Archive for January, 2006
January 30, 2006
A Public Service Announcement (Raquel)
Today is bubble wrap appreciation day. Please do not let this packing material continue in such dreary and un-appreciated existence. Go appreciate some bubble wrap. Go ahead–you know you want to.
Comments(2)In Which We Come To an Enchanted Place and Say Goodbye (Gabrielle)
I love reading Winnie-the-Pooh. My mom read it to us when I was younger and then I read them to myself. I finally got copies of the two books and read them. They were as good as I remember them to be. I should have remembered I would cry at the end, but I didn’t until I was. The end of the story still has the power to make me cry. I cried the first time I read it and I cried this time. Nicely predictable. In the last story the animals say goodbye to Christopher Robin. They don’t know how, but they know things are changing. Christopher Robin hasn’t been around as much as usual and they know that soon he will go away. Eeyore writes him a poem and they all go to present it. As Christopher Robin reads it one by one the animals trickle off until only Pooh is left. Christopher Robin and Pooh go to an enchanted place from where you can see the whole world and you can never tell how many trees there are no matter how exactly you count. They sit in the enchanted place and Christopher Robin says goodbye. See, he’s growing up and he won’t be able to do just nothing anymore. Pooh promises to remember him forever and they run off to play while they still can. And I cry every single time. I know our culture reveres youth and I know that is wrong. I know Peter Pan is not someone I want for a role model and I can feel bad for him and the lost boys. But growing up is hard. Life hurts you and you never heal back up completely. Tough times touch you more and there is no hedge of protection around you anymore. Instead you have to man the wall and put a hedge around someone else. And that is hard. I remember when I had to grow up. The transition had been coming for a while and I was getting ready to switch from child to adult, but the actual click happened in an instant. One moment I was an old child and the next I had to be a young adult. And then I moved here and I had to help keep the hedge up around the children so they wouldn’t have to know how bad life was when they weren’t ready for it. And it was really hard. But growing up isn’t all bad. Not by a long shot. I look at Noah and sometimes I feel really bad for him. He is incapable of being truly joyful and he can’t even be happy for very long at a time. If the slightest thing goes against his wishes his happiness is gone. He is grumpy most of the time. Part of training children is teaching them how to be happy when the world is being the world around you. And part of being an adult is having learned that. I can be happier and enjoy life better than Noah can. I enjoy more of life than he understands exists. I enjoy more of life than Arianna knows exists. The world is bigger for me than it is for them. In some ways I can look at the world through the eyes of a child now that I am a grown up better than a child could. A child’s take on things can look charming, but really it’s because he don’t understand everything that’s going on. And he hasn’t learned the magic of life. So I look at the world and try to see magic and I try to feel wonder. It is getting easier the more I practice. And I try to be the one who brings that sense of juvenile where ever I go. I feel childish sometimes, but most people around me enjoy it and some start playing along. When I was an old child I would be too mature to play with baby toys, but now that I grew up I realized that baby toys are fun. I had to grow up to enjoy simple things like a child again. It is hard not to look back at my childhood and wish for those days. Life felt simpler, though it wasn’t really, and I wasn’t so tired. But life wasn’t actually better, it was just different. But growing up isn’t actually saying goodbye to that. It’s just looking at the world through taller eyes. There’s no hedge around you, but that means that now you can actually see the horizon. And you can still go to the enchanted place sometimes and try to count the trees.
A long and complicated story (Raquel)
It all started the week before we moved into this house. (I told you it was a long story.) This was, of course, the week that we divided our time between madly scrambling to pack and madly scrambling to get the house ready to move into. I was tired, and probably would have been in a perpetual bad mood if I’d had the energy to keep it up–and if Gabrielle hadn’t been over nearly every day to help us work on the house. Toward the end of the week, as we scraped really gummy paper backing off our wood floors, I vented to Gabrielle about how I’d never had a real surprise party.
It didn’t occur to me that anyone else might have heard this conversation until several months later when Theresa walked into the room and said that it was time to plan my surprise party, because I’d never had a surprise party before. Somewhat amused I began mental preparations to plan my birthday party–until Seth said, “Yes, and I think we should keep it ambiguous as to whether we’re really throwing a surprise party or not.” Ha, that means you’re not because then I’d know…but if I know that you’re not then…but if… What if I went back in time and kidnapped my grandfather before the surprise party? Paradoxes are so mind-bending.
From the point on I made it my mission to make it impossible for them to throw a surprise party. I had it all figured out as to which days were available, the various methods they might use to get me out of the house, and what clues I was looking for. In the last week before my birthday I knew a surprise party was impossible. There was no way to fit it into the schedule, and I took a certain perverse pleasure in this.
Yes, I wanted a surprise party. The best way I can explain it is this–when I play a game I play to win, and I don’t count it as a win unless the other players are also playing to win. If they were going to surprise me it would not be because I closed my eyes and let them do it. They would have to really mean it in order to pull it off. They did.
Saturday we had Noah’s Hawaiian theme birthday party scheduled. As you might expect, I showed up in a Hawaiian Goth costume, complete with a black lei, purple crayon lipstick, and a ‘grass skirt’ made with strips of black and white floral print fabric. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the decorations as I walked in, but as we finished the greetings I began to notice several oddities in the luau decorations. For one thing, the balloons were in my chosen birthday colors of black and silver. There were roses on the table, along with burgundy (my third birthday color) tulle adorning the table and walls. Gabrielle was wearing black.
As I said, this was all distinctly odd, but I didn’t want to say anything. A few moments later I followed Gabrielle into the kitchen. She was going in to see if Crystal needed any help. At this point I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be allowed to help, but I was ready to do a little fishing. In the kitchen they were making Reuben sandwiches, my chosen birthday meal. Uh-huh.
As I watched Theresa spread the sauerkraut she started laughing a little and commented how odd this was. She never answered my question as to exactly why this was odd. Instead Seth said, “Happy birthday, Raquel.”
Typing this out, it seems remarkably like some of the dreams that I have. Everything was just a shade off from reality and everyone else was acting like it was perfectly normal–and also wondering why I was being so dense, but I didn’t realize that at the time. I was so skeptical and so sure it was impossible that in the end I walked right into it. Somehow, that sounds about right for me.
January 28, 2006
My Dad (Gabrielle)
Today is my father’s birthday. He is 55 today. Now I know I talk a lot about my mother, but my father is equally important and I hope to show him that by talking about him in a public place. Ready, Dad? The thing I miss most about living with my father is dinner time conversations. For a year it was just my dad, my mom, me and a college student who lived with us. Then for ten months it was just my dad, me and the college student who wasn’t always there for dinner. Dad and I would talk about whatever we were thinking about recently. We once had a conversation that spanned maybe two weeks of dinners. We would put it down when dinner time was over and pick it up the next day. When that topic was done there was usually another one waiting in the wings to be started. And off we’d go. When I think back to when I was a child it is easier to notice my mother in my memories. She is the bright colored one. But I remember the times Dad had to go to a conference or General Assembly and the house would just fall apart. Sometimes literally. And we joke that all the interesting things happened when Dad wasn’t there and some of that is true through no fault of his, but Dad is the man you can depend on when things go wrong and you end up not noticing them going wrong around you. Interesting times were things like Mom getting blood poisoning and a water main bursting. If Dad had been there those times wouldn’t have been half as interesting because he would have taken care of the problem. And our culture sneers at being dependable, but it is a marvelous virtue to have. My father is the wisest man I know. I have come to him with all manner of problem and he will come up with an answer that is mighty different than I expected and also very right. He has developed a boldness that says what has to be said. He is still tactful and careful not to needlessly offend anyone, but if someone needs to be offended my dad is probably first in line to do so. He’s told me off countless times and always when I needed it. It is not a gift that is very comfortable for the people around him, but no one said life would be comfortable. I hear stories about people who don’t talk to their fathers and people who just once want to hear that their father loves them and is proud of them. These stories make me very sad because I know how it is to live the other way. My father tells his children very often that he loves us and that he is proud of us. The second part is important because he didn’t raise any of us to succeed according to society’s plan and we are all doing a mighty fine job of that. The world looks at his children cross-eyed, but my Dad is very proud of us and he tells us often. And it really is that cool to hear your father say he’s proud of you. If I was ever going to move back to Erie the main reason would be my dad. Even my sisters come in below him on the list of things I miss. My father is the most important man in my life and he takes this role very seriously. I miss interacting with him on day to day things. I miss him bouncing ideas off me and his input on things I forget to talk to him about when I call. I am very grateful for the Dad God gave me and I wouldn’t trade him for the multiverse. Happy Birthday, Dad! I love you very much.
January 27, 2006
Three more days of being a teenager (Raquel)
I have attempted to be calm and mature about turning twenty. I started with an emotional roller coaster ride about my upcoming birthday. Yes, I know those are supposed to start around thirty, but I’ve always been advanced for my age. You must understand that previously my birthdays have always celebrated with just me, my parents and my little sister. There were a couple of milestone birthdays with my other sisters or my grandparents, but that was it. This year I was happy to be home for my birthday, and to know that Peoria really is home now. But it meant a total upheaval of all the birthday traditions I’ve always taken for granted. I still get to choose my birthday meal, but I discovered that some people assume that there are decorations at birthday parties. Weird, huh? For a variety of reasons I was generally freaked out about this birthday for a couple of weeks. I got over it. Now I am trying to hold back from mentioning my birthday every couple of hours. “Only three and half more days until my birthday now! Ooh, did I pick my cake yet? When are we buying my birthday decorations?” I refuse to instigate such dull and repetetive conversations. Yesterday it finally slipped out of my mouth that it was only four more days to my birthday. It turned out to be a good thing that I mentioned it because Theresa said, “Oh, wow! Yeah, we need to pick up stuff for your party.” Still, I’m trying to restrain myself. But hey, I haven’t written a blog post in a while, so I might as well ramble on about my birthday in a blog post, right? Hardly more that fourty-eight hours until my birthday now…
January 26, 2006
Things heard about the Lansberry House (Raquel)
“Oh, we have to go kill someone–the professor called us.”
“Thumbs is fifty-five.”
“No one ever has to go to the bathroom.”
“Please yell nicely, children.”
“I may have told you not to cut your fingers off, but I’ve never told you not to cut off your toes.”
“I want my body back!”