Now We Are [almost] Six

When I was One,

I had just begun.

When I was Two,

I was nearly new.

When I was Three,

I was hardly me.

When I was Four,

I was not much more.

When I was Five,

I was just alive.

But now that I’m Six I’m as clever as clever.

So I think I’ll be six now forever and ever.

--A.A. Milne

                “Mama?”

                The room was dark.  The stories had been read, the kisses given, the blankets tucked.  Both twins were supposed to be asleep, but one of them clearly wasn’t.

                “What’s wrong?”  I crouched by the bottom bunk, the inhabitant of which was dwarfed by her giant Winnie the Pooh.

                “Mama… I don’t think I can all the way brush my teeth myself when I’m six!  I can’t make the little circles like the dentist said!”

                As far as nighttime terrors go, this one was pretty easy to address. “It’s ok,” I reassured her.  “I can still help with brushing, if you want.”

                “Until I’m seven?”

                “Sure.”

                “But that’s only two years away.  Maybe until I’m eight.  Or nine.”

                I teetered between amusement and pathos.  This was the same kid who had told me, a few weeks previously, that she never wanted to be done with kindergarten, because she feared that first graders needed to know how to tie their shoes.  I could easily teach her how, I’d said.  “No…” she moaned, as if shoe-tying were akin to juggling live rattlesnakes.  She won’t let me throw away her favorite size-three corduroy pants or pass on the shape-sorter box to friends with babies.  When she was barely two, she used to hide in a cupboard to fill her diaper.  She knew she was perfectly capable of using the potty, but she didn’t want me to take the diapers away.

On the upper bunk is the other twin, the one who gave up the diapers right at her second birthday, pretty much the moment she realized that big kids wore underpants.  She’s also the one who spent an afternoon alternating between rigid focus and howling frustration because she was determined to be the only kid in preschool who COULD tie her shoes.  She’ll try to lift an eight-year-old or wrestle with a boy who outweighs her by thirty pounds.  During University Park Elementary School’s Graphing Week, this was the twin who was furious to find that the mathematical questions intended for fifth and sixth graders were too hard for her.

Now they are about to turn six, an age somewhere between little and big, between “I can do it all by myself” and “I want my Mommy.”  And I’m not sure which twin’s camp I’m in.

I used to know.  Six years ago, I had two newborns and a not-quite-completed dissertation. One day, when I was peeling one of the tiny, squirmy little creatures out of her oozing onesie for the umpteenth time, I noticed the tag on the small garment.  Underneath the Carter’s logo was the company’s tagline: “If they could just stay little.” 

I stared at the tag.  The baby shrieked because she was chilly (babies never shriek because they are covered in poop, only because you try to take their poop away from them).  The other baby shrieked because she wasn’t being held, or because I hadn’t nursed her for a whole 37 minutes, or just because she was a baby.  These things were sometimes a bit obtuse to me, and I hadn’t slept in several weeks, so my logic was off.  But one thing seemed pretty clear.  Much as I adored my children, with exactly the overwhelming devotion that had once seemed slightly daft in other parents, I definitely did not want to have two infants forever.

This self-admission made me feel a little anxious.  Was there something wrong with me, or insufficient in my love, if I was eagerly looking forward to a time when my kids could communicate in a manner that didn’t involve howling, and maybe play a few games of Scrabble with me?

Although my anxiety never entirely disappeared, it was somewhat assuaged by the passage of time.  The Sack of Flour stage of babyhood is rapidly replaced by the Wiggling Worm stage, and then the Barrel of Monkeys stage.  Infants change so quickly that there’s always something new for parents to gush about.  A smile!  A burp!  Neck muscles that don’t flop about like overcooked pasta!   I enjoyed every stage, despite the curdled drool, the awkwardness of trying to get through a door while lugging two car seats, and the necessity of installing dozens of little plastic gizmos on outlets, drawers, and cabinets, rendering them kid-proof and adult-proof in one inconvenient step.

My enjoyment was real, but it was also forward-looking.  I didn’t mourn the outgrown 3-6 month snowsuits because I had sacks of larger hand-me-downs lying in wait.  I was cheering the kids along as they grew teeth, gnawed on Cheerios, and learned to walk.  In retrospect, it was predictable that one kid seemed to find crawling demeaning.  It made her angry.  She was so desperately eager to get on her feet that she became fully bipedal at ten months.  It was also predictable that the other kid waited until 13 months, when she could be sure she wouldn’t totter and fall, then ambled around without fanfare. 

I don’t recall greeting a new stage with any pangs of regret until it came time to (finally) wean my little milk-monsters. I didn’t really plan to keep breast-feeding long enough to have toddlers who marched up to me and announced, “Want nurse!” but it happened kind of quickly.  I wanted to be done with it… and yet I didn’t.  My biologist sensibilities and my mom-sensibilities were equally entranced by the nonchalance with which my body, after doing nothing of the sort for 33 years, was able to produce two complete human beings, and then a couple of hundred gallons of milk.  Some women feel insulted or grossed-out by being reminded of their kinship with cows, but I kind of liked the simplicity and sisterhood of mammalhood.  I enjoyed being one with all the shrews, gnus, dolphins, and elephants who had done this long before me.  So I felt a little sad when I told the kids that the milk was All Gone, and ceremoniously re-sewed Boppy the Nursing Pillow into two smaller pillows, one for each crib.  One kid – I probably don’t need to say which one -- took this transition a lot harder than the other, and required a bedtime pacifier – not just for a couple of weeks, but for two more years. 

Despite this small blip, I was still gazing ahead to the horizon: to age three, the minimum for preschool; to age four, when their legs would be long enough to hike appreciable distances and pedal a tag-along bike; to age five, and the beginning of formal education.  When I was sick of reading Touch and Feel Farm, Corduroy seemed like a reprieve.  When I was sick of Corduroy, James and the Giant Peach was a treat.  Each birthday felt like a real celebration, not just because of the fire truck cakes, fruit dragons, and sunny playgrounds.  Each year, each new number, seemed like a new chapter, a new adventure.  Why bother being only three when one can embrace the excitement of being four, or even FIVE? 

This year, though, I find myself starting to notice not only the positives of growth, but also a few of the downsides.  Two kids are hard to cram onto my lap these days, although they still want to be there.  For how much longer?  The bunk beds will be too short pretty soon.  The peer pressure is starting to kick in, escalating the requests for tacky plastic toys.  In these peer groups, the restrictive gender lines are becoming more tightly cinched.  Life is more complicated, more scheduled.  There are tests and report cards – report cards!  What does it mean if my child does not yet Meet Expectations in kindergarten music class? 

On the flip side, though, I now get to spend my free hours with two distinct and fascinating individuals who ask questions about how static electricity works, how often whales need to breathe, whether the Easter Bunny can receive mail, and why the cement doesn’t harden inside the mixer. My answers are circuitous and fumbling.  I find myself jogging around the living room holding a beach ball and saying, “Now, if you can imagine that this is the sun…”  Yet my children still think I’m brilliant -- mostly.  Their ideas have the chaotic orderliness of poetry, and they play point-counterpoint to one another like a scientist who has been locked up for six years with an architect. 

“Look, every strawberry is different,” says one, rolling the fat fruits between her small fingers, examining each dent and seed.

“Of course,” says the other, cramming one into her mouth.  “They all have different DNA.”

Young Christopher Robin Milne once loved his teddy bear.  He built things out of chairs.  He was afraid of invisible Heffalumps.  He was six, and as clever as clever.  But he didn’t stay six forever and ever.  He got older, and went to boarding school, where he was mocked for the stories his dad had written.  He came to hate the books.  In their pages, he would always have a pudding-bowl haircut, a nanny, and no idea how to spell Wednesday.  He was furious at his father for exploiting the person he used to be.  Cuteness is all very well, but it has a sell-by date, after which it’s about as appealing as a fermenting haddock.

Luckily, my writing has an audience of no more than a hundred people, and it’s unlikely I’m dooming my kids to infantile notoriety.  They probably won’t, like Christopher Robin, have to take up boxing to defend themselves against Pooh tormentors.  Still, I know that no matter how obscure I am, there will come a point in time when I will embarrass my kids.  They may not cringe over my writing, but they will hate my socks or roll their eyes at my jokes or try to convince their friends that they have not in any way been influenced by my appreciation for Thai eggplant, They Might Be Giants, or E.B. White.

For now, though, they’re willing to appreciate Charlotte’s Web from the vantage point of my lap.  How long will this last?  A year ago, they couldn’t read.  Now, they can, albeit with a lot of stumbling.  This transformation, like so many others, is wonderful.  I can’t wait to invite my kids to meet the residents of Prydain and Middle Earth and Wildcat Island and Hogwarts.  But I hope they let me keep reading out loud for a while longer, so that I can go there with them.

These days, we read four bedtime stories each night, with each family member taking a turn.  Then I tuck in the blankets, and the kids snuggle down with their heads on those old halves of Boppy.

“Good night, my big girl!”  I give my child a kiss.

“Mama!”

I pause.  “What’s wrong?”

“Mama… I’m NOT big.  I’m little.  And… I want to be with you!  I want to be with you forever.”

I’m immobilized by surprise.  Not by the sentiment – but by whom it’s coming from.  My five-going-on-twelve girl.  Little Miss I-Can-Do-It-All-By-Myself.

Of course, there’s only one possible answer. “Ok, little one,” I agree.  I give her another kiss. 

She’ll change her mind, I know.  I’d be devastated if she didn’t, eventually.  But as to when she makes that mental transition – next year, or in ten years, or every day, back and forth, from now until college?  It’s up to her.  I’m in no hurry.  And yet… I can’t wait.  Because the only thing more fun than letting them be who they are is seeing who they will become.

Under the spell of English

“There can’t be a silent ‘gh’!”  Lizzy looked up from her literary selection, Clifford Goes to the Doctor.  She glared at me accusingly, as if I had personally invented the English language and imbued it with all its peculiar inconsistencies just to confound her.  “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know,” I sighed.  She was right.  ‘Light’ should be spelled ‘lite,’ just as it is on the rows of pink-dyed aspartame-sweetened yogurt at Fred Meyers.  I couldn’t uphold the existence of that ‘gh,’ and I wasn’t even trying.  If I was the court-appointed lawyer for my mother-tongue, I was doing a terrible job.  But given the unassailable claims being brought forth by the plaintiff, was a defense even warranted?

Helping two five-year-olds wallow through Puppy Mudge Finds a Friend and painstakingly hand-write their entries for the University Park Elementary School Annual Poetry Contest has reminded me just how agonizing English spelling is – but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Last week, Molly asked me why the Three Little Kittens cried when they found their mittens. I had to explain that “cry” means not only “burst into tears” but also “call out in excitement.”  A few days later, one of the twins’ friends looked at Lizzy suspiciously when she claimed to have “several” toy horses, and demanded to know what “several” meant – and, having been given a definition, how it compared to “a few” and “some.”  Our language is so full of superfluous synonyms, irregular verbs, double-meanings, multiple definitions, context-dependent connotations, impenetrable idioms, and maddening silent k’s that I can’t really blame my kids for their peevishness.  Back when I was discovering that ‘weird’ is spelled weirdly and that ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ mean the same thing, I too was pretty sure English had been invented by sadists or lunatics.

I can recall debating with my second grade teacher, Mrs. Monteiro, about whether it was possible to hear the difference between the ‘wh’ sound and plain old ‘w.”  She suggested that it was; I hotly denied -- in my enormous experience as a seven-year-old -- ever having heard anyone speak that way.  She listened to my argument with her usual gravity, and agreed that perhaps the distinction was too subtle to be of much use in ordinary diction.  Mrs. Monteiro took me seriously, and in return, I adulated her.  She was an elegant, sharp-eyed, wry-humored woman who challenged me daily.  She taught me about planets, dinosaurs, and – when I asked what the word “boycott” meant on her lapel pin – labor unions, workers’ rights, and injustice.  On the first day of school, she told the class that her first name was Joan.  “You can call me that when you’re twenty-one,” she deadpanned.  I’m not sure the other kids understood the humor, but I felt teacher-awe wash over me. 

It’s a powerful force.  These days, I see Lizzy’s eyes light up when she tells me that Mrs. Claar showed her a caterpillar, or that Coach Davis is teaching sign language in gym.  I see Molly swell with pride as she holds up her paper maché globe and repeats what Ms Lewis told her about continents.  “Isn’t Eurasia a funny word?” she muses.  Yes, I think – and just wait until you try to spell it.  Both kids are thrilled to report that not only do their teachers and the school librarian read stories to the kindergarteners, but so does Mr. Bob the custodian.

Molly and Lizzy have always been huge fans of stories – as was I.  It might seem odd that I was frustrated with English as a child, given that I wasn’t a victim of academic despair.  On the contrary, I was an inveterate little bookworm. However, I was also fond of logic, and incensed by the lack of it.  I was good at remembering how to write incorrigible words like ‘neighbor’ and ‘necessary,’ but that didn’t mean I liked how they were spelled.  My parents still refer to Grand Union supermarkets as Grand Onions, because that’s what I insisted the sign said when I was four.   I can remember being personally affronted by the fact that ‘doctor’ does not end in ‘er.’ 

Mrs. Monteiro had a fine appreciation for language.  She glanced at the picture books I was selecting from the school library, and scoffed.  I could read much harder stuff, she told me. She was right; at home I worked my way through a lot of Sarah’s books, so I knew I could handle the selections of a precocious ten-year-old.  Still, I was miffed.  I shot back, “What, like War and Peace?”

She granted me the barest flicker of a smile. “Oh, are you watching that on PBS?”  She was too.  Over the following weeks we discussed all 751 minutes of the series, then moved on to the next production: I, Claudius.

As a result of all that PBS, all those books, and parents who peppered the dinner table conversation with words like obfuscate, penultimate, and kerfuffle, I had a vocabulary large enough to earn me blank stares on the playground. Using too many words was a social impediment.  Kids who want to know whether something is ‘cool’ or ‘gross’ or ‘ok’ are suspicious of ‘exceptional,’ ‘repugnant,’ and ‘mediocre.’  Big words were not only impenetrable, they were also snotty.  I learned not to use them at recess. 

I don’t think Molly and Lizzy have yet reached the age of disillusionment, when they will realize that other children may not like them for entering poetry contests, or for saying, as Lizzy did earlier this week, “Look, a mosquito inserted its proboscis into my arm!”  Sometimes I worry that they’ll hate me for telling them that the talking bears in Goldilocks are ‘anthropomorphic.’

On the other hand, I never resented or discarded my vocabulary, even when I hid it.  Although all those words didn’t completely assuage my annoyance over the illogic, flaws, redundancies, and omissions of English, they were gradually seducing me.  There were patterns hidden in their depths – amble, ambulance, perambulator, ambulatory – and poetry in their syllables – mellifluous, susurration, onomatopoeia.  Grown-up words were also a free ticket into the world of adults – or, at least, the adults I most wanted to communicate with.  I played Scrabble with my dad.  I gave my mother whole notebooks full of pencil-scratched stories, and blithely asked her to copy-type them. I was allowed to join my parents and their friends in a game that involved inventing fictional definitions for words so obscure that only the dictionary knew which was correct.  And I chatted with my teachers, not just as authoritarian dictators of spelling quizzes, but as people. 

Mrs. Monteiro talked to me as if I were a grownup, but she also had a knack for connecting with me as a kid.  She noticed that my handwriting was nothing but a hasty scrawl.  She could have forced me to practice writing letters and words by rote.  Instead, she loaned me a book of poems, and gave me a special lined notebook.  I could read whatever poems I liked, she said.  I should copy my favorites into the notebook.  But it was a special notebook, so only the very best handwriting would do.  I glowed with pride.  I was a big kid!  I had a special poetry journal!  I was also a little kid.  I copied Jabberwocky, and a lengthy work by AA Milne: A bear, however hard he tries/ Grows tubby without exercise...

This week, Lizzy’s appreciation for language was bolstered by winning third prize in the school poetry contest – with a masterpiece about wearing underpants on her head.  She came home with a plastic kite and a smile that appeared to be larger than her face.  For a shining moment, when her class applauded, she was a poet, a wordsmith, a writer.  By bedtime, though, she’d remembered that she really doesn’t appreciate that ‘who’ and ‘eight’ are spelled as if someone pulled letters randomly from a hat.

For now, it seems fair enough to commiserate with her that ‘gh’ doesn’t make sense, that ‘knee’ has at least one letter too many, and that ‘knight’ is afflicted with a double dose of insanity.  Falling in love with words takes time and patience. Maybe it wasn’t until second grade, in Mrs. Monteiro’s class, that I first started to view our language in the full light of all its wondrous possibilities.  Maybe it was then that I began to realize that I was angry at English not because I hated it, but because I loved it so much. 

The internet wasn’t at our fingertips in 1979.  But today, thanks to a memorably-offered first name, it yielded the street address of an 81-year-old who donated money to a Political Action Committee called Voice of Teachers for Education.  I could be wrong, of course, but I’m guessing that’s the same sharp-eyed woman who taught me about labor unions and corruption within the Roman Empire while whipping my handwriting into shape with Winnie the Pooh. 

I’m a lot older than twenty-one now.  Maybe – with my fingers crossed, in hopes that I’m not too late -- it’s time I dropped Joan a thank-you note.

Honk, honk

“Yerba Wubba Zrrrrble Uggugg!”

I hear the distinctively incoherent call as I jog along the muddy verge.  It’s springtime, and a common migratory species is once again rolling down its truck windows and exercising its vocal cords.  That’s right -- the Drive-By Warblers are back.

April offers lots of other signs of springtime, of course.  Slush and gravel whisper invitingly to small people in big boots.  Puddles large enough to be given names lurk along roadsides.  The cranes have returned to Creamer’s Field.  The swans are here, and so are the geese, the newborn reindeer and the adorably homely baby muskoxen. Flocks of bikers, their spandex plumage lurid in the sunlight, have repopulated the routes that were my private terrain in black January.  Family birthdays are gathering on the horizon, chirping “six, six!” and honking “forty!” These are iconic harbingers of the season – but so are the Warblers. 

Warblers are not just a Fairbanks phenomenon, of course.  In fact, they seem to be a species with a vast range, inhabiting every continent I’ve visited. While emphatic, their comments have almost always been obtuse.  I figure that the participants in this warm-season sport must have been cutting class on the day that the Doppler Effect was discussed in high school physics, and are thus blissfully unaware of the distortion of their voice effected by the motion of their 1989 Ford pickup, not to mention the masking effects of an elderly muffler.   They may also have missed out on the finer points of elocution and grammar.   

In years past, out-of-truck pronouncements unsettled me.  They undermined my need to be invisible, and augmented my hefty burden of insecurities. I’ve been walking, biking and jogging around -- in several states and nations -- ever since I was a kid.  To varying degrees, my non-motorized habits have been considered unusual, quirky, and downright weird.  Although I’ve always preferred to imagine that I’m utterly unremarkable while undertaking these perambulations, it’s hard to maintain that pretense while getting hollered at from a moving vehicle. 

Even when I couldn’t hear what was said, correct interpretation of the commentary always seemed like a lose-lose bet.  Option #1 was that these unknown males were making fun of me.  Maybe they were telling me that my butt looked vast and jiggly, or that my running style was reminiscent of Daffy Duck.  Maybe they thought that my speed was more glacial than their great-grandma’s, or that my bike helmet was the dweebiest thing they’d ever seen, and was buckled crooked besides.  My own imagination provided dozens of possibilities for humiliation.  Option #2 was even worse.  Maybe these guys were objectifying me, to the tune of, “A female!  In shorts!  With arms and legs in what appear to be roughly the correct numbers!  Woohoo, let’s engage in reproductive behavior immediately!”   Objectification, my angry-white-female self told me, was socially depressing, slightly threatening, and embarrassing in its own way.  In any case, whatever the options, humiliation was always on the menu.

I encountered my first Warbler a quarter century ago. I was biking back from the beach with my friend Mia, shorts pulled on over our damp bathing suits.  We were 14.  I had yet to hit puberty, and was such a blissfully clueless late bloomer that I turned to Mia in confusion and asked why some grown-up was offering up loud garbled pronouncements.  She rolled her eyes.  “Because we’re girls,” she said.  I blanched.  Because, you know, ick.

Ten years later, I was living in rural Jamaica, where it’s always the warm season, and where a young white woman on a bicycle is about as unnoticeable as a firecracker in an elevator.  No one had a truck, so as soon as my brain could parse Jamaican Patois, I understood the comments.  The many, many, many comments.  Every day.  For two years.  Options 1 and 2 were both employed, with myriad creative embellishments. My skin got thicker.  Not thick enough, but thicker.

Nevertheless, I never stopped walking, biking and jogging.  I do it because it’s a cheap and convenient form of transportation; because it’s often my sole source of exercise; and because it’s an excellent way to multi-task – I’m commuting, saving gas, saving money, trying to save the planet, and saving myself from cabin-fever in one easy maneuver. 

Fast-forward another fifteen years.  Some things are the same: it’s April, and the local truck windows are starting to roll down once again.  I still run, walk, and bike all over the place.   I still look like Daffy Duck, and I still can’t get my bike helmet to sit completely symmetrically.  On the other hand, a lot has changed.  I’m a professor – with, you know, an advanced degree and a career and everything.  I’m also a mom, and there’s often a kid-trailer or a tag-along bike clamped onto my own set of wheels.  Thus, when I met the first Warbler of the 2012 season, I was on my way from work – my I-have-a-doctorate mad-scientist job – and was heading over to pick up my kids from kindergarten.  And I was running, because, as mentioned, I’m a bit strange.

“Yerba Wubba Zrrrrble Uggugg!” shouted the guy riding shotgun.  I had no idea what he’d said, or which option it fell under.  That part was normal.  But then I realized that the game pieces had shifted.  Option #1, The Insult, now seemed to have a slightly new translation in my mind.  It sounded something like, “I am a pasty-faced under-employed young man who feels a peculiar need to shout rude things at almost-40-year-old professors.”  Option #2, The Come-On, now meant, “I am an awkward, incipiently paunchy 22-year-old who feels that he’d really like to sleep with some random almost-40 mom who is about to pick up her twin kindergarteners.”

This year, the season’s first Warbler didn’t leave me feeling irritated, vulnerable, or over-aware of my goofy, jiggling running style.  Instead, it left me laughing. 

Maybe laughter wasn’t the correct response.  I suppose I could get worried about my impending birthday.  I could develop a sudden urge to buy a red sports car, wear polyester pantsuits, or pen mournful existential poetry.  I could stock up on wrinkle cream and hair dyes and worry about my over-ripe ovaries. But, then again -- nope.  I’m not going there.  I wasted too much time in my pre-forty years feeling insecure.  It was supremely unhelpful.  Laughter is way more fun.

I think I have another ten years or so before I’m officially a crone, but I’ve already decided that I want to pick and choose the aspects of crone-ness that I embrace.  I think I’ll go with the part that allows me to wear odd hats, champion unpopular opinions, and laugh at things that I’m not supposed to laugh at.  I want to dispense wisdom on the rare occasions that anyone asks for it, and know how to shut up when they don’t. 

And of course I will continue to walk, bike, and run all over town in every season – and enjoy it. I’m already enjoying spring.  And I think I’m going to enjoy this birthday, too.

The Long and the Short of It

The cozy log shelter known as Lee’s Cabin is not a race checkpoint on the White Mountains 100.  Of course not!  Any real ultra-racer who is snow-biking, skiing, or running 100 miles wouldn’t even pause to rip open a Clif bar a mere seven miles into the adventure.  And yet two weeks earlier, Lee’s had been not a blip in the background, but the Grand Destination – and I’d spent a lot more time planning for that two-day fourteen-mile round-trip than for this (theoretically) non-stop hundred-mile one. 

As I meandered past on my sturdy classic skis, I did stop for a moment, and take a good swig from my battered Nalgene of hot chocolate.  I felt a little self-conscious for even noticing the cabin’s existence, but I could practically hear the echos of our Spring Break visit.

“Two, three, four…” The scuffling of ten small hands and an equal number of small feet in the loft of Lee’s Cabin sounded like an infestation of forty-pound squirrels.  “…seven, eight, nine…”  After several false starts, a total was reached.  Down below, the adults exchanged sardonic glances and waited for the census results to be announced.  The stuffed animal census, that is.

Placing limits on the plush beast population was part of the elaborate packing process.  So was preventing the kids from stuffing their allotted toy bags with cherished blocks of wood, railroad spikes, or chunks of granite.  But despite these efforts, the invisible gurus of Traveling Light mocked me. 

“They’re all small animals,” Lizzy told me earnestly.

Part of the trouble was that all undertakings involving kids need to be double-buffered against Worst Case Scenarios.  And if the adventure involves getting our two five-year-olds (not to mention three small people belonging to other mommies and daddies) to ski seven miles to a backwoods cabin when the temperature is hovering around zero Fahrenheit, make that quadruple-buffered. 

I knew that bringing a whole pint of maple syrup – from real Canadian maple trees! -- might be overkill.  Then again, running out of syrup?  That would be tragic.  I knew that the twins were unlikely to wear more than one sweater under their snowsuits for the simple reason that if they did so they’d be unable to move – but what if one sweater got wet?  What if it was accidentally drenched in real Canadian maple syrup?  I brought extras.  I worried that the rigors of the trail, the limitations of a cramped space, or the chill of the cabin floor might cause my kids to decide that (horrors!) they didn’t actually like ski trips.  I countered this eventuality by bringing approximately eight million snacks, plenty of art supplies, slippers, and, of course, stuffed animals.

Jay likes to spend whole evenings reading up on the riveting nuances of gossamer-light sleeping bags, tents less hefty than the average guinea pig, stoves that fold into your pocket, and rain jackets that practically levitate.  And yet there we were in the woods with not only three boxes of Girl Scout Cookies, eight bedtime stories, and a non-stick non-gossamer frying pan, but also a well-travelled Lamby and a toy cat named Dirty Snow.  I like to think I know how to prepare for the most extreme of Arctic expeditions, but what I actually prepared for was a slumber party at which the greatest danger was that someone might wet their sleeping bag or mislay a teddy.  The irony stared me in the face with its fuzzy little sewn-on eyes. 

In contrast, for the Whites 100, packing took roughly half an hour.  It wasn’t that I was trying to take the race less seriously than I took the family camping trip.  But I escaped the waiting list and inherited bib #16 only two days before the event -- and even then, I couldn’t immediately begin stuffing my old blue backpack.  I had a few other jobs to do first… starting with lining up 30 hours of childcare.

Luckily, our friends are saintly.  As far as I know, no one even groaned or rolled their eyes.  Still, I had to call upon the collective goodwill of six different long-suffering individuals, each with sleep habits to match their allotted shift.  These folks are savvy to the ways of kindergarteners (no unsupervised use of Sharpies; no eating pudding in the living room; beware of scientific experiments involving Silly Putty, food coloring, or grownup scissors), but I still needed to write a few basic instructions about things like pajamas, family doctors and school schedules.  I packed lunch boxes two days in advance, and I packed a canvas bag with enough apples, fishy crackers, cucumber slices, and smoked Gouda to fill the time in between. 

I also had to face the uncomfortable reality of my work schedule.  The race started on a Sunday morning.  I estimated that I would finish on Monday night… or maybe Monday evening, if I was lucky… or possibly even Monday afternoon, if I was an incurable optimist.  But however things panned out, on Tuesday morning I needed to wax lyrical – or at least wax coherent -- about climate change impacts to an audience of forty people from around the state.  I was planning to flagrantly violate the rule that states “Don’t Lead a Three-Day Conference When Utterly Annihilated.”  At the very least, I needed to finish my Powerpoints and put my laptop and paperwork in a bag, and make sure that bag was so handy that I could not possibly forget it, even if my Tuesday-morning brain had all the cohesion of a fruit smoothie.  While I was at it, it seemed prudent to lay out my clean clothes and semi-professional shoes.  Am I the only one who sometimes has dreams in which I show up at a podium with no clue what I’m supposed to talk about, clad in muddy overalls or Superwoman underwear?

And then there was the party planning.  Back when I thought that Jay was the only member of the family who was going to be out on the racecourse, I’d happily agreed to do all the shopping, cooking, and planning for the after-race party – a dinner (hopefully at least passably edible) for 100-ish people. I figured it would be fun to check on Jay’s progress on the SPOT tracker while stirring up a few gallons of brownie batter and simmering chili in a pot large enough to bathe a wildebeest.  Instead, I rushed to do all this in advance, my demeanor more Demented Line-Cook than Betty Crocker.  I took advantage of the vast size of our freezer – otherwise known as Fairbanks Winter – to store the results.  A hundred slabs of homemade cornbread?  No problem… so long as I didn’t also need to prepare food for the race itself.  Except that, of course, I did. 

It turned out there was one other task I’d forgotten.  It was my turn to clean our community’s shared building.  Quick, get out the mop!  By the time I’d laundered the tablecloths and played the requisite game of The Vacuum Cleaner is Going to Nibble Your Toes, there wasn’t exactly time to shop for Powerbars. 

Luckily, there’s always plenty of food in our house.  Pilot bread?  Check.  Peanut butter?  Crunchy and creamy.   I was pretty sure other race participants would be fuelled by carefully calibrated rations and high-performance brand-name gels and goos – but there were plenty of those animal cookies left over.  I filled two sandwich baggies.

I figured those cookies must be good trail fuel, because they’d been popular among the three-foot-tall skiers.  “’Nother cookie, please, Mommy?”  The treats were just the right size to stuff into Molly, one at a time, as she struggled along on her Lilliputian skis.  No need to take off your mittens when your parent is imitating a bird feeding its fledglings.  Look, this one is shaped like a lion!  At least, I think that’s a lion.  Tiger?  Endangered snow leopard?  Mmmm, chocolatey snow leopard.  Keep those skis moving, kiddo!

I kick-waxed my own skis the night before the race in the infinitesimal interval between almost-kids’-bedtime and really-truly-right-now-kids’-bedtime.  I tossed the waxes into the top pocket of my backpack, where they fought for space with the headlamp, extra batteries, and small ration of toilet paper.

On our Spring Break trip, we carried a full medical kid, complete with salves, ointments, and cherry-flavored medications for the kindergarten crowd, just in case.  In other words, we had all the necessities. My race backpack had all the medical necessities, too: duct tape wrapped around a pen, and six Alleve tablets in a Ziploc.  There were four race medics out on the course, and I had a lot of warm clothes.  I’d be fine without the Winnie the Pooh Bandaids. 

My slush-proof overboots – for use on the notorious Ice Lakes and other sections of overflow – were actually plastic bags that had once held spruce pellets for our stove.  I knew they worked.  But I didn’t exactly feel like an ultra-racer with legs that said, “Made from 100% Alaskan Wood.”

It was when I was removing this low-rent footwear for the second time in a mile, at about mile 92 of the course, that a racer on foot caught up with me.  Strictly speaking, skiers ought to be far ahead of those who are walking the course, but I knew there were already two foot travelers ahead of me, so my pride wasn’t exactly at stake. 

In fact, my fellow racer didn’t seem scornful of either my slowness or my pellet bags, although I knew that if anyone is a real ultra-racer, he is.  Not only has he completed umpteen events, but he was one of the 18 entrants who actually finished this year’s snow-mired Iditasport, a race that Jay dropped out of after pushing a heavily laden bike through drifts for three days straight.  I was very grateful to find that such a supremely accomplished walker was willing to hike the next section of the course with me, because mile 93 is Wickersham Wall, a hill just as daunting as it sounds. 

And yet, somehow, the Wall wasn’t demoralizing at all.  Oh, I’m not saying I flew up it at lightning speed.  I was panting along with my skis strapped to my pack, my knees aching, and my ankles threatening mutiny.  But as I chatted with my new friend about his background in theoretical physics, his girlfriend who had snow-biked the course and was (hopefully) awaiting him at the finish, his political frustration and amusement, and his job at Google, it seemed easy to tell him about my kids, my logistical contortions, and my hope that Jay was there at the finish, too.  Maybe this guy was a real ultra-racer in a way that I would never be, but he was a real person, too, with a jumbled calendar and competing interests.  Moreover, he had a sense of humor – a trait that seems crucial for dealing with not only sleep-deprivation and steep hills, but also Powerpoint presentations, party-catering, small children, and just… life, the universe, and everything.  Sunshine was pouring down on us, there was still enough afternoon to carry us to the finish line, and we were both having a blast.

The course of the Whites 100 is a loop with a spur at the beginning and end, meaning that I passed Lee’s Cabin at mile seven, but also passed within half a mile of it at mile 94, right after topping Wickersham Wall.  This time, I was too far away to actually see the cabin, but I gave the left-hand trail a glance and a smile anyhow.  I’d be back again.  Jay and I would bring the kids back next winter, or perhaps even in the fall, with extra sweaters, chocolate cookies shaped like bison, and plenty of cuddly toys.  Maybe we’d even beat 2012’s record – although that might be tough. 

No, I don’t mean we’d beat the four hours that it took our family of four to cover those seven miles.  Who cares about speed?  I’m talking about our stellar packing job. Because when the plush-critter census was complete, and the number was relayed down from the loft, even the grownups were impressed.

How many stuffed animals made the journey? The answer, it transpired, was eighteen.

What the DIckens?

I

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

“Too bad it costs two hundred dollars to get a snowmachine ride back,” sighed the long-haired young man. 

I didn’t know my fellow racer’s name, but I’d caught glimpses of him as I had of many others, through a day, a night, and a second day on the trail.  He was one of the runners – as opposed to a snow-biker, or a skier like myself -- but now, at mile 83, he was more of a trudger.  His hair looked like a cozy nest for a squirrel, and his eyes seemed to be focused on something a few miles beyond my left ear.  He was ten or fifteen years younger than me, but here at the back of the pack, the Susitna 100 was long enough to make us all look a bit like something past its expiration date. 

I wanted to say something peppy and motivational, but my brain was as foggy as his gaze.  Why had he wanted to take part in a hundred-mile “Race Across Frozen Alaska” in the first place?  Why had I?  Why, for that matter, did anybody?

A few competitors, of course, were impossibly buff and optimally trained: superheroes in snowgear.  They were racing to compete, and to win.  I, on the other hand, was a mom from Fairbanks with scant training and goofy skiing skills.  I was covering a hundred miles at three miles per hour – which, once I’ve worn out my initial energy in the first 25 miles of back-country skiing, is the inelegant pace I can maintain, for hour after hour.  After hour. I knew this from last year’s White Mountains 100.  And yet here I was again.

How far is a hundred miles?  To put things in perspective, it’s almost four marathons, or thirty-two 5k races, or -- for the less ambitious -- 880 laps from one end of Fairbanks Fred Meyer West to the other.   It’s roughly three times the length of the companion “Little Su” – a race that has to cap its roster because lots of people actually want to take part in it.  A hundred miles is also long enough to listen to the Audiobook version of Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities – every gorgeous, rolling, imbued-with-significance paid-by-the-word syllable of it – and still have plenty of time to listen to two other complete novels as well.

It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

At the race start, on that Saturday morning in February, the atmosphere was bustling, businesslike, foot-stompingly chilly, and slightly anxious.  People muttered about gear and trail conditions, and eyeballed their competition.  But that mood dominated for only a half mile or so, until the horde of zippy fat-tire snow-bikers and the three insanely competitive skate-skiers were out of sight.  Then the ambiance became that of a peculiarly linear social gathering.  “Are you from Anchorage?”  “Have you done the hundred before?” “Here, let me see if I can help you get that sled adjusted.” “Hey, we have the same skis!” 

I met Tom, a cheerful classic skier with a gray beard and two teenagers back at home who apparently were just not into this kind of thing (sigh).  I told him about my own kids and my secret fear that they would one day take up video games and/or cheerleading as their primary hobbies. I met Fiona, a perky young champion skate-skier who wanted to know if I recommended using her bra as a battery-warming holder for her ipod.  I did, of course.  I’m not sure how males overcome their obvious disadvantage in this arena.

The sun came out.  The temperature rose.  Sweating in my longjohns, I kept removing my easier-to-strip upper layers until I was sliding along in a tank top.  “Ooh, I didn’t know there were going to be bikini babes in this race!” teased a skate-skier who had been jealous of my classic skis on the hillocky narrow trails of the first ten miles of the course, but who would soon blast past me on the endless wide-open rivers.  My fish-belly Fairbanks-winter skin set to work producing vitamin D. 

Via my earbuds, I met the inimitable Dickensian cast: a revolutionary who never stops knitting, an alcoholic attorney, a darkly hilarious grave robber.  Their world blended with the world of bright snow and dark spruce around me.

It didn’t seem like long before I was at the first checkpoint, Flathorn Lake, amidst a bustle of skiers and runners.   We were all about efficiency and camaraderie as we filled water bottles and snarfed down homemade brownies.  All the chocolate you want!  This was why we were doing this!

It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…

I left Flathorn with great faith that I’d finish the race – faith that I lost within the hour.  I’m not quite sure how I wrenched my shoulder.  The course was almost entirely flat, nothing like the crazy descents, mountain pass, and ice lakes last year in the Whites 100.  But somehow I caught a pole wrong, and the 25-ish pounds of food, water, and required emergency gear on my back didn’t help.  A ball of muscle wound itself up into a jangly nervy mass.  By the time I made it to the second checkpoint at mile 41 -- and Madame LaFarge was storming the Bastille with her knitting buddies -- every plant of my left ski pole ached and stabbed.  In Luce’s Lodge, I could barely raise my arm high enough to take my hat off.  It was dinnertime.  Many of the bikers had already passed me, whooshing back toward the finish line.  Why was I trying to do this?  I’d never make it.

 “If you don’t mind getting a massage from someone you don’t know…”

Um, was that a trick question?  My only regret is that I still don’t know the name of the woman – the fiancée of another racer, visiting Luce’s Lodge via snowmachine -- who spent a good fifteen minutes working on my sweaty, nasty, shoulder.  She had nothing in the world to gain from this.  I was shoving a grilled cheese sandwich and fries into my face as she worked, and I’m pretty sure my greasy thanks were utterly inadequate payment for her compassion.

It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…

Fortified emotionally, physically, and gustatorially, I headed out into the darkness for the long slog to Alexander Lake and back.   The round trip was 24 miles, and I knew it would take almost all night.  With only the light of my headlamp on the snow, the voice streaming in from my audio-library selection seemed all the more potent.  The tale seemed increasingly likely to end in high-Dickensian pathos, with a woeful widow, a fatherless girl, and a mad – albeit industrious – shoe-maker.  And yet, I couldn’t help but hold out some hope for them.  The stars were out, my blood was burbling with high fructose corn syrup, and this was the section of the race in which I saw all the other racers who were anywhere close to my league. 

First, I encountered those who were outbound while I was still inbound.  “Good work,” they told me.  “Keep it up!”  I saw Fiona, going strong, still smiling, and still presumably warming her ipod.  I saw the “bikini babe” guy, skating through the darkness, cheering me on with jovial conviction.  Tom and two other fellow classic-skiers were sound asleep at Alexander Lake, but others were there to share the cocoa and gird for the return journey.

And then, in the 230 surreal minutes between 1:30 a.m. and 5:20 a.m., after I’d wrenched myself away from the snug, sweet hospitality of the cabin, I saw those who were even slower than I.  “You can do it,” I told them.  “Looking good!” 

Good, of course, is relative.  Under Dickens’ pen, it sometimes neared perfection. The story’s message of bravery, hope, and generosity mingled in my sleepy brain with the world of free massages, all-night volunteers offering soup and sympathy, and tenacious runners smiling in the darkness.  When the Tale surged to its bittersweet closing and Sydney Carton earned his “far, far better rest,” I was semi-ebullient, although there was no rest for me -- not only because there were, thankfully, no guillotines in the middle of the Yentna River, but also because I was only half way through the race.  A hundred miles is really that long.

I moved on to my next literary treat, the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy.  A dystopian tale of guerilla-style murder in the wilderness is a psychologically risky choice, on an isolated trail after midnight.  But no – the theme wasn’t really kill-or-be-killed.  It was a tale of evil governments and a subjugated populace, of risking everything to subvert the oppression, of hope and loss and the triumph of the human spirit.  Not so different from Dickens, after all. 

“Great job,” I told my fellow racers, my fellow humans.

And then, above me, the aurora blossomed.  For hours, it teased the edges of my vision.  Look up for too long, and I’d trip over my own skis – but I looked up anyhow.  The lights danced. 

We had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Luce’s Lodge, outbound.  There was going to be a shortcut on the return route, so there were only 35 miles to go!  Wait… only?  Not so long ago, 35 miles was further than I’d have been willing to ski in a day, even with a good night’s rest behind me and no wobble in my knees.  Sleep.  Must. Sleep.

And sleep I did, for three hours, in bunkroom number eight.   I have no idea who the other two people were, sacked out with me, although one of them kindly gave me a bunk and took the floor.  I protested, but he seemed to be instantly snoring. 

Rise and shine, creaky self!  Time to half-fall out of your bunk and lurch toward the outhouse!  Around the wooden tables in the lodge, someone was eating spaghetti and meatballs at 8 a.m.  Several people were downing pancakes.  Two were fast asleep with their heads face-down on the table.  My stomach roiled at the thought of the Lodge’s breakfast options.  The rich slabs of chocolate in my pack mocked me.  I sipped warm Gatorade. I went on.

We were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

Between Luce’s and Flathorn, I met the Irondog.  There was something oddly comic about a snowmachine race raging past me at 80mph while I slithered along at 3.  They were, in fact, going the other way.  They were catching air.  They were churning the trail with their powerful paddlewheels.  They probably thought I was a lunatic, especially when they chanced upon me peeing, skis still on, breezy river on all sides.  They gave me a polite berth.  I sipped my Gatorade, but my pee had turned orange and I remained untempted by Nacho Cheese Combos or Nutter Butters.

At Flathorn, the cozy cabin seemed so quiet that for a moment I thought I was the only one there.  Then I saw the six or seven forms, slumped and sprawled on chairs and couches, slack-jawed, half-lidded.  Obviously I’d reached the Zombie Apocalypse section of the race.

“Would you like some jambalaya?” asked the kindly hostess. 

She’d been up for two days and a night, too, and yet she gave me her chair, and mixed me some Tang.  I tried to make my anti-jambalaya groan a polite groan. 

She looked at me appraisingly.  “How about some plain white rice?” 

I ate two bowls, as grateful as I as was incoherent, and washed it down with more warm Tang -- an epicurean’s delight – before staggering out the door.

It was then, as I was setting out on that final 17 miles, that I spoke with the disenchanted young man who was dreaming of a snowmachine ride.  I knew exactly what he meant, and he knew that I would understand.  It doesn’t take much to pare us all down to exposed little husks – certainly not 18 years in the Bastille.  But I also hoped that he would not ask for that ride, or take it if it were offered.  It never occurred to me that I was supposed to be competing against the cabinful of zombies.  In my mind, they were on my team.

“It’s not really the two hundred dollars,” I said.  My smile used up precious energy reserves, but I tried to make it speak volumes.  There was something besides lack of funds that was driving him forward – his pride?  His stubbornness?  His dreams?  Only he knew, exactly.

“Yeah.”  He took another step, and another.  “Yeah.” He sighed, as if damning the demon on his own shoulder.  “I know.”

He was falling behind me, but I knew he’d finish.  I knew we both would.  And I figured Dickens might have understood if I’d said, with no intention of being oxymoronic, that we’re all in this together… and we’re all in this separately.

I started a third novel.  It was the story of a twelve-year-old boy who finds out he’s the son of Poseidon, and has to brave a series of Greco-Roman monsters to save what really matters.   It was a story of compassion, and tenacity, and what it means to be human.  In my addled brain, I imagined that Dickens would have liked that one, too.

Six hours later, I clambered into Jay’s truck, clutching my Finisher’s medallion.  Jay, who had come out onto the course in the darkness and walked the last mile at my side, plunked a quart tub of fresh melon onto my lap.  He told me it had been selected by the kids, who had somehow psychically known that it was about the only food that I’d want to cram into my mouth in juicy handfuls at midnight.

“Did you have a good time?” he asked for the third or fourth time, as if unconvinced by my previous efforts at a positive response.

I thought back on the race – every mile, every face and hand and smile, every flicker of light in the darkness and every word that poured into my head and indelibly mixed with and enriched the experience.  Ninety-five people started the race.  Eighty-two finished it, of which I was the seventy-third.  The last one had yet to stagger in, eight hours behind me, in the early light of Monday morning.

Why would anyone want to bike, run, or ski a hundred miles?  Every one of us had an answer to that “why,” but the only answer I could ever be completely sure of was my own -- and that one was too complicated to explain.  Especially with my mouth full of melon.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

Dickens understood.  And maybe, almost, I did too.  “Yes,” I told Jay with more confidence.  “It was great.”

It was the best of times.

Bore of the Roses

A couple of weeks ago, I pushed my shopping cart into Fred Meyer and immediately winced as the Seasonal Display assaulted me:  shiny plastic hearts, fake flowers, lacy ribbons, and fuchsia teddy bears.  Near the cash registers, the impulse-purchases on offer were those heart-shaped candies that are almost as tasty as Tums.  “Be Mine!”  “Luv U!” It was that time of year again.

Based in part on what a big Valentine’s Day Grinch I am, I spent years assuming I had some kind of allergy to romance -- and indeed to all things loving, tender, and touching.  What else could I think?  I routinely scowl at jewelry displays that exhort men to show their devotion by opening their wallets.  I mock movies in which the artfully-bloodied hero wins the artfully-disheveled-yet-still-eyelinered girl.  I am ruthlessly sarcastic about novels in which brooding, rugged ‘Chet’ and sassy-yet-innocent ‘Estella’ suffer inexplicable mutual magnetism despite their drastic and improbable misunderstandings, and subsequently fall out of their clothes.  Even things I normally appreciate – luscious assortments of creamy dark chocolates that require a map to navigate their multi-layered deliciousness – seem overwrought when wrapped in heart-shaped ribbon-adorned boxes.  All this stuff is aimed squarely at my demographic, and yet it has always left me cold.  Ergo, I long ago concluded, I must be utterly unsentimental.

When I was really little, the age my kids are now, I didn’t hate February 14th, but I didn’t really get it, either.  I ate the Tums-candy with the rest of the class, and exchanged the everybody-gets-one Valentines, as prescribed.  I remember thinking that it was oddly pointless to give the same card to the kid you liked and the one who destroyed your Lego-block towers, but at that age, a lot of grownup rules seemed pretty weird.

This year, now that my own kids are in kindergarten, I was sucked into the not-really-optional kiddie Valentines vortex.  Class lists came home from school.  I figured that we might as well make this exercise as creative (read: gluey) and educational (read: “we love penmanship!”) as possible.  Besides, as mentioned, I’m allergic to the Valentines section at Fred Meyer, so purchasing the pre-fab cards was anathema to me. 

I felt a twinge of déjà vu when one of my daughters, sounding out the names on her class list, said, “Do I have to give a Valentine to ‘Warthog’?” [all children’s names have been altered to protect the innocent, and also for my own amusement].

I told her that she did.  I got out the construction paper.  It wasn’t pink.  Green and blue Valentines are ok, right?  I got out the glue sticks, the scissors, and the markers, and I even unearthed a few sparkly things.  Then I looked at the lists of names, and sighed.  Fifty-six hand-lettered cards amounts to a Herculean effort for two small people who have only recently become semi-literate (“I do not like green eggs and ham… and I also do not like Valentines Day, Sam-I-Am.”)

As the twins worked away, making cards not only for Alligator, who invited them to his birthday party, but also for Albatross, who apparently spends work time staring at his pencil, and Lemur, who has Serious Behavior Problems, I wondered who was going to be left out later on, when everyone gets a little older and the rules change.  Because if making Valentines for everyone at age five seems like a rather pointless exercise in sweatshop labor, sending flowers only to the popular kids at age fifteen is far worse.

When I was in high school, Valentine’s Day was used as an excuse for a fundraiser/popularity-contest called Carnation Day.  Kids were encouraged to send color-coded dyed carnations to friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, and crushes.  By the end of the day, the popular girls had dense bouquets, rich in reds and pinks.  I had one or two crumpled yellow blossoms hanging out of my three-ring binder. 

It only got worse in college.  There were plenty of Valentines events, university-sanctioned and otherwise.  Such proceedings required (or presumed) an actual date.  I had plenty of terrific male friends, but they generally treated me like one of the guys -- unless they preferred guys as dates, in which case they treated me as one of the girls.

Sometimes, my friends asked me for advice about romance.  I protested that this was akin to asking me to translate Swahili, but they kept right on asking.  In the dramatic screen-play of college romance, I didn’t have a role – but I was the script prompter. 

In my senior year, my roommates and I held an Anti-Valentines party, complete with black torn hearts.  After that, I ignored the pseudo-holiday to the best of my ability.  Still, I was pretty much convinced that I just didn’t belong in the same universe as anything even vaguely romantic.

Roughly five years later, I met Jay.  I immediately thought he was pretty fabulous, of course – but that doesn’t mean that there were any hearts, or doilies, or icky sentiment – of course not!  We went hiking together, and talked about good books, and recounted past outdoor adventures, and discussed world events – you know, the sort of things one does with a guy who is not prone to brooding or improbable misunderstandings. 

One October day, about two months after we’d first met, as the first snowflakes of the season drifted down, Jay met me at the door with a gift.  “I thought of giving you flowers,” he said.  “But… you aren’t really a flowers sort of person… so I got you these.”  And he handed me a pair of back-country skis. 

I’d never owned my own pair before, although I’d skied quite a bit on borrowed ones.  When I protested at such a gift, he demurred that they’d been heavily discounted.  “Besides, I wanted you to have them… because… well, I want to spend a lot of time out skiing with you,” he explained simply.

I skied with him.  I married him.  We produced two children, and had yet more adventures. 

Twelve years later, there I was, watching the kids working away industriously at their Valentines.  When one of them proudly showed me the one she’d created for her bestest friend, ‘Pterodactyl’, I found myself grinning at her kindergarten spelling. 

“Happy Valitis Day” the card proclaimed.

Valitis!  So that’s what it was!  Back in my not-ill-spent-enough youth, I spent far too many years suffering from valitis.  But luckily, sometime just before the turn of the millennium, aided by a pair of skis in the hands of the right person, it became obvious to me that I can be plenty loving, and yes, even a true romantic, without subscribing to the maudlin, mawkish version of Valentine’s Day being served up to me in the aisles of Fred Meyers. 

This year, on the 14^th, Jay bought us all fresh strawberries, melon, and pineapple in blessedly ordinary packaging.  The kids handed out their paper missives -- even to Warthog and Lemur.  They seemed to buy into my explanation that these examples of kindness and generosity – not to mention Very Best Handwriting – might help make the recipients nicer kids, in the long term.  I may have almost believed it myself.  And this past weekend, I skied a hundred miles through snowy forests and beneath dancing aurora, [but that’s the next blog post] while my fabulous husband took care of the twins and held down the fort. I had plenty of time to cogitate on what I think Valentines Day ought to be about.

I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out the variety of romance and the brand of sentimentalism that doesn’t give me hives.  I certainly know I’m lucky.  But I reserve the right to ridicule the February Seasonal Display – and I’m still not going to eat those chalky little hearts.

Holding the universe together

“Mommy… how do you spell ‘duct tape’?”

I was standing at the kitchen counter, grouchily attempting to make tea in an electric kettle with a jammed lid.  My daughter was kneeling on the floor, pen in hand, brow furrowed in concentration.  She was writing out another section of her science fair project report.  The text below each section header was short and to the point, in keeping with the attention spans of twin five-year-old scientists.  The handwriting wobbled precariously.  Hypothesis: The big parachute will be slower.  Methods: We dropped the dolls and timed how long it took.  Now she was up to Materials: Two dolls, stopwatch, trash bags, scissors, string…  duct tape.

This, I thought, was not going to be one of those shiny, polished, no-expense-spared projects that wow the judges.

Sometimes I feel like my whole world is patched, welded, crazy-glued, jury-rigged, re-strung, puttied-over, wired together, and – of course—duct taped.  My right heel is wrapped in the stuff.  So is my left thumb, my bicycle seat, and both my old ski poles.  For the most part, the repairs are perfectly functional.  The gray sticky stuff works better on winter-cracked skin than any salve or balm I’ve tried.  The bike is oddly comfy and fabulously theft-proof in its taped-up glory.  Still, shouldn’t my world look a little less slap-dash and a lot less redneck?  I can’t help thinking that I probably shouldn’t be living a lifestyle that includes rolls of duct tape in every color of the rainbow.

Back east, where I grew up, duct tape was neither a fashion accessory nor a structural housing component.  Thus, I didn’t start out as a duct tape addict – at least, not exactly – although I have to admit that the inclinations were there from an early age.  I didn’t have eleven rolls of the stuff when I was a kid.  In fact, I’d never even heard of it.  But I was a big fan of all the other kinds of tape I knew – scotch, masking, and the coveted electrical – and I also had a heavy hand with the household supplies of string, cardboard, and glue.  I took apart the broken vacuum cleaner, built elaborate doll furniture from Quaker Oats boxes, and hoarded magnets, binder clips, shoe boxes, popsicle sticks, and wire. I suspect that if I’d known of duct tape’s flexible strength, its wondrous stickiness, its almost-waterproof resiliency, and the satisfying noise it makes as it comes off the roll, I would have saved up my twenty-five-cents-a-week allowance for almost nothing else.

Back then, I hadn’t yet internalized the stigma of looking like a half-hearted hobo.  Aesthetics and propriety meant nothing to me, and I didn’t know the jokes about blue tarps.  But now I look at all my repairs and Rube-Goldberging with a more critical eye.  I COULD afford a new bike seat.  I don’t HAVE to wear a jacket with a zipper that has blue teeth on the left and black teeth on the right.  The extension cord hanging from the ceiling is not particularly attractive.  And do cardboard boxes really constitute a filing system?

I tell myself that I could give up my string, my cardboard, my glue, and even my tape habit – really I could – except that things keep breaking.  In twelfth-grade physics I learned about entropy:  no matter what we do, the overall orderliness of the universe is always going to decrease.  Potential energy turns to kinetic energy, the energy of motion.  Kinetic energy, under the influence of friction, is wasted as heat.  Heat dissipates.  Things fall apart.  And when they do, we all have to fight uphill against entropy by borrowing orderliness from some other corner of the universe.  Some people do this by buying NEW things.  Shiny things.  Smooth, glossy, matching, professionally painted things.  Nancy gets out the duct tape.

The hope that I’ll be cured of all my patching is stymied by my surroundings.  If duct tape has a hometown, it’s Fairbanks Alaska. I’ve seen people using it to hold together clothing, trucks, and heavy equipment.  I’ve heard it works pretty well short-term in lieu of stitches, if you happen to have any gaping wounds.  But for all its uses, popular wisdom nonetheless labels duct tape as tacky, slip-shod, and possibly even a sign of moral decay.

I banged the kettle on the countertop slightly too aggressively.

“What are you doing, Mommy?”  The young scientist was temporarily distracted from her writing exercise.

“Trying to fix this… problematic… kettle,” I growled.  I have to be selective in my use of adjectives in front of the kids.

“Can I help you?  Please, I can fix it!”  My wannabe-helper was already reaching for the large plastic bin on the lowest shelf – the one that holds the duct tape.

“This isn’t a duct tape problem,” I explained.  The lid on the electric kettle was stuck open.  This made the water boil more slowly.  More importantly, it prevented the kettle from turning off when it did boil.  For someone like me, with the attention span of a gnat, auto-shutoff is a must. So I took a good look at the lid.  There was a little poky plastic thingy on the inside of the hinge that needed to be pushed in, but I couldn’t do it with my fingers without jamming a hole in my thumb.

“Let me!  Please, can I try?”  This was my fix-it kid.  She knows the difference between Phillips and flat-head, between D-cell, C-cell, double-A, and triple-A.  She knows that Elmer’s All-Purpose only works on porous surfaces, that bike tubes should be gently abraded with sandpaper before application of the glue and patch, and that seam allowances are a must.  She wouldn’t be able to fix the kettle, I thought, but she’d nag me about it insatiably until I let her try.  Sometimes, as I supply both my kids’ cardboard, string, and paste habits, I have an eerie feeling that I’m being charged for my own crimes, with thirty years worth of back interest due.

 I handed her the ornery thing, and started packing school lunch boxes instead.

She examined the kettle carefully.  “The problem is this little poky part,” she said after a minute or two.  “But I can’t push it in, because it hurts my fingers.”

Well, yeah.

We puzzled it out together.   “I’d use a thimble,” I said, “but I don’t have one.  At least, I don’t think I do.  But how about this pen?  It has a small indentation on the lid, and it’s narrow enough to do the job.”

She nodded earnest agreement.

 Pop.  The little plastic gizmo slid back into place.  The kettle shut with a click.  I smiled at my accomplice, and she beamed back.  The lid was still crooked.  As far as I could discern, it would always be crooked.  But I was pleased – more than pleased.  I realized that I wasn’t just compromising and making do with a less-than-perfect hot-drink appliance.   I actually liked it better that way, crooked lid and all.  I’d shared a sense of victory with my young co-conspirator.  We’d overcome an obstacle.

Moreover, we’d kept one more chunk of stainless steel, copper, and plastic out of the Fairbanks landfill.   Recycling is the guilt-panacea of a throw-away society.  Not dumping stuff in the first place is recycling's old-fashioned predecessor.   So what if the kettle didn’t look perfect?  Fixing it made it more mine – more ours – than it had ever been before.

 My fix-it kid hastened back to her original task.  “Look,” she said, proud of herself.  “See, I’m all done with the ‘Materials’ part.”  She held up her work for my inspection.

As I carefully examined her efforts, I recalled the peculiar sight of the identical naked dolls hurtling off the cabin loft, each with her own trash-bag-and-string parachute.  The larger parachute was indeed slower.  And the duct tape harnesses held up beautifully.  I imagined these items artfully arranged on a table in front of the kids’ display board – which itself was re-used, with telltale rips from the previous scientific efforts of my neighbor’s kid. 

I thought of the emails that periodically circulate around the university, in which biologists, physicists, and chemists are asked to please please please offer up a few hours for such-and-such elementary school.  It dawned on me that the project would be graded by off-duty scientist-parents – people like me.  And, perhaps more to the point, the scientists would be fellow Fairbanksans.

D-U-C-T  T-A-P-E.  The words stared up at me in purple marker from the bottom of the page.

 “The judges,” I said, “are going to love it.”