Monkey Business

David and Trinity started tumbling classes last week. We've noted for a long time what beautiful summersaults they both do, David especially: he tucks his head under and rolls forward with his legs straight and together. It's like watching a seasoned diver go into a tuck from the high dive. Trinity's summersaults are a little more like head stands with an added bonus (and she can't do them on the hard wood floors because the' 'fro doesn't create enough friction, but we do get some much needed sweeping done when she tries!). We've also taken note of just how house bound we feel in these cold winter months. And so we made the decision to get the kids out of the house and maybe build some athletic skills while we're at it.

Trinity has taken right to it. She is focused and enthusiastic. She's in love with the bar that they have set up about 2.5 feet off the ground and from which she can hang. Her other great love is the trampoline, and then comes getting thrown into the gigantic pit of large foam squares. In fact, the very idea of tumbling came from Trin's talent for crib jumping and general rolling about. Check her out:**



David, on the other hand, mostly wants to see what other people are doing. These other people are mostly girls between the ages of 8 and 17 who are flip-flopping all over the place at great speed, and he usually wants to get close to the action. Poor guy: at the rate he's going, he'll be trampled by a group of girls in leotards before his third birthday.

A student of mine is a former competitive gymnast, and while talking to her and her father about tumbling and gymnastics, I realized that I don't think I want either one of them to *really* pursue it. The combination of high cost and unholy hours, not to mention ghastly injuries for micro-miscalculations, and long-term ill-effects (my student tells me she can't bowl, for instance, because her arm pops out of it's socket on the backswing), leaves me less than enthused. Still, it's great to see them getting some focused instruction and having a blast at the same time. Plus, I would love for them to be able to do those high-speed handspring jobs that cover about 50 yards by the time they're done.

Frankly, I would love to be able to do that myself....just to change things up and develop a few tricks that would make an impression...maybe spice up the teaching routine.

Classes started for me last week and I have to admit to feeling a little less than enthused right off the bat. For one thing, I'm teaching three courses that I've taught many, many times before. I change things up as much as I can, just to keep myself interested, but there's only so much you can do sometimes. And each first day of class does tend to bring the same array of questions. Here are some of my favorites -- the ones that drive me batty:

* On the syllabus, if there is a reading listed on a certain day, does that mean we should have it read by that day, or do it on that day? (Honestly, I just don't understand this one.)

* My parents are flying me to London at the end of the semester. I leave on the day of the final, and that's the only flight they could get. Can I take the final early? (I'm always amazed just how poorly parents and their travel agents anticipate the final exam schedule).

* Will you tell us what is going to be on the quizzes? (My reply: "Questions that you need to answer.")

* Is there going to be extra credit? (My reply: "The fact that you are already preparing for the possibility of needing extra credit is a bad sign.")

And my all time favorite....

* Do I need to buy the books? (To which I typically answer, "I don't know. Do you?")

I probably sound like an ogre. I'm not. And I usually follow snarky responses with a smile and then I give them a real answer as if to say, channeling my hero, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog,
"I kid! I kid!" (though Triumph would likely respond first by saying: "That's a good question.....TO POOP ON!").

Don't get me wrong: I have mostly bright and thoughtful students. But when I get questions like these, or I see that group in the back with their laptops open "IM-ing" each other (I can usually tell because they are typing away in short bursts even at times when I'm saying nothing particularly noteworthy...and sometimes they LOL, and I'm not that funny), I feel like one of those toy monkeys banging its little cymbals together, chattering and smiling like a fool.



** "Trinity is Covered in Bumblebees" (music by JNP, orchestration and arrangement on GarageBand by NNP).

As Time Goes By

My very earliest memories are of living in Navy housing in Annapolis, MD. And even those are merely scattered moments -- just a few snippets here and there without chronology or context:

Taping string to a plastic baseball bat hoping that it would sound like a guitar.
Watching a light snowfall from the upstairs window.
Losing a tricycle race to Bobby Orlosky.
One of the neighbors running from her house with a bee in her blouse.
Hiding under a blanket while watching an episode of Star Trek that I found too scary.
A guy tossing me a baseball (I found out later that it was one of the Oakland A's).

Two years and this is all that remains. Nothing monumental here -- just the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday. But why these moments and not others? What was it about these things that made an indelible impression? Or do I remember these things because they fit most closely with the person I am today? Do I select them from a larger array of possible memories because they reaffirm certain things about me?

Actually, there are other memories, but I'm not sure they are really mine. Instead, they're more like narratives that I have constructed from hundreds of snapshots in shoeboxes and funny stories repeated around the dinner table over the years.

I like to tell stories; it's something my family does. Nancy makes fun of me sometimes because she's well aware that the stories I tell about my childhood have changed over time. She recognizes that I've sacrificed the facts in many cases in order to offer a better narrative with structure and coherence, even though lived experience rarely possesses either of those things.

I've been thinking lately about David and Trinity and what they will remember, not only of their early days with us, but of their lives before us. And I wonder what kinds of stories they will tell about themselves. For Trinity, of course, there's not much there before us: just four months with the McBrides, her first foster parents, who got her two days after she was born. But when we ran into Jean and Ken a few weeks ago at a restaurant, Trinity climbed into Jean's lap and snuggled in like not one day had passed since she was in her care. There's something there, no matter how faint. And there probably always will be.

For David, though, the story is different and far more complicated. He spent his first five months with his birth parents until he was badly injured in their care. His next eight months were with a really large foster family. In Spring of 2006, they decided they needed a break from foster care, and the kids were re-placed. David came to us when he was 14 months old: handed off at a shelter in Collette Park. There was no fanfare, no official documents signed on site, no instruction manual -- just a quick and slightly teary goodbye from his first foster mom, and then there we were. We'd met him only once before for about 15 minutes.

What does he remember about that day? What does he remember about his life before he met us? What will he choose to remember as time takes him farther from the experiences themselves?

We recently received an envelope full of pictures of David just after he was born and up to his first birthday. Everyone looks so happy; it's a family just about like any other. But now his family looks completely different. He'll see these pictures, of course. And when he's old enough to begin to understand, we'll explain to him what happened. We don't want to keep things from him, because it's his story and he should be proud of it; it's who he is. But, strangely, though it's his story, we'll be the ones framing it. And we don't know all the details.

And as time marches forward, and we begin to forget details, or reconstruct them into a more satisfying narrative, what happens to the truth about his experiences? There are documents that he could seek out in order to piece it all back together, and they might run counter to his "memories." So what is the function of our memories? Should we strive for clarity and exactitude about the painful, mundane, or chaotic truth? Or is it better to construct a story that exists somewhere between fact and fiction: something we can live with, something that gets better with time?

I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement

Last night I went down to the basement to put a load of laundry in the washer and fold the clothes that were waiting on top of the dryer. Nancy was upstairs with the kids. Suddenly, I got this feeling that something was wrong, or that I was being approached from behind. All of my basement-related nightmares started coming back to me. I turned around but saw nothing and nobody.

And then she appeared, smiling ever so slightly as she descended the last treacherous step and put her bare foot down on the very hard concrete floor of the basement.

Trinity: the girl who, not more than a year ago fell ALL THE WAY DOWN the much longer staircase from the bedrooms upstairs to the main floor of the house (and did so without getting a scratch, I should add, but a singularly terrifying moment, nonetheless). She knows she's not supposed to get on the stairs by herself, especially descending.

So, I swept her up and marched her back upstairs.

And then it hit me: I had the feeling that someone was approaching me before she was down the stairs. And with the washer running, there's no way I could have heard her footfalls. I didn't hear her approaching...I felt her approaching.

Nancy says she had many instances during her teenage years when she would suddenly think of a meal while she was at school only to find out upon returning home that they were having that very meal for dinner.

There's something to be said for being so in tune with someone, or so alert to a situation, that you can anticipate future actions. But then there are those experiences that can't be explained by mere coincidence -- those moments when you have to at least entertain the notion that there's something else going on: something mysterious and uncanny.

Here are a couple of my favorites.

Back in the early '90s,when Nancy and I had an apartment in Portland, ME, my parents had come to visit. At this time, Nancy was cultivating an interest in growing her own herbs. Being apartment dwellers, however, we didn't have any garden space. So, my father offered to build Nancy a big table on which she could construct a mini garden lot, and over which we could hang a grow-light (no, she wasn't growing pot in her closet). As we began to prepare for the construction, we realized that we needed a long extension cord for the circular saw. I didn't have one and so Dad and I took off for the nearest hardware store, which was within walking distance, down the hill and on Commercial Street. As we started to descend the hill toward the store, we noticed a scraggly looking fellow coming up the hill toward us. As we got near to him, he stopped and asked us the following question:

"You guys interested in an extension cord?"

He produced exactly the thing we were on our way to get, albeit not a new one. But still...

Without hesitating, or really even breaking stride, both my father and I replied, simply, "No, thanks."

When we got a few steps farther, we both started laughing, perhaps a little nervously. I always wonder what would have happened had we taken that extension cord from him.

A couple of years before that incident, Nancy and I had taken a leave from responsible living, and set out across the U.S. on an open-ended road trip. We worked in Yellowstone for a few months, went to San Francisco to see old friends of mine (attended Beth and Hugh's wedding!), visited my folks in San Diego, went to Graceland, etc. When we got back to Maine we were, of course, unemployed so we lived for a few months with Nancy's folks and worked temp jobs as a way to save some money for the security deposit on an apartment down in Portland.

One of these temp jobs was a two-week gig at an L.L. Bean overstock sale. Bean's rented a huge abandoned shell of a department store (formerly an Ames, I think) in Bangor, trained a couple dozen of us in the ways of the Bean, and stuffed the gigantic space with everything they had been unable to sell otherwise (plus some nice things, too).

Early on in the two week run, I contracted a nasty flu bug: bad cough, horrible aches, and a fever over 102. I was out for a few days until the fever broke. When I came back, I was still a bit shaky on my pegs, so they told me to just work the floor, replacing items that had been abandoned on the ground and helping people who had questions.

At one point, I was in the middle of the store and saw a man who looked just like Redd Foxx. Now in Bangor, ME, you don't see a lot of older African-American men hanging around the L.L. Bean sale; it's just a demographic reality. The fact that he looked just like Redd Foxx made me go get Nancy to show her that there was a celebrity among us. I was gone about a minute. When I came back to the spot with Nancy, he was gone. Not just in another area. Gone. There's no way he could have navigated the clusters of clothes racks to get from the middle of that enormous space to the doors and out in the time that I took to get Nancy.

"Weird," I thought. "I wonder if I just imagined that in some still fever-addled part of my brain."

Nancy went back to work.

When we got home that night, I turned on the 11:00 news. A few stories in, the anchor said something like the following:

"And sad news out of Hollywood tonight. Comedian and actor, Redd Foxx passed away today."

I looked at Nancy, she looked at me. "Now, that's creepy," she said.

Frankly, I'm kind of flattered by the thought that Redd Foxx might have chosen to reveal himself to me in the afterlife.

Just so long as he stays out of my basement.

The Defiant Ones

Friday morning at 4:13 I awoke to the all too familiar sound of Trinity fussing in her crib. She had most likely shed her three blankets during the inch-worm routine that she does in her sleep, leaving her exposed to the too-cold upstairs air despite the cozy cotton footy pjs she's wearing; she's a true princess, in the pea under the mattress sort of way. As usual, I hauled myself out from under the two comforters and shuffled over to her crib, mumbling something about needing sleep. "It's four in the morning, Trinity. Go to sleep," I said as I returned the blankets to their rightful place and patted her on the back in a perfunctory sort of way.

"No."

"You're not going back to sleep?" I asked, a little miffed, a little amused.

"No," she whispered in her best sleepy Lauren Bacall voice.

And so it was that Trinity and I, after about a half hour of increasingly tense negotiations, ended up downstairs, first in the recliner foolishly hoping for sleep, and then in the playroom watching "Teddy Bear Jump" (aka "A Pocket for Corduroy") until Nancy stumbled down and took over at 6:00.

More and more these days it seems that our requests and demands are met with that staple of toddlerhood: the simple and defiant "No." More often than not there is an exclamation point attached to the end. Sometimes, it precedes my name (in rare instances, Nancy's): "No, Daddy!" Other times it's hurled between the two of them. All too often, it seems to come out as a verbal tick: a go to response to hold the place of the real response while the request is being decoded and scored for desirability. Hence, the question, "Do you want a cookie?" is often met initially with "No" followed closely by "Cookie! Have it, cookie!"

Of course, every parent in every country in the world in every epoch has experienced what I'm talking about. It's nothing new. But David and Trinity have a better trick up their sleeve. It's the thing that my brothers and I weren't allowed to say without penalty, and I never understood why until now. It's the simple, straightforward, and really annoying, "Shut up." Of course, in their mouths it comes out more like, "Shuuup!" but it's no less grating and rude. And the maddening thing is that David KNOWS it's not a good thing to say, but he just can't seem to stop himself. And when he gets started, it turns into a chant. He's even trying out different inflections: loud and disobedient, or sometimes with a smile (stated almost like a question), or long and drawn out, or short and to the point.

But no matter what, and unlike most of the other things these kids do, it's never cute or charming.

Nor am I cute and charming when the kids are acting up. I try desperately to be patient and understanding. "They're only almost 2 and 3," I tell myself. And then I get hit in the head with a Hot Wheel, or someone gets bitten, or I get told to shut up, and I dissolve into Mr. Frederickson, my cranky seventh grade PE teacher, whose angry and impatient bellow we all swore must have risen out over Otay Lakes Road like a thunderclap, reverberating all the way down to Bonita Road, causing shoppers at Big Bear to stop dead in their tracks.

But then the sound of my voice -- denying, correcting, chastising -- echoes back to me and I start to wonder who it is that is being truly defiant.

This morning on the way to daycare, as we sat in the usual left turn lane, waiting for the usual green arrow, to go over the usual overpass and into the usual parking lot, David said, "No, Mommy, go this way." He was pointing to the right and up Wabash Avenue heading east.

"No, honey, we have to go see Miss Vicky at daycare."

"No, Mommy, this way."

"David, we have to go to daycare."

"Mommy, this way."

The light turned green and we turned left (as usual), etc., etc.

Perhaps ninety percent of the requests that the kids make are met with a quick and definitive veto. We've got things to do, places to be, and indulging the whims of two wild toddlers is not going to get us there any faster. So we deny them.

We deny them sweets, television, opportunities to climb the stairs by themselves, hot dogs for breakfast, the dog's water, and so on, and so on.

Of course, our job is to teach them how to be responsible and respectful individuals -- and to keep them healthy and as injury free as possible. But I also worry that we are also teaching them (or me at least -- Nancy is way more fun than me) that there's very little time or place for simply seeing where this road will take us, or finding out what dog food tastes like, or how it will feel to jump from the coffee table onto the couch, or what this button on the television does.

"No. No. No. No. No. No!"

No wonder they want us to shut up.