The Jabberwocky

If you've been around a while, you've probably noticed that I'm a little curmudgeonly about holidays and parties and anything that involves interaction with other people. But despite all the things that make me twitch, there's something I always look forward to on Halloween.

Every year we try to do a project, something that we'll remember and care about years down the road, something more than just a cute costume. Last year my three-year-old made it through the entirety of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Dang, I was proud of her. The year before that, my daughter was the star of her own Halloween horror story.

This year, my four-year-old pirate princess takes a Jabberwocky's head for a prize. *

You're welcome.

*No mythical creatures were harmed in the making of this video.

So long as we are dirty, we are pure

"All of earth is crammed with heaven

And every bush aflame with God

But only those who see take off their shoes."

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My daughter's birth marked a landfall after nine long months of a watery existence. Little bit by bit, each additional day she was in the womb, she became a little less fish and a little more mammal.

Sometimes, even four years later, it seems as though she's still trying to make up for her sloshing fetal isolation from terra firma. When she gleefully kicks up the dust beneath her feet, I imagine an ocean-weary mariner whose feet unexpectedly hit dry ground after so many days at sea.

She wants nothing more than to wriggle her toes in it; to savor its taste in her mouth; to pour it over her own head in a perverse mockery of acceptable cleansing rituals. But when I watch her enthusiastic, gritty exploration of the world around her, it strikes me that there is something cleansing in shucking protective barriers and getting dirty. Despite my declared love of nature, despite our move to a rural mountain town, I still spend far too much time with a window between me and the world. My four-year-old is doing her best to cure me of that problem.

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At our local public library, there's a song that the kids sing during story time. It goes,

Each of us is a flower,

growing in life's garden.

Each of us is a flower,

we need the sun and rain.

Sun, shine your warmth on me.

Moon, cool me with your night.

Wind, bring the gentle rain.

Earth, take my roots down deep.

It's one of those cutesy songs that I don't want to admit enjoying. I'd be okay if most nursery rhymes and children's songs faded into obscurity. Yet I can't deny there is not much that is better than watching a bunch of three or four-year-olds perform a choreographed dance while crooning "each of us is a flower . . ."

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There are treasures down there beneath the dirt. Bottlecaps, old nails, crumbling pieces of brick and ancient tile work and pottery. Worn pennies and forgotten plastic bracelets. Little rocks that could be hidden gems and big rocks that could be prehistoric fossils.

"Getting buried," her new favorite activity

As an adult, I too rarely stoop to break the surface of the ground I walk. But now, excavating a moat and castle, I relive my own childhood archaeological adventures. It feels good to sweat through my shirt, to imagine what's under the next layer of earth, to see our mountain grow taller.

And it feels good to have my daughter by my side. She digs with her own pink shovel, inadvertently throwing dirt back into the hole I'm laboring over. She bends to pluck curious objects before they're lost to the settling soil. She scoops handfuls of dirt and rubs them over her skin like some luxurious moisturizer. And when we're done, she's the very best buried treasure a scurvy pirate dad could find.

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Our neighbor, a spry eighty-year-old in a boonie hat and gardening gloves, watches from the back fence.

"What's that yer working on?" he says.

My daughter and I survey our territory, the moat and the castle mound that is currently a temporary home to assorted trucks, dolls, and transplanted flowering weeds.

"We're just digging!" shouts my daughter, waving her shovel triumphantly. 

"Are you gonna plant something?" he asks uncertainly. "Tomatoes?" 

"Not yet," I say, slowly looking around. "Just digging. For fun." 

"Yeah! For fun!" shouts my daughter, emptying a cup of dirt over her head. 

"Huh," he says, and turns away, shaking his head. 

Alan, our neighbor, is a gardening fiend. He can't wait until we stop foolin' about and start growing things. Which we fully intend. It's on our to-do list. Definitely in our 10-year plan. Living an hour from a reasonably-sized grocery store, it starts to make a lot of sense to grow things ourselves.

But for a little while, we're pretty okay with digging for the sake of digging. With examining roly-poly bugs and watching neat lines of ants trooping along the bottom of our trench. With laying on a pile of dirt and watching the clouds go by. With carving canyons with shovels and kitchen implements and with building tiny civilizations on the cliff edges. With getting so dirty that a shake of our clothes leaves a cloud of dust wafting through the air, and perpetually having dirt under our fingernails, a keepsake and reminder to get outside again soon.

The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions . . . mud pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.

-Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1870

Feel the burn!

Last weekend I ran the Bakersfield 10K Volkslauf for my fifth straight year. I didn't really train much in the "preseason," since we're in the middle of trying to buy a house and, well, because laziness. I almost didn't show on race day, but finally dragged myself to the starting line for the sake of continuity. And because velociraptors. My daughter, enthusiastic about my athletic goals (or lack thereof), has taken it upon herself to help me get back in shape:

She's a tough taskmaster.

I used to try this same maneuver several years back when she was ten or fifteen pounds lighter, and I was ten or fifteen pounds more muscular. If I'm gonna be able to still manage it in several more years, I've obviously got to up my game. It's daunting, but dang-it, I'm gonna make it happen. When I think of a father-daughter obstacle racing team, I can already feel the pre-race butterflies flapping around excitedly in my stomach. Next year, at almost 6, she'll be the perfect age to start.

So, challenge accepted. I'm feeling the burn.

In your image, orange, the world was made

Lunchtime. I consider the oranges at the bottom of our refrigerator. A friendly neighbor unloaded them on us after a weekend of harvesting, and they practically spill from the clear plastic bin. My four-year-old is happy to announce to friends and strangers met on daily walks that oranges prevent scurvy and that scurvy is something pirates and even regular people really ought to avoid. 'Cause it'll "make you dead." Lately, though she's happy to talk about that citrusy goodness in relation to pirates, this kid has been refusing oranges as a snack. And we have a lot of them.

I take a gamble and begin peeling two oranges. She says "yuck!" and contorts her face in exaggerated expressions of disgust which escalate into melodramatic demonstrations of extreme pain. So I take a break and we go to the internet so I can read her some poetry about oranges. Kids dig poetry, right?

Neruda's persuasive words notwithstanding, my daughter will not be moved. "That's nice," she says. "But I still won't eat any orange." Well. I tried.

I make my way through the segments of one orange, separating each crescent landmass from its companions. I handle the textured bumps and protrusions of a piece of peel, and form a continent from it. I show my daughter where we live in North America. I make a Gulf of Mexico with my thumbnail. I sliver off a piece for Hawaii. As I carve out a piece for Central America my daughter absentmindedly grabs an orange segment and pops it in her mouth. I pretend not to notice. With the aid of a map from a National Geographic, I carve Canada and South America, Africa and Scandinavia, Australia and India. This is becoming a project, and we're enjoying it.

The orange segments disappear, one by one, into her mouth, until all that remains is the shell of the world that once was, the outline of the multitudes it contained.

With a spare lamp we become a sun and cross the face of the earth, waking it with the first rays of dawn and letting it fall into a slumbering darkness.

Each orange consumed offers a brief overwhelming shot of both bitter and sweet, one besting the other but never eliminating it. 

Inseparable the two tastes exist, one the greater and one the lesser. And all packed together into the ever diminishing, juicy heart of the orange. 

In the end, with all the pieces swept together in a final messy Pangaea, the pieces approximate but don't quite recapture the wholeness of their original. We sweep away the remains of this world, and pull another from the bin.

Edit: This post ended up hitting the front page of Reddit, which was kind of crazy. For a few days, it seemed like the entire internet was scolding me for 1. my strained metaphors, and 2. using a Mercator Projection map as a model. Both points are well taken. I've got a weakness for metaphors, and I just hope that my kids someday find my grasping, sometimes overwrought imagery endearing, the same way I (sometimes) miss my dad's puns. And as far as the Mercator Projection: never again. I promise.

And, more recently, I worked an orange peel into a map of the United States, another laborious but fun project to share with my daughter. 

Showers

 

Arachniphilia

In the middle of the night, my four-year-old knelt down by my bed, tapped me on the shoulder, and whispered into my ear.

Her: "Daddy, I'm scared. It's so dark." 

Me, (trying to remember where I am and whispering so as not to wake my wife): "Um. Okay.         Let's, uh, go back to your bed and I'll sing you some songs." 

Her: "Okay."

Once she's back in bed, I lay down next to her and we sing quiet duets of "Row, row, row your boat," and "Twinkle twinkle little star," and Diana Ross' "If we hold on together."

I pause a moment as I feel a spider crawl across my bare foot. I flick it away from me.

My daughter: "Daddy! Was that a spider!?" 

Me: "Yes. But don't worry, I got rid of it." 

Her: "But it looked like a baby! You don't hurt baby spiders. You take care of them (this seems to be a pattern)! Baby spiders are my favorite!"

I sigh. A minute later, we're both on our hands on knees looking for the baby spider, and upon finding it, my daughter marches me to the front door where I deposit it gently outside.

My daughter: "I'm not scared anymore. Goodnight, dad." 

Me: "Goodnight. I love you." 

Her: "I love you too. And I love baby spiders." 

Me: "Okay."

I finally crawl back into bed, and all I can dream about it eight-legged crawly things. I'm pretty sure my daughter and I are sharing dreams.

And when I wake up and pull aside my covers, I kid you not, a spider (very much not a baby) scampers out of my bed.

It's a little frightening the way a kid's dreams, if nurtured, become reality.

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The next day, we had more spider conversations on the walk home from pre-school:

Her: "Dad, do spiders talk?" 

Me: "Probably. Or, at least they use body language." 

Her: "Hmm. Well, I want to look up on the internet how to talk spider language. 'Cause I want to ask a spider to be my pet. Lately they just keep running away from me."

Keep on running spiders. Keep on running.

Syrup in my bed, Fly Girl, marriage and baby, spiky claws, crazy art