Grand Central Vacation

Recently, in quick succession, we hosted Linda, Devin, Loren and Adelle, cousin John, Nettie, and Mina, and then Ken, Debbie, Chris, and Kyle. We enjoyed them all, and I should really give each visit its own post, but in the meantime, here are photos.

[Beckett making his father proud by demonstrating wrestling prowess, and Ken making Beckett's mother retroactively nervous now that she can see how we play with Beckett when she is away.]

More Rocks

They say that once you have kids, you forgive your parents. I don’t know that I am ready to give up my excuse for all my neuroses just yet, but I have had two experiences recently that have me rethinking Mom and Dad’s choices and my choices as a parent. When I was little, we had to meet with Dad every few months to review our goals and set new ones for the next few months. At some point while in college, I looked at my goals and found one from when I was three which was to wear my shoes. The thing about this goal is I am having a hard time imagining that I was the one who made the goal to wear my shoes. I can’t see myself doing such a thing. This goal has all the marks of a suggestion from Dad, and I’ve always gotten a snarky pleasure out of telling people at cocktail parties that my parents once made me make a goal to wear my shoe when I was three and rolling my eyes in that way we all do when we reflect on all the ridiculous things our parents did to us.

Enter Beckett. And I am revisiting the those self-satisfied smirks. Beckett doesn’t like to wear his shoes, and in theory I would like to be in favor of this just to demonstrate how far I have advanced from my parents’ benighted behavior, but it turns out that there is a reason why everyone but Australian bush people wear shoes: slivers. One really has four options in the shoe wearing department. One is to fly. The second is to not wear shoes for long enough that the soles of your feet get hard enough to repel thorns, nails, sticks, tacks, glass shards, and other on-ground detritus (this is what bush people do). The third one is to not wear them occasionally, and get slivers. The last is to bite the bullet and wear shoes. In the case, of Beckett, we haven’t been successful at options one or two, which means we are mainly doing three, but beginning to think that maybe four is not such a bad idea.

While traveling to grandma and grandpa’s recently, Beckett ran around on the back patio in his bare feet and used his heel to separate a little sliver of wood from the deck, which he subsequently took with him. Jeanne and grandpa got out the tweezers and the sterilized needles and began digging around in Beckett’s heel to try to get the sliver back out. They had the easy job. Digging around. I had the hard job: holding him still so they wouldn’t run their needles all the way to bone, and being close to his head. It didn’t take but one second of digging around for Beckett to decide that he didn’t like slivers but he hated getting them out even more. By now, he has plenty of language tools at his disposal. He cried and yelled and screamed, but what was worse is when he stopped screaming and started talking. He pled with us to stop. “No, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” I was holding him from wiggling and tearing up myself. I wrote an blog recently about me enjoying Beckett’s joys, but the obverse is me feeling pain at his pain, and my capacities to do both seem equally matched. Call it the curse and blessing of empathy.

Beckett is now minus one sliver, and since then gotten another, but the pain of slivers seems not to last as long as his desire to be free of his shoes. So maybe Dad had encouraged me to make the goal to wear my shoes, not because he cared about shoes per se, but because he didn’t want to see me get slivers, and he didn’t want to have to be the person holding me still and listening to me plead with him to stop digging my slivers out. Maybe he was half looking out for me and half trying not to break his own heart.

There is one more facet to the story. When I was little, I also remember filling my pockets full of rocks. And I do mean full. I would stuff my pockets full up to the brim with rocks. So many rocks into my pockets that I could not quite properly take my pants on and off, because the rocks had my pants bulged out taut so even though I didn’t have any hips or waste to speak of, my jeans were tighter on me than any 80’s girl. Now, I don’t recall that my Dad and Mom ever had me make a goal to put fewer rocks in my pocket, so I can’t be smug about my parenting, but ever since Beckett made the transition to toddler, I have been looking forward to the day when he would stuff so many rocks in his pockets that he couldn’t get his pants on and off, and feeling some strange proleptic pride at the thought that he was certain to do so.

[Beckett picking up a rock (meteor) to put in his pocket at the Natural History Museum]

Today, was not that day. Not yet, that is. We came home from school, and went up stairs to play in his bedroom, and he wanted to lie down on his bed with his stuffed dogs, bears, and monkey. Then I felt something strange like crumbs all over his bed. After a little searching, I realized that he while at school, he had stuffed a quarter inch layer of pebbles and sand into shirt pocket, which now that he was horizontal was spilling out on his bed. I began to realize that maybe its not such a great idea to wait anxiously for the day when Beckett fills his pants pockets with rocks, because those rocks will have to come out somewhere and it seems likely that they will come out in his (or worse, my) bed, or in the laundry, or on the living room carpet, or in the bathtub, or on our hardwood floor. And none of those places seems like such a great place for a pocket full of rocks. Again, in theory, I would like to be pro-rocks, but in practice, I am afraid that I’ll not enjoy the rocks nearly as much as I thought I would a week ago. Next thing you know, I’ll be setting goals with him not to put rocks in his pockets.

[Beckett dumping dirt in the hair of cousin Mina]

Beckett and his Grandpas

We went to Utah, Wyoming, and Arizona, but somehow hardly ever got out our camera. But here is Beckett hearing a story from Grandpa Al, and Beckett on his first horse ride with Grandpa Jim (with a shout out to Ashley for being such a great co-rider)

All About Eve

The Scene: Preschool

The Players: DL (day care provider and grandmother of Jojo) Beckett, Jojo (see preceding post) and Eve (roughly Beckett and Jojo's same age, has older brother--coincidentally also named Beckett--and thus is long suffering)

Jojo hits Eve and sprints for a secluded corner on the other side of the stairs and behind the coat racks. DL chases him, and comes upon four little legs poking out--Beckett and Jojo are sitting side by side in the narrow spot conferring.

Jojo: I hit Eve.

Beckett: Hmm.

Pause

Beckett: Better go kiss her.

Jojo and Beckett race out of the mini-cul de sac and over to bestow hugs and kisses on Eve. Jojo hopes this will earn him a repreive. Beckett is either just along for a gratuitous hug or else feels that he needs to support his friend who is likely to get in trouble otherwise.

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!]