay calm and the beach sand so fine as to be almost silt or mud on the other side. We watched the birds caterwaul and swarm on the calm side of the island, a fitting counterpoint to the bare rippling of the water, and the crashing of waves just yards away on the other side of the island.

For lunch, Jeanne and I took the opportunity to treat Marshall and Kirsten (who had already made such great meals for us) to real Japanese food since we don’t have any close to where we live. (One of the downsides to living in a small town after having accustomed oneself to the quality of sushi in Tokyo.) then we were off to a different beach for the afternoon, Surfside, with different sand, different beach contours, but the same great conversations as the rest of the weekend. All too soon the afternoon was over, and we had to make the return flight to the mainland, and leave our millionaire world of finely discerned flavors and colors and textures (and textiles, along with the nuanced conversation that has no price tag) behind us, but for a few short days, we sure felt like we were doing something out of our league and deserving of a place on the bucket list.

[Beckett and papa fly the crazy kite!]

You'll Have to Be up with the Lark

[Right: Jeanne, our host Emma, and our Cousin-in-law Nette slaving away in the Kitchen on the day before Mother's Day]

Just a day before the end of classes, our cousins John and Nette and their daughter Mina (Minerva) invited us down to Barnegat Light on the Jersey shore for the weekend to christen the new bed and breakfast Minerva’s By the Sea owned and managed by Nette’s wonderful mother Emma Lapsansky (who also happens to be Minerva’s proud grandmother, and drives a VW bug sporting the ever-so-hip license plate ‘ELAPS’).

Shameless plug—for a great weekend down the shore see: www.MinervasBandB.com

The traffic deities smiled upon us (meaning fast speeders to follow so I could speed without get more points on my license, and no traffic jams to slow any of us), and we made it to Long Beach Island with plenty of time for socializing in the evening before it was time for bed. Minerva’s By the Sea was a delightful place to stay and our company turned out to be more delightful than that. Along with Nette’s mother, our gracious host, we were joined by Nette’s uncle, my Aunt Laree and Uncle Dick, John’s sister Annie and her husband Eliot and their two kids Max and Sonia, and my sister Linda her husband Devin and their two kids Loren and Adelle.

Saturday morning, Beckett woke at 5:30 AM so we had an early morning stroll through Barnegat Light before returning so I could be the breakfast sous-chef for Emma. I stole a few cooking tips from her, while regaling her with stories of Japanese comic books and animated films. I definitely got the better end of that deal! Most of the rest of the people got up at a more vacationally appropriate 9 or 10, by which time Beckett, Jeanne and I had been up for half a day, and Beckett was working on his third meal. After waffles with fixings, we took a group walk to the boat docks to see the fishing boats, some jelly fish, and give Beckett and Mina a chance to throw a lot of things in the water, including, much to my chagrin, cigarette butts Beckett found on the ground. I don’t know why I suddenly feel more responsible for litter if it has been picked up once by Beckett and then re-deposited into nature, but I did feel a sense of ownership about that cigarette butt which is now polluting the bay with a small bit of tar and nicotine. I suppose that Big Tobacco will claim that Nicotine is not habit forming in fish, and that the science is still ambiguous as to whether the tar will give the fish cancer, but I still cringed.

We picked up Dick and Laree and continued the walk to Barnegat Lighthouse. Uncle Dick was his jolly and droll self as always, while Aunt LaRee remained ever the incisive commentator and puncturer of our self-proclaimed wit. Climbing to the top of the lighthouse for views of the ocean and bay is allowed and encourage, so we did. Beckett seemed mainly to enjoy the wind, and I couldn’t tell if he realized that he was going around in circles or just thought that the walkway at the top of the lighthouse was infinitely long, but he did circumnavigate the top several times. Loren went up and down three times in order to ensure that we had a good group average, but even Laree and Dick showed that they still have what it takes by making up at least 60 steps. I am sure this disappointed Loren who suddenly found that he could have skipped half a trip up and down and still kept us on average, but the exercise was good for us all.

All the while, Beckett and Mina renewed their budding relationship with Beckett trying to kiss or hug Mina several times. We have been working with Beckett on not hitting or pushing other kids, so in a sense, kissing and hugging are a step in the right direction, but there is that problem of a male kissing and hugging a female who hasn’t consented to such behavior. So we will have to further refine our coaching on Beckett’s interpersonal relationships at a later date. I admit I felt less guilty about Beckett’s forays into putting the moves on his second cousin (heck that’s legal in at least 16 out of 50 states), than I did his redistributing the litter from the street to the sea. Don’t know what that says about my ethical compass.

During naptime, the adults sat around and talked politics, economics, and the like and second guessed Reagan as much as would be expected with between two and six proud Obama-mama’s in our midst. Strangely enough, John was the apologist for Reagan. Don’t know what that says about his ethical compass.

We took a late afternoon trip to the beach, and promptly discovered that the May version of the Jersey shore demands a sweatshirt for proper beach enjoyment. We flew Loren’s kite, turned over atavistic horseshoe crabs, split open mermaid's purses, and then when we got chilled to the bone retreated to the lee of a beach dune to watch the waves and sky protected from the wind. Whatever we lose (like a dozen degrees), its always ourselves we find at the sea.
When even the lee of the dune couldn’t keep us out in the wind any longer, we double-retreated back to Minerva’s just in time to watch the sun drop below the horizon from the second story balcony. Dinner was lasagna provided once again by the industrious Emma, coupled with a birthday cake for Linda who is turning, dare I say it, the big 3-0. Conversation flowed freely, and lasted until way later than it should have for those whose 19 month old sons are likely be up with the roosters.

Beckett was indeed up with the lark, so the three of us had another early morning beach walk that couldn’t be beat, and then hustled back to help out again with breakfast. This time, owing to a mother’s day commitment by the men to let the womenfolk rest, John was the head chef, Eliot was the sous-chef and I was the sous-sous (aka dishwasher and cleaner-upper). John oversaw the creation of famed Aldous crepes and the men almost (but not quite) dethroned Emma from her status as king of the kitchen.

That afternoon, Annette and Eliot and Dick and Laree and company had to head back to Virginia, but Jeanne, Beckett and I convinced the remaining folks to head to the beach again. This time the temperature was more accommodating, but the wind still sandblasted us. The waves were cold enough on our ankles to make us wince, but it sunny out and we had lots of good fun that was funny. We would have gladly stayed on for more, but classes awaited us back in Amherst, so in the evening, with tears in our eyes, we waved goodbye to Minerva’s by the Sea, and our wonderful cousins and host, and headed off into the sunset (actually away from the sunset) for the long ride home, but with warm feelings in our hearts and a desire to make Minerva’s By the Sea our Jersey Home away from Home.

Have credit card, Will Travel

Yesterday we were in Nantucket visiting our friends Kirsten and Marshall. Clearly the monied atmosphere influenced Beckett dramatically. When he woke up he told me, "I have credit card. I go Chucucago (Chicago) and California." (He has been talking about Chicago and California since Bruce and I had to visit each of those places for conferences.) Clearly this is the case of have card, will travel.

You Say Plimoth, I Say Plymouth, Lets Call the Whole Thing Off

You might think that in a college town with two colleges and one large public university, the public schools and colleges would get together and align holidays so that all the professors in town would have vacation at the same time as their children. This seems like it would be great for everyone. Kids and their parents could enjoy vacations together. However, due to some completely inexplicable oversight UMass’s holidays turn out not to be coordinated at all with those of Amherst public schools. We happen not to have any school aged children yet—we like to think of Beckett as a prodigy, but he is not that advanced—so this shouldn’t really affect us, but it also turns out that all of the day care providers in town must take care of their own kids during the public school holidays, so we day care consumers also suffer from the lack of cooperation between the colleges and the public schools. Add to this the simple fact that Jeanne and I managed to schedule our teaching times to exactly overlap with each other, and we realized that we had a problem on our hands. After much casting around, we realized that the cheapest (and most fun) option for ensuring that Beckett didn’t run the streets and hang out smoking cigarettes behind the gym with reprobates during his week-long holiday from daycare was to fly his grandmother out to tend him. So we got to have a special visit from Grandma Diana for week. [Plimoth Plantation Cannon]

She arrived on Monday evening and she and Beckett hit it off like old buddies. By the time it came for Papa to head off to work Tuesday AM, Beckett hardly acted like he cared at all. Diana is the ultimate baby-sitter and extrovert, so she planned up a week’s worth of activities and was soon better acquainted with all of the parents of Beckett’s friends (who were all on the same circuit of kid’s activities it seems) than we are. She took Beckett to the library singing time, and to the crafts time at the kids’ museum, and to the park. We also got some free housecleaning and dinners out of Grandma. So she did double duty for us.

For the weekend, we headed off to Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth Rock (yes the spelling is different for these two Plimoth/Plymouth’s just three miles apart) and the Mayflower. Plimoth Plantation is one of those places were actors dress up and act like the original pilgrims. This is both fun and not fun. First the not fun: If you were really a pilgrim in Plimoth Plantation in 1629 and a bunch of weirdly dressed wildly impractical people butted into your affairs all day every day to ask you questions about what you were eating and why you were stacking firewood and the like and wanted to stand by you and have their friends point little black boxes and you, it would probably take about three days before you would get annoyed with them and want to hide. So the problem here is that rather than act like Plimoth pilgrims, but ones that happened to have an infinite amount of leisure time and no pressing tasks to tend to and an innate love for answering the questions, many of these actors acted like genuine pilgrims who were bothered by all the interruptions in their overly busy lives. [Native Person House-Great Architecture]

The fun part: some of the pilgrims did indeed act the way you would want them to. One fellow seemed to have nothing better to do than regale us strange passersby with all sorts of stories about town politics and wove a skillful monologue which taught us quite a bit about life and attitudes in 1629 Plimoth. It was also fun to answer one of their questions naively and have them express amazed wonderment at something we said. A different fellow asked Jeanne how old Beckett was and when she told him that he was 18 months old, he replied that he had never heard of such an odd way of reckoning age, and wondered what she would say when he was 12 years old. A woman didn’t know what Jeanne was talking about when Jeanne asked if she wore make-up and no amount of explanation could get across to her why someone would want to put extra color on their body and why anyone else would think that doing such a thing would increase ones allure. Somehow the conversation wound around to bathing and the she wondered why anyone would want to bath more than once a fortnight or so, and expressed deep concern that we were washing essential oils off our bodies by cleaning ourselves so often. It is always good to be reminded that one’s own practices are near arbitrary and just because that is the way we have always done it and the way that everybody around us does it, it doesn’t mean it's the right or best way to do it.

After Plimoth Plantation, we went to Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II. Beckett napped while Diana and Jeanne went to the Mayflower II, and then Beckett and I watched motorcycles cruise main street. Our Beckett loves motorcycles. Then it was my turn to had Beckett off to mama and grandma and visit the Mayflower II and Plymouth Rock myself. Oddly both were much smaller than one imagines, but while the rock was smaller in the disappointing kind of what’s-all-the-fuss way, the Mayflower II was smaller in an Now-I-understand-what-all-the-fuss-was way. Imagining all those people and sailors packed into that tiny ship getting sick and growing tired of the same provisions every day—it really must have been miserable. But they stuck it out for a glimmer of a different better life, and while its hard from this remove to condone the condescending way that they treated the native population when they got here, its not hard to empathize with people who were feeling their own kind of oppression or marginalization and wanted to go somewhere else and establish a different society.

All in all it was a good day. And all too soon, we had to take Grandma Diana back to the airport and send her back home again. But we had a real New England experience with her, and Beckett enjoyed becoming good friends with Grandma.

Beckett is also a Hardy

Last week Bruce and Beckett were in Henion Bakery (the bakery at which, as you might remember from our 2005 Christmas letter, we have a tab) to buy bread. Beckett stood in front of the cake display, pointed up at the cakes, and insisted CAKE! CAKE! CAKE! I WanT IT! (With incredibly precise enunciation, that even made his linguist father proud).