when we pretend that we're dead

Two years ago, we were staying in a rambling house in Northeastern Vermont with two other families who are dear to us, gathered together for a week to celebrate the marriage of Edith and Zac. At the time, we were in between two houses, two lives.

All our belongings were in storage for the time that would elapse between closing on our old house in Lancaster and moving into a new rental in Annapolis. In the midst of those homeless days, we packed all we could into our new Prius (we had recently said goodbye to our old car, in addition to everything else). Frances had just turned three, Gabriel was three months old, Mike and I were overwhelmed, and the four of us drove twelve hours to Vermont, where we experienced a series of days that felt something like being lifted out of regular life and placed gently on a cloud (as one of our housemates later described it).

But of course we didn't forget that we were smack dab in the middle of a massive transition. One morning in the cloud house, I heard Frances stirring. She was in a room adjacent to ours, and I quietly climbed into her twin bed and snuggled up next to her. She looked at me for some time. Then she looked at the ceiling, a ponderous expression on her little face. Suddenly she looked back at me with great intensity and pointedly asked,
Did your Papa die? 
Yes.
Silence surrounded us. Then I told her that I missed him very much.
I do too, she said. And I knew she was telling me the truth.

That conversation ushered in a time of serious morbidity and existential inquiry. What was being alive; why did people and animals die; where did they go? Who were the relatives in her family that I knew who were dead now? Were they very very old when they died? This lasted almost a year. We wondered if it had to do with the loss of her old home and community. Was her grief being expressed somehow as three-year-old style mourning for everyone and everything that had ever lived and died in the world?

Those days are a far cry from the conversation in the backseat yesterday afternoon as I drove us home from a playdate on the Eastern Shore. As we mounted the majestic Bay Bridge, I heard Frances insisting to Gabriel: you're dead! you're dead! you have to die now! die die! And he responded with a series of refusals, increasing his volume with each repetition of I NOT DIE NOW! I NOT DEAD!!! He knows. He's approaching the age Frances was when death became a real force in her life. He's fascinated by dead bugs, dead plants, all kinds of dead stuff. And he knows he absolutely does not want to be dead, even for pretend.

Nowadays playing dead has a certain romance and mystique for Frances. She learned from her princess-loving classmates last year. They would enact their own elaborate fairty tales that featured the dramatic and satisfying death of a princess. Sometimes she came back to life, sometimes not. The game was even called "Dead Princesses." (An aside: all those old Disney princess movies should be called Dead Princesses! Sleeping Beauty and Snow White get their prince, but only by dying first.)

So after a morning of 'acting' Snow White (charming Mackenzie explained the story to Frances, who happily donned a massive curly black wig and played the wicked queen), Frances was eager to rope Gabriel in to some more dead princess play. The boy will go to all kinds of pretend places with his sister (among them: fairy woods, their wedding, a little nest where they are baby squirrels or owls, a tent, an apartment where they are Charlie and Elizabetha*...) but the afterlife? That's a no.

So death has returned as a topic of intense fascination for Frances, but now her imagination and intellect provide a protective distance from the potential emotional whammy. This morning on the way to her swimming lesson, she noticed the signage at the World War I memorial at the Naval Academy Bridge, prompting endless questions about war. Do only the bad guys die? Who can be in the army? Why do they go to the army if they might die? Why do you have a memorial if the person is already dead and can't see it? We talked and talked, and the entire time Gabriel was uncharacteristically silent. I could see him growing serious and uncomfortable. His thoughts are not sophisticated enough to protect him. He simply feels the subject matter, which is not easy.

And this morning, the girl who never forgets a birthday asked me if today was my papa's birthday. Yes, it is. And how old would he be if he were alive? Fifty-nine.

That was the end of her questions. She hit a wall. Fifty-nine is too young to be dead. Some time ago, anticipating today, Frances requested that we go out for ice cream with Grandma and Rachel and anyone else in our family we can find every year on Grandpa's birthday. This is a tradition I can get behind. So even though we can't be with Grandma or Rachel today, after Gabriel wakes up from his nap, we're going out in search of ice cream.


*Meagan: So are Charlie and Elizabetha friends? Brother and sister?
*Frances: In the early ones when we're young, like in our twenties, we're boyfriend and girlfriend but then when we stay friends for a really long time we decide we want to get married.
*Meagan: So are you married when you play now?
*Frances: Yes. Right now Charlie is 31 and Elizabetha is 39.

eternal flame

Not too long ago, apropos of nothing, Frances said to me:

Mama, why were there a hundred million songs on the radio when you and Papa were teenagers? And why did you like them all and how do you know every single word to all of them?

Ah. Well. Maybe if you had been twelve in 1989 you'd understand.

Can you detect the adolescent exasperation brewing? She's already begun to feel burdened by "our" music, the music that we have more or less successfully - up until now - embraced as our family's music. She realizes she wasn't on the scene when I first latched onto this or that song, which must be a little weird and annoying. The truth is we've adjusted our listening habits since becoming parents, eschewing music that explicitly celebrated less-than-wholesome living (goodbye to so much rock and hip hop) and enthusiastically welcoming people like Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell into our living room. When Jonathan Richman broke up with the original Modern Lovers, he said didn't want to make music anymore that would hurt a little baby's ears. As new parents we endorsed that position. No music that would hurt a little baby allowed! 

Happily, lots of pop music is made out of soap bubbles and doesn't hurt a bit. (Plus at home you can always turn down the volume.) And I guess we like it too much to give it up. Some of you may remember how we encouraged precocious baby Frances, who could identify Johnny Cash, the Kinks, the White Stripes, and others just a few chords into a song. We brought out lots of sixties pop and Pete Seeger and Leadbelly and anything that struck us as quality family listening material. As a toddler, Frances could listen to Pete Seeger sing "I've Been Working on the Railroad" for hours. I started to feel like a crazy person after about four listens.

Now both kids have strong opinions about music. They are often admirably cooperative when I interrupt them mid-sentence in the car to announce that a REALLY good song is on the radio. I turn up the volume and do all kinds of soon-to-be-embarrassing mom dances in the driver's seat. I feel myself reaching back through time, connecting to generations of mothers who have done some version of this to their children. I especially feel like I'm channeling my mother (who I can vividly imagine singing Motown in our minivan) when I drive our new/old 1995 Toyota Camry station wagon. Sometimes I put on - get ready - a cassette and rock out to some college-era mix dug from a pile of tapes I found in a shoebox at my mom's house during our last visit.

But really, what is it about the music of our youth? How does it imprint so indelibly on our brains? Some combination of receptivity and passion, I suppose. Why didn't I spend middle school committing Latin or long Shakespearean passages to memory? Instead of belting out every single word of the Bangles' "Eternal Flame" to Frances and Gabriel, I'd be lulling them to sleep with sonnets and psalms. Did any of you read The Chosen, or other Chaim Potok books? I could have been one of those scrawny Orthodox boys hunched over the Torah, memorizing it forwards and backwards. Instead, I memorized the Smells Like Teen Spirit album and far too many Cure songs to keep straight.

The thing is, it's not just nostalgia. I love to hear an old Pixies song on the radio, sure, but I also love new pop music these days. A good song really does pop; it sparkles, shines, and adds a burst of happy energy to my day. Dishwashing, bath-giving, dinner-making...these little moments are transformed by a good song.

The sad fact that we have to do most of our traveling by car here in Annapolis is ameliorated considerably by WRNR, a local station that plays lots of good, new independent music. I was never energetic or committed enough to read reviews and track down new music (yes, you can file me under 'I listen to my boyfriend's rock music and claim it as my own') but now that I can just turn on the radio, I love it. I try to get my kids on board, with mixed results. Vampire Weekend is a go. Bon Iver proved to be excellent toddler sleeping music. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes meets with ambivalence in the backseat...but I attribute this to how loud I sing along to their single Home (versus the band's actual merits). The more enthusiasm and mom dancing I indulge in, the more I risk losing potential sing-along partners.

I quit piano lessons when I was eleven. I know absolutely nothing about music theory and history. Regardless of my ignorance, some of my happiest memories involve music, especially shared music. Singing campsongs with abandon, singing at church next to my mother and sister, guitars and shakers at various picnics and gatherings, singing at the top of my lungs with friends in a car, all the windows down. Emily Rogers commented on this blog months ago that Pete Seeger said if everyone in the world could participate in regular singalongs, there'd be no war. I'm not entirely sure, but I get what he means.

And better than all those peaceful hootenannies and living room concerts? Singing with my children! Waking up to Gabriel's clear high voice singing "Freight Train," even at 5 am, makes me smile. When we sing grace as a family, when we sing Hi Ho The Rattlin' Bog, when all four of us start into Yellow Submarine, inspired by a t-shirt of Gabriel's...my heart literally starts flapping its little wings, trying to fly out of my chest and into the sky.

dinner in july

All those jungly tomato plants in the garden are earning their keep. Seriously.

So is the basil. The potatoes and zucchini are doing their best. Thank you, garden. Thank you bugs and deer and bunnies for feasting elsewhere, at least for today.

And thank you Whole Foods for those one pound plastic boxes of salad greens from California. And herbed tofu and olives and organic avocados from Mexico.

And thank you also to the creative and zany person who discovered beets make chocolate cake extra delicious. I made this recipe during Gabriel's nap, while Frances assembled multi-colored pop bead jewelry for our family. I know the words "beet tea loaf" all in a row are not exactly evocative of dessert, or of anything appetizing for that matter. But trust me, it's great, and a beautiful color too.

I used whole wheat pastry flour and one generous cup of pureed beets (she calls for 1.5 cups loosely packed grated beets). These beets were originally picked by a certain hot and grumbly child at Larriland Farms on the Fourth of July, an event that happened to fall within the two weeks or so that I was cooking out of Jessica Seinfeld's sneaky mom cookbook. So when I brought home many pounds of beets without any particular plan for them, I dutifully followed her lead, roasting and pureeing and freezing them in half cup portions, waiting to be silently slipped into something sweet and pink. Or in this case, reddish-brown.  

I wish I could have popped a bite of this cake into Frances' mouth while she stood in that beet field, sweaty and indignant. Reluctant farmhands, your reward shall come, and in ways you never could have expected.

the open house

Here are Tessa and Frances, feeling joyful and not a little unhinged, en route to The Open House.

The Open House is a house that is for sale midway down my mother's block in Lancaster. It has a seemingly permanent sign out front that reads "OPEN HOUSE Sunday 2 - 4 pm." No one lives there now. It is a big beautiful house that features many dead cicadas littered around the front steps for bagging up and inspecting with one's friends. The Open House also boasts a dusty porch swing - situated low enough to be accessed by those with very short legs - the lone item on an otherwise eerily empty front porch. I once watched Gabriel tentatively climb the steps by himself and walk to the swing. He looked so nervous as he swung a little leg up, I wondered which child had double dog dared him to do it.

At a certain point I chaperoned a motley gang of six children (aged almost-two to almost-six) who moved with a great sense of purpose and surprising speed between The Open House and my mother's front porch, collecting bugs and bits of mulch and who knows what else. After that day, whenever I'd begin to suggest a new activity or announce the morning's plans, Frances would quickly jump in and derail it all with: you mean The Open House? I'll get Tessa and Annika!! Let's go!!

They LOVED going to The Open House. At least one parent would watch them running down the street and back so it wasn't completely unsupervised...but still. What a thrill, what freedom! It was like their own hideout, fort, bug-collecting site, and house all rolled into one. No one ever went into the house (except those adults who may have peeked in during the actual Open House, at which point we were back on the road to Annapolis). But something about it belonged to the children, just them, and even though there were a few moments when things threatened to get out of hand, I loved it.

I loved the dirtiness, the wildness, the kid-driven play, the sweaty walks, the too-late bedtimes and too-much ice cream that characterized our week in Lancaster. It was a break from the rules; a time to throw open the windows and doors and let some air in. An open house, indeed!

Here are a few scenes from our open week, hanging out in the neighborhood.

Henry suggested everyone cover their eyes for this shot. I think it works.

Gabriel insisted on perfecting his headstand on the hard cement.

 Boys and their...balloons.

The view from my mom's porch Saturday morning around 9 am.

The view in my mother's next-door neighbors' backyard Saturday afternoon.

Little Annika, running back home from The Open House, with Gabriel close behind.

Happy Gabriel, oblivious to the fact that baby Beatrice is about to swipe his peanut butter and jelly.

On the last day of camp, kids were invited to dress up however they wanted. Frances proudly conceived and assembled this "pirate princess" get up.

A quiet moment in my mother's beautiful living room. (Despite the demands of directing an outdoor Shakespearean comedy, my mother found the time and inspiration to create this adorable butterfly dress during our visit).

 

Happy Tessa.

Creative and big-hearted Leslie (Titania) babysat Gabriel while I worked in the mornings and built the HMS Lala with him on their first day together. Besides a lot of fun, it provided a holding pen for stray toys and curious children during our visit.

Gabriel was gaga for our friend Aidan, at least in part because he generously welcomed this less-than-harmonious duet on one of the first evenings in Lancaster.

Here is darling Agatha in the kiddie pool at Buchanan Park. When we arrived, a beautiful boy with long black hair ran up to me and announced: We live in your old house!! He was right. He does live in our old house.

He told me they still find magnet letters under the refrigerator.

...Are those yours?? Did you play with them?

Yes, we used to.