We’re back from Iota where we spent the entire day taking in the small festival the city hosts every year. Despite being very nervous about the folks in Mardi Gras costumes when we first arrived, Lily insisted on staying until the Mardi Gras came into town. Wise of her. As one of the first kids they saw, they showered her with candy.
This morning at breakfast Lily announced, all of a sudden, that she remembered why, when she was younger she didn’t like peas and green beans. She thought the peas were grass seeds and the green beans were grass.
A song sung on a Sunday morning, toy cats — Siamese cat and Fireworksy Christianson, to be precise — in hand.
There is, somewhere, an entire category of posts properly categorized as “things found in Lily’s pockets.” The most frequent thing found in her pockets is acorns. (I do the laundry in our house, so I get to find these things.) This most recent collection is from yesterday’s pig roast hosted every year by our friend Barry Jean Ancelet.
Lily got a bicycle for Christmas — thanks to her Nai-Nai. Like a lot of things, her interest and her ability just sort of seem to explode onto the scene. It’s really been Yung who has taught her how to ride, patiently walking up and down our street, giving a small push here, a small word of encouragement there. (It’s amazing to watch her do this.) On the second day of riding, Lily turned to her mom and said, “Mommy, wheels are good!” By the time I got home from Arizona, she is an accomplished tourist of our neighborhood. I grabbed the photo below while trotting backwards trying to stay ahead of her. (Yung can barely be seen in the upper-lefthand corner.)
Lily in Motion
Before I met Yung-Hsing, I rarely thought about what I was going to wear for the day until I stood before my clothes. Having lived with her for a while now and enjoyed her orderly nature, I now regularly lay out my outfit before going to shower.
For a while now, Yung has been offering a Lily a choice between two outfits. And because Lily is Lily and needs as much advance warning as you can plan for, Yung has regularly checked the weather and then set out two outfits for Lily for the following day, often pointing them out to Lily so that she has plenty of time to think about which one she wants to wear.
Lily has lately begun to dress herself, and tonight she has taken the next step: she has laid out two outfits for herself to choose from tomorrow morning when she wakes up. I guess she wants to make sure she starts the New Year off right: by creating the choices which she will then choose.
Lily’s Clothes Await Her Waking
We woke this morning in our smallish hotel room — it turns out that the Renaissance Arts was not the hotel I thought it was — but enjoyed our late rising and our breakfast in the hotel, despite the absolute chaos of the restaurant.
Yung and Lily in Bed
Tina and Felix picked us up at the front door and we headed off to the Aquarium of the Americas, which seemed smaller, or at least more chopped up then either Yung or I remembered. We decided it must, in part, be from the increased number of gift shops scattered about the place and the food court that is now also part of the place. (Revenue is revenue, and it’s all part of the overall package that museums find themselves having to offer.
The tunnel you walk-through is still pretty amazing, and the rain forest area was impressive. The passages and hallways, however, are pretty narrow and so even a smallish number of visitors begins to feel like a crowd.
The fun part was the chance to hang out with Tina and Felix and to watch Tina and Lily get to have more time together. Afterwards, T and F dropped us off at our hotel, we grabbed our bags, fetched our car, and got on the interstate as quickly as we could, not stopping until we got to Des Allemands for gas and lunch.
Lily Follows Her Own Labyrinth
Tonight was my turn to get Lily to sleep. As always, we read a few books — my favorites, the Frog and Toad stories — and then we turned off the light. We usually talk for a little while, as I slowly encourage Lily to quiet both her body and her mind — the former twitches while the latter races. Christmas is a week away, and the graduating students in her school are putting on a Christmas pageant for the younger kids. My understanding is that most of the action is narrated by her teacher, but even without speaking lines, she seems to be taking a great deal of the action in. (She is, in her own words, the “indoor keeper,” which she likes because her robe has pink in it.)
So there have been some discussions about Jesus and the fam.
Tonight, as we lay in bed, her small voice reached out to me and asked, “Daddy, is Jesus alive?”
How to answer such a question? I tried to be honest. Jesus is alive in us, I told her. Some people think he lives on in Heaven with God, but the most important thing is that he lives in our hearts. I asked her if Nai-Nai was with us. No, she said. But we can feel her with us when we think about her, yes? Yes. Is Mommy here in the room with us? (Yung was in the kitchen and we could hear her washing dishes.) No. But she is our minds when we think about her? Yes. And when we think about her we feel good don’t we? Yes.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, Lily.”
“Is Mary alive?”
And then she asked about Joseph. I gave similar answers for both of them, but her next question was really the hardest:
“Daddy, is Santa Claus alive?”
We are staying at Lew’s while we wait out the weekend in hopes that Himel’s Air Conditioning will be able to get everything done on Monday. We got in last night and had a supper bought from Champagne’s ready-to-eat case. We all went to bed early and slept late: none of us realized how much the day had taken out of us.
We woke this morning and decided to have breakfast at Hub City Diner, which is only a few blocks away. While Lily and I waited for Yung-Hsing to get ready, we were sitting in Lew’s living room, playing and talking. Suddenly, Lily noticed the mantle clock that Lew keeps on top of the armoire which holds all his entertainment equipment.
“The clock’s stopped,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I guess Mr. Lew forgot to wind it.”
“He turned it off?”
“No, that clock isn’t electric. It gets its energy from being wound up, like your wind-up robots. When they wind down, they stop.”
“He turned it off?”
Our discussion continued for a little while, but I’m not sure if Lily ever quite understood that the clock wasn’t powered by electricity. It’s interesting, really, because we don’t have any electric clocks, per se, at home. All our clocks are battery-powered, and I am pretty sure that she has seen me replace batteries in those.
But the more interesting moment to consider, I think, is an universe in which everything is electrically powered. We are not far off from that moment as I write this. All the major automakers are racing to develop either electric cars or hybrid ones. Our house, with our gas heater, clothes dryer, and hot water heater, is something of a throwback when so many new homes opt for the clean, single source of electricity. (That electricity is more expensive than gas is only something of this moment. As we move to solar power, especially at home, I think gas lines will slowly wither away.)
What isn’t electric is gas-powered and usually encased in a way to discourage understanding of how the thing works.
That I would think about any of this probably is also the reason that I am currently pursuing my current work on crawfish boats. I would perhaps go on to lament that these men are something like a dying breed, but the fact of the matter is that they are not. There are plenty of them out there, but there is, I think, an increasing divide between those who can work with materials and with their minds and those who work only with abstractions.
My daughter can do many things, a number of them are pretty amazing for a three year old, but one thing that she is seemingly indifferent to being able to do is to break away from playing in order to use the bathroom. We have reached something of an impasse. She appears to have mastered the art of staying dry at school, where the social stigma — which children only reinforce for each other — appears to have some sway. At home, however, it’s another story. It’s not consistent behavior, and it’s not every weekend that it happens.
This past weekend, however, it happened several times. It was a particularly brilliant weekend here in south Louisiana. A cool front swept in at the end of last week and gave us two amazing days of perfect weather: warm in the sun, cool in the shade, with a light breeze that could leave you with goosebumps. Lily and I pretty much spent almost all of Sunday outside. I mowed the yard while she picked flowers in the front yard and then played in her playhouse-castle in the backyard. Then I fired up the grill and cooked hamburgers and some of those amazing Comeaux’s chicken and green onion fresh sausages. After eating lunch inside and having some quiet time, we were all back out in the yard. Yung-Hsing and I read on the patio while Lily played with her water table. And then, later, we all spend some time dashing through a sprinkler.
During the course of the day, Lily ended up with wet pants twice. She just can’t break away from playing. I had lunch with our friend with Leslie Schilling yesterday, who feels a strong connection to Lily, and she offered a really nice insight into the difficulty of breaking away from play. Or, as she termed it, breaking up play. She quoted Heraclitus:
“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” (Fragment 41, for those who care.)
The problem, she said, is that when you are deep in play, deep into really good play, you are deeply immersed into a magical world, in magic itself. To imagine leaving it is to imagine breaking the spell, and who really wants to do that?
For those familiar with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work will recognize that this is, in some small way, a reasonably good description of flow. In CsiÂkszentmihalyi’s work, flow is something to be admired, studied, and, perhaps most of all, cultivated. It might be a reasonable stretch of the imagination to suggest that perhaps some have a chemical propensity to it, if you follow some of the recent studies of ADD, in which some researchers and writers suggest that deficit attentions have a flip side in hyper attention or, sometimes, simply socially inappropriate and/or inconvenient attention. That is, sometimes individuals, especially children and adolescents within educational institution contexts, are considered ADD because they are not attending to what they are supposed to be attending. (In my day — and I am not that old except to be older than the current era of ADD — some of those individuals wouldn’t simply have been chided for being “day dreamers.”
Of course the flip side is that some kids were simply considered to be “handfuls” or “misfits” which is why I largely view the ADD era in a positive light. I was one of those kids who, in primary school, flirted with the boundary between “dreamer” and “handful.”) So here we are, blessed with a child who possesses a full capacity for flow. Left to her own devices, the girl sings, dances, voices miniature social scenes, and otherwise peoples her world or sets it into motion like Copernicus’ model of the heliocentric solar system. We fuss over wet pants. I feel, now, like one of the robbers of creativity that Ken Robinson laments in his TED talk about what we do to children. Our mission is to find a way to keep both the river flowing and the pants not.
