Texting

On falling down

“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.” 

                                                      ― Martin Luther King Jr.

If there's one concept I wish I could teach my daughter, it would be this. The Universe seems inexorably to succumb to decay. But in each of us is a creative power that trumps the destructive forces that surround us, if only we will have the will to use it. From the ruins of tragedy may be built soaring towers of transcendence. 

Thunderpants, sprinkler, baby potato, Sprinkling love

A million splashes

Our new place is a short walk to a park with a fishing pond. As we walk along the road to the pond, Addison and I fill our pockets with little flat stones. Skipping stones is a new skill that Addison is keen to learn. As I skip a rock, she counts the splashes: "One . . . two . . . threefourfivesix!" And when she tosses her own rock like a shot-putter hurling a cannonball, she waits for the single massive splash and shouts, "Whoa! A MILLION splashes!"

We go to the pond almost every day. I scan the ground for likely candidates as we walk. My heart skips a beat when I pick up a really quality skipping rock, something with a comfortable heft and a nice place to curl my finger around it. The kind of skipping rock that's so beautifully formed, so perfect for its purpose, that you save it for last and then don't want to use it after all. Because in the end, the very best skipping rock is the one that skips the farthest and then sinks into the depths, beyond recovery. Such great potential paired with the heartbreak of such a singular moment, a brief triumph that can never be repeated.

As I watched my daughter bend down to pick up stones in the dirt shoulder of the road, I considered her little self. So perfectly formed. And her hand fits so perfectly in mine. I kind of just want to keep her in my pocket and never let her go.

But really (I have to keep telling myself this), raising a kid is like having a perfect skipping stone that's MAGIC. You throw it out, and it skips incredibly, beautifully across the surface. And then it comes BACK. It always comes back. So long as you've treasured it, cradled it in the palm of your hand, loved it with all you have. So long as you pause a moment before launch, breathless, preparing yourself mentally for all that will come. If your throw is true and pure, imbued with the experience of many past successes and many hours of practice. If you've earned the stone's love, it comes back.

And then, one day, the stone will learn that it can throw itself. All those times when you launched it out there with your heart in your throat -- they were all for this purpose. So that someday, even when you're not there, the stone will keep throwing itself out there, and keep skipping gracefully, magnificently across the surface, and never sink to the bottom.

"Whoa! A MILLION splashes!"

Booming the scares, taking care of hurt monsters, phoning dead relations, wanting new parents, PICKLEWEASEL!

We're almost done with our move up into the mountains, blog post to come soon. In the meantime, there have been a bunch of conversations I wanted to record. As first seen on my Facebook page, here they come:

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Addison has recently been complaining about scary things at night, something that's never been an issue before. She'll come running out of her room at bedtime, saying, "Scares! In the dark! There are scares in my room!" 

So Lindsay tried to teach her a little trick with an invisible magic wand to make the scary things go away: 

Lindsay: Just say, "Abracadabra scary things away, BOOM."  

And then Addison's maternal instincts kicked in and all her fears of things that go bump in the night faded away, to be replaced with this:

Addison: Oh no! You boomed the scares! But now all the little scares are hurt and they don't have their moms and dads to take care of them. I will be their mom now. Poor scares. Poor, poor scares.

And so Addison, now refusing to go to bed for a different reason, starts wandering around to all the dark little corners of her room muttering "it's okay, scares. It's okay. I'll take care of you."

Kids. They take that parenting manual and really scribble all over it.

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My daughter, running breathlessly out of her bedroom: 

Addison: There's monsters in my room! 

Lindsay: Oh? 

Addison: Yeah. And some of them are hurt. And I need to take care of them. 

Lindsay: Okay, well, get back into bed and take care of them. 

Addison: Okay. 

I can see that we may have a new bed-time routine.

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As we near our move-out date and Addison contemplates what it means to move from one home to another, and since she thinks about her deceased (great) Grandpa all the time, this is where her thoughts went: 

Addison: Does God have rooms? 

Lindsay: Uh. What? 

Addison: Like to sleep in... 

Lindsay: Um. Maybe? 

Addison: Let's call my Grandpa and ask him to ask God to give us some rooms to sleep in after we die. 

Because when you travel from one place to another, you always want to know that there's a safe place to land. Count on a kid to remind you that mundane things act as analogies for the big concepts in life. I'm gonna have to put some extra special thought into cozying up her new room.

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My daughter's revolution continues. She said, "I want new parents." 

The reason? "I want new stuffed animals," she said. "These stuffed animals are not my favorites." 

Me: And why do you need new parents for that? 

Addison: Because they will have different stuffed animals. They can still be named Lindsay and Neal. But they will wear different clothes.

Lindsay: But we'd miss you so much. 

Addison: It's okay. My new parents will bring me to visit. Or maybe you can come live with my new parents, too. 

My, how easily we are replaced. It's a little sad that she'd trade us for a new set of stuffed animals . . . but at least she doesn't mind if we still live together.

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Typical phone conversation with my daughter: 

Me: I have something to tell you. 

Addison (from a distance): No! 

Me: Ok, then I'll tell you this: Pickle-weasel! 

Addison (suddenly much closer and engaged): Pickle-weasel to you!

Me: No! Pickle-weasel to YOU!

Addison (at max volume): NO! PICKLE-WEASEL TO YOOOOUUU!

I'll treasure these conversations.

Tire swings and quiet moments

It's not often that we catch our daughter in a moment of repose. The world is too big, too exciting, too explorable for her to sit still for more than a fraction of a second. If I ask her to come and sit on my lap and tell me about her day, she comes running, gleefully, and touches down like some winged thing. And then, before I have a chance to wrap my arms around her, she's off again, a bird of prey soaring away with something snatched in her talons. She's a will-o'-the-wisp, materializing in unexpected places, and then slipping away before I've fully realized she was there. She's a pioneer, pushing every frontier, striking breathlessly through liminal spaces, a tiny human-shaped vessel going where none have gone before.

And yet there is a quiet place in this little dynamo. There is an eye to the storm, a still center about which great energies revolve.

I glimpse these moments and I imagine a strange alchemy which converts energy from her recently wind-milling limbs into conceptual fuel. The propellent ignites from a spark in her synapses, and her mind goes questing, boldly travelling her internal infinities.

Or perhaps there is repose both inside and out. Perhaps in these moments her mind empties itself of the myriad distractions of this world. She finds calm. She finds peace. She finds simplicity. And she quietly refills her psychic reserves, safe in sanctuary, before launching back into the wide world of possibilities.

I'm pretty sure I'll never know what secret conversations she has with herself in these moments; I think I like it that way. Because as I watch her and imagine, mystery and possibility fills my head, too.

My little reader and my Google Reader

First, a few pictures of my blossoming reader. After that, a request for help.

The only one on the plane who took the safety announcement seriously

Still poring over it, long after the presentation was over

There be dragons here

We spent a good 25 minutes talking about this single page.

In a couple of days, Google Reader will disappear. Every time I log in, I get a message reminding me of its impending doom. And I still haven't found a replacement. When the demise of Reader was announced several months ago, I spent some time researching alternatives, but I wasn't ready to make the leap. Now I'm going back and trying to do more research, but it's tricky because a lot of the reviews I find are many months old and may not be fully accurate.

According to my stats, I've got over 100 subscribers on Google Reader. My Google Reader companions, I feel your pain. You might consider subscribing to my posts via e-mail (there's a "Follow by Email" button on the sidebar); that's probably the safest way to make sure you see my stuff.

But for a Reader alternative, I found this article on Lifehacker that offered a few brief reviews for replacements, and based on it, I'm thinking Feedly, The Old Reader, or Newsvibe. Have any of you started using an alternative? How did you choose? How do you like it?

Note: I originally created the Then/Now comic for the Insatiable Booksluts. It's a cool blog about many things literary. You should check it out.