Tag Archives: adventures in normality

Oh My Stars! Or, an ordinary woman tries to comprehend the size of the universe

August 26, 2007 tinymantras Leave a comment

I know an awful lot more about space today than I did a year ago. I suspected I had something to do with my son’s intense interest in the cosmos because I did watch an awful lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns on the DVR during the first three or four months of his life, when the better part of our days were spent nursing and napping. But I couldn’t have named the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Or told you the names of any galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

These days, if I don’t clue in to words like quasar and understand that there are far more elaborate whirlpools than the ones that we see when the bathtub drains, I miss out on a lot of things that Declan is thinking about.

I grew up with the original Star Trek. Reruns, mind you. I remember exploring strange new worlds and civilizations on my back patio in New Jersey with my mom, brother and some friends. A small curtain was our transporter, and I was always Uhuru because she was the only female character. (I had high hopes for Lieutenant Tracy, but she was offered up for slaughter as quickly as she appeared on the show.)

Somewhere between my new cosmic awareness and a few Voyager and Deep Space Nine reruns in the past year, it finally dawned on me that I have been watching in relative ignorance. I either nodded off in 6th grade science or I just haven’t paid enough attention to space news over the years. At minimum, I glazed over during technical dialogue in Star Trek too often. I was never really conscious of the fact that the whole thing takes place in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and most of it in just one quadrant of our galaxy. Of course, that is not a small area. Our sun is, after all, one of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. If we actually do make it to a significant number of other solar systems within those 25 billion-ish stars by the 23rd or 24th centuries, we will have made some kick-ass technological leaps.

Somehow, in my childhood brain, I never really differentiated between “galaxy” and “universe” and that stuck with me through adulthood. I never contemplated the massive stretches of void between this galaxy and another. I never really thought about other galaxies, because Earth alone has generally been plenty big enough for me to try and fathom. But beyond the 100 billion neighborhood stars in our neighborhood, the Hubble telescope tells us that there are at least 100 billion other galaxies. And presumably, many of those galaxies have their own 100 billion stars, at least.

Now they have found a HUGE hole in the universe that is nearly one billion light-years across. This means, I am told, that it’s about the size of 10,000 of our Milky Way galaxies laid end-to-end. These figures are so mind-boggling to me, the theory that we are all really just Sims begin to make sense.

I find something comforting in these new, daily reminders and revelations that I’m smaller, and more insignificant than I ever imagined. For a few moments, it can turn ordinary concerns – like the 20 percent increase in my health care premium that I just got word of in the mail on Saturday – to stardust.

Life soundtrack: The Ventures, Gold, “Telstar”

Notes of a She-Hack, Oh My Ohio

West Side Story, Chapter 2

August 16, 2007 tinymantras 1 Comment

I got stuck in an automatic car wash on West Broad Street* two days ago. I input the code numbers to make it go, the thing pulled me in about 20 feet, then stopped. Trapped in the somewhat foreign space of my stepfather’s Crown Victoria, I watched the spindle of fat, soapy rags twirl through an entire cycle and realized that I couldn’t take the keys out of the ignition without putting the car in park. Being on a track that demanded the car stay in neutral, this didn’t seem like the smart choice. Instead, I chose to lean on the horn like the most annoying person who ever lived and hoped that my oil-stained white knight would arrive soon.

My mother called me on my cell phone at that moment. Learning of my peril while listening to me beep for several minutes without getting any response, she serenaded me with, “Did she ever return? No, she never returned, and her fate is still unlearned/Though for years there were fond hearts watching/for the little girl stuck in the car wash who never returned.”

She tried to call the BP station for me while I kept on honking, and after about 10 minutes, a young man finally showed up to help. After a series of “turn the wheel this way” and “hit the gas!” instructions, I wound up safely back in the right place and miraculously, without any scratches on the car. He sent me back though with an upgraded car wash, which is apparently more expensive because you get to sit there and watch yourself get encased inside of a rainbow of sherbet-colored foam instead of plain white soap.

Yesterday, on the same stretch of road, I stopped at a traffic light close to the outerbelt, right at the moment that an ambulance and firetruck pulled over to examine a person lying on ground beside the offramp. I saw an EMT pick up one of the person’s arms and drop it. As it flopped to the ground, I decided that I would add an errand or two to my trip, which had been to simply ship a camcorder back to Canon that they have now failed to fix twice. I didn’t find anything about this person in the paper today, so I’m hoping that means the man or woman (I couldn’t tell which) is okay, or recovering from whatever happened somewhere.

When I finally drove home, I soaked in the friendly sight of Westgate’s neighborly-looking streets. A young woman in a ruffled blue shirt and spectacles walked a three-legged dog in front of these 1940s homes, where canna and petunias and sunflowers are embroidered into the landscape. There is enough obvious house pride around here to keep us feeling the peer pressure to weed and fix our crumbling front step. As commercial or institutional as West Broad Street can feel, Westgate is equally welcoming.

Dan keeps joking that living on the West side is like being in the witness relocation program. In our old quarters, closer to North High Street*, he couldn’t walk ten feet without bumping into some musician, artist, know-it-all, music fan, cult of personality or new or old friend. I have run into someone I know out in the neighborhood (in this case, at the hardware store) exactly once since we moved here last November. Dan, of course, has run into a few more, but nowhere near the level he did around our old stomping ground.

This is probably a blessing this summer, because we certainly can’t go to a festival or music event without his experiencing some degree of interrogation about what happened to Little Brother’s and what he’s planning to do next. Around the closing, it was very touching when so many people said “I’m so sorry,” and a few people actually cried about losing the club, or because they hurt for us, knowing that despite Dan’s veteran status as a music man, our life as a family is very new and financial instability is scary. It is touching, but exhausting.

For the sake of trying to figure out how we are going to rebalance our lives, it’s good to get stuck in a West Broad Street car wash.

* For those not familiar with Columbus, West Broad Street is the primary east-west road that runs through Columbus, while High Street is its North-South counterpart. The two street intersect in the center of Downtown, where the Ohio Statehouse is located.

Life soundtrack: Doc Watson, My Old Country Home, “The Ship That Never Returned”

Armchair Astrophysics, Motherhood

Dark & Elegant Matters

August 12, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaKqejeuVcc]
(Note: this video is longer, and of a higher quality, so it may take some time to load.)

We found this huge book on the Cosmos at Borders a few weeks ago. High atop a display of discount outer space books, Declan asked me to get the “Bero Galaxy book.” For those of you who, like me (before I had a space-obsessed child), would have no idea what that might mean – it’s a book with a picture of the Sombrero Galaxy on its cover. Filled with huge images taken by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, as well as various other spacecrafts, he was excited to see things he loves, like the Galilean moons of Jupiter, in such detail.

And he stunned me a bit by identifying not only the things I knew he knew, but by saying things like “oh, these are the train wrecks,” when I turned to the page that showed distant galaxies colliding with one another. He can also identify many planets and moons in our solar system by their surfaces – the volcanoes on Mars, the pock-marks of Mercury – and the long arms and glowing cores of several different galaxies. His father and I are confounded by this on pretty much a daily basis, and grateful to be learning that we are even tinier specks in the universe than we ever thought possible.

“That is a really good space book,” he told me confidently after we spent 10 minutes on the floor of the bookstore, flipping through and talking about the pictures.

His favorite thing to watch lately has been the Nova special The Elegant Universe, about string theory. I have watched this with him at least two or three times now and much flies over my head. Declan likes me to watch it with him and explains some of the basics to me: “It’s everything, mommy. It’s everything.”

A few days ago, a young pregnant woman flirted with Declan in the grocery line. He peered around the shopping cart at her, sweet and shy. She waved at him and said “Hi there! How old are you?”

This is a question people ask him all the time, but he doesn’t seem all that interested in answering or even knowing the answer.

I leaned over to him and said, “can you tell her how old you are? Do you know you are two? Can you say ‘I’m two?'”

He looked right at her and said “It’s an elegant universe.”

She looked at me curiously and I interpreted. “He said ‘it’s an elegant universe.'”

She looked pleased and surprised as she touched her belly.

“He has a lot of answers about the big things,” I offered. “Details like his age – not so much.”

“Who needs to know they’re two when they know that?” she said, then she leaned down and looked right at him. “I hope you keep thinking about the big things and the elegant universe for a long, long time. I hope you don’t forget them when you get older.”

Life soundtrack: The Elegants, Little Star: Best of The Elegants, “Little Star”

Motherhood, Oh My Ohio

Forget your blues

August 8, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

Dan played blues riffs on his guitar in the living room this morning, vamping lyrics about Barry Bonds. Declan started dancing on arrival.

He does a lot of dancing these days. A couple of weeks ago, he romped with lots of wet toddlers and their drenched stuffed animals at the Columbus Symphony Orchestra’s “Teddy Bear Picnic.” The evening ended with a puddle-splashing riot, led entirely by people too small to ride on roller coasters.

This past weekend, he put his whole heart into a jig at the Dublin Irish Festival, which had organized a massive (10,000+ person), 3-minute jig to try and take back the world record for dancing without arms from Dublin, Ireland. I have no idea if they made it, but Dec did more than his part.

Mostly, we just have to play music around the house to get him started. His tastes are already becoming as eclectic as ours, and perhaps veering into territory even we are unaware of. He’ll throw down for rock, spin for classical, bounce for pop, wiggle for reggae, or sway his head from side to side for blues and jazz, like he did this morning.

“Gimme some skins,” Dan said to Dec, who obliged with a high-five. “Let’s play the blues.”

“No. Let’s play the reds,” Declan answered.

Life soundtrack: Billie Holliday, The Incomparable, Volume One, “I’m Painting the Town Red”

Motherhood

Funderstorms

July 27, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

We all woke up in the middle of last night as the house got a good shake or two from passing thunderstorms.

“It’s a funderstorm,” Declan told us, confidently.

For some reason the weather made him very alert at three in the morning. He requested that he be able to play with a puzzle, take a purple bath, watch “Little Einsteins” and see the moon. The three of us opted to drink tea, sit by the window and look out at the rain together, trying to explain why “funderstorms” obscure our lunar view.

When I complained that I was hungry, he asked me for a “shiny red apple.” We went to the kitchen and cut one up for him. Before I could get something else for myself, he made me take a bite of one of the slices.

“Is that better, mommy?” he asked me.

In that moment, he reminded me so much of my little brother, Andy, who possessed that breed of kindness from his earliest days as a blonde-haired moppet. Lately, he I get those childhood reminders on lots of days, like our visit to Inniswood park earlier in the week, when I had to swoop Declan up into my arms to stop him from picking a flower for me.

Life soundtrack: Eddie Rabbit, All Time Greatest Hits, “I Love a Rainy Night”

Motherhood, Oh My Ohio, Under the Whale

“You’re Already Home”

July 19, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

For some reason, this emerged as Declan’s chosen mantra on the final night that Little Brother’s was open. He pointed at several different people, leaned into me and said, “he’s already home, mommy,” nodding, often putting his hand on my cheek and adding, “we’re already home, mommy.”

On Sunday afternoon, my mom and I were part of the wrecking (or, more accurately, preservation) crew at Little Brother’s. She managed to pry out a painting that covered the fireplace – a phoenix with the word Stache’s that painter Dan Work made there years ago. With some help from friends who came by, we also managed to bring down the Elvis, Billie Holliday and Karen Carpenter paintings that used to be the bathroom walls at Stache’s. Not to mention the bird painted on diamond-shaped plywood from the wall next to the sound board that used to cover one of the front windows at the old place. I took enough pictures of the dressing room, which was filled with fairly historic fliers from both clubs, to hopefully reconstruct the room in a photographic collage.

One of Dan’s doormen climbed a ladder and took down the Little Brother’s sign. We loaded it, and some odds and ends, including a life preserver that said “Save our Stache’s (and Little Brother’s)” into the trunk of my car.

Then I went to a friend’s house to pick up Declan.

“Oh mommy!” he said when I walked in the door. “You’re home! You’re really, really home!”

Dan spent a long night and extra day clearing out the place and cleaning. By Tuesday morning, the last few straggling tools were gathered, and the locks on the building were changed.

Meanwhile, Declan’s continued his monologues about the galaxies as well as random declarations, including “all aboard the choo choo train” and the old standby “just the right SPEED, just the right ANGLE” (which he chanted alone while practicing somersaults on the upstairs futon the other afternoon). Last night, the three of us sat around the dinner table at 6:30, which seemed awfully strangely normal.

In these first couple of days in this new life, the mantra keeps coming, usually while we’re sitting together, reading a book or watching TV: “Mommy, daddy, are you home?”

It’s been exactly what I’ve needed to hear.

Life soundtrack: Chris Smither, Leave the Lights On, “Leave the Light On”

Oh My Ohio, Under the Whale

Chasing the moon

July 1, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

Dan spent yesterday afternoon at the club, the front door propped open so that people could come in and buy t-shirts or old posters he had on sale. It was kind of a depressing day, with people mostly coming in to gawk, take pictures, or, to his amazement, say “you mean you’re really closing?”

He came home deflated that he hasn’t saved more memorabilia over the years, and that business has been so lousy in this final month. This all happened so quickly, it was impossible to create any real finale for the place. People might have stayed away for fear of getting trapped in the crowds, so there weren’t many crowds. Or they never believed it was really going to happen, thanks to the dubious reporting of The Other Paper, where the only real coverage was the speculation that Dan was bluffing or that the landlord was going to have a change of heart. (Never, I repeat never, trust TOP‘s “facts.”)

Fortunately, I read Space.com almost every day. So yesterday, I found out that last night’s full moon would appear to be the biggest of 2007. Venus and Saturn are also hanging out together in the western sky.

So, here on the realio, trulio (props to Ogden Nash) last weekend of Little Brother’s, we loaded our son in the car at sunset on Saturday night and drove to the country. The sky was electric pink and an old, unmarked mix tape of mine that I unearthed in the club’s basement played Neil Young’s “Long May You Run.” Venus was bright, with the faint Saturn nearby, and fireworks were going off all over the countryside west of town. When the moon peeked over the horizon, it did indeed appear to be huge, streaked with hazy red and orange stripes.

“Is it Jupiter, daddy?” Declan asked.

This is the planet that Dec is both the most fascinated with and the most afraid of. After watching a few specials about it, I must admit that I’m a little scared of Jupiter too.

Life soundtrack: Neil Young with Stephen Stills, Decade, “Long May You Run”

Keen Insights Into the Obvious, Motherhood, Oh My Ohio

The understanding of bliss

June 28, 2007 tinymantras Leave a comment

All weekend long at Comfest, this arch of rainbow balloons tormented Declan. The allure of the rainbow seduced him across crowds. It would catch his eye and off he’d run. Held down by two supposedly empty helium canisters, it was treacherous to toddler parents who knew that looking at the spectrum really wasn’t enough for little ones. They want to stand beneath it, to touch it if at all possible, and you’d just have to hope that you caught them before they pulled on the ribbon that held it all together and rolled the metal canisters right over their feet.

On Sunday night, the arch was attached on one end and sagging lower to the ground on the other. Declan ran in circles beneath the limp side and Dan brought it down to him. Soon, an entire gaggle of toddlers was running directly underneath the rainbow, or wedging themselves into sections where everything in their world became blue, or in Declan’s case, orange (pictured above). The laughter was infectious and constant – the most contagious display of unabashed child–ness I have ever seen.

But for some reason – I think maybe an older kid down the row started popping some of the balloons – the woman who had blistered her hands making the arch came up the row, upset and yelling “Let it go! This mine, get off of it now!” to, well, a lot of people who were under five years old. Even though there was less than an hour or two of daylight left in the festival, and the helium arch was flagging, she scolded Dan to let the balloons go, claiming he was preventing all of the other children from enjoying it.

This is the place where parents and people without kids often part ways. I know that before I had Declan, there were certainly times when I would have been on that woman’s side of the divide and wondered what in the hell we, as parents of wild, balloon-crazed giggle monsters were thinking. I know that I’ve put shiny objects in front of more than one little person in my time and wondered why there seemed to be no way to get them to leave it alone. If I’d put in the work that she did, I also might be too attached to watch my work destroyed, even though the arch’s death was clearly inevitable.

When a little child is one of the people you are closest to in life, and you accept their essence – their ability to sustain a state of joy – you know that there is absolutely no way that simply looking at an arch of balloons can compare to the unadulterated bliss those children had when they could run beneath, around and over them – how often do you get to touch an actual rainbow? Regaining a closeness to that simplicity is one of the most precious things about parenting a toddler, and you can often see a nostalgia for it on the faces of parents who have been there.

So I’m grateful to the woman who made the arch, I just wish that she had been able to experience some of that joy along with us.

Life soundtrack: Willie Nelson, Rainbow Connection, “Rainbow Connection:

Notes of a She-Hack

Moon drops and perfect days

May 21, 2007 TZT Leave a comment

It was a recipe for chaos: the Little Brother’s 10-year anniversary and Declan’s 2-year birthday fell on the same weekend. The class that Dan is taking at OSU had a field trip planned for the entire day of said birthday and then, of course, the club’s anniversary took on a whole new significance when its closing was announced. It felt like Dec’s birthday was going to get sucked up by everything else in our lives.

Instead, the appearance of old friends and reunited bands at the club really put Dan at greater ease than he’s been at weeks. The whole weekend felt like a vacation. Dec and I spent most of his birthday on our own, taking phone calls from singing relatives, opening the cards and gifts that people had sent to him and enjoying each other’s company. I let him lead the day, happily fulfilling requests like “let’s hug and snuggle” and “read it again, mommy.”

When a packet of glow in the dark planets arrived in a package from my dad, I dutifully put them up in order on Dec’s bedroom wall. Because he’s watched a Science Channel special about the formation of our solar system on the DVR several times, he was able to name every planet after I went through them with him once or twice. Uranus tripped him up a few times, but he’s now an expert who runs into the room yelling “panets!” several times a day, then points at each one expectantly: “Murkee, mommy? Wenus, mommy? Earf, mommy?” And yes, the set does include the recently demoted “Fluto.”

Most of the adults in his life don’t remember learning the planets until well into elementary school, so again, he is blowing our minds.

His Giga (my mom) got him an amazing blue and silver indoor/outdoor spaceship tent and a Moon in My Room. The latter slipped from his hands as my mom and I were putting a play kitchen from Target together that involved approximately 6,231 screws.

“Baby dropped the moon,” he told us.

Everyone tells me that two is a magical age. And it is. We had a little cake with a number two candle when Dan got home. Declan was every bit as excited to pretend to make his daddy dinner in his play kitchen as he was to sit inside his tent and pretend to be launching into space.

Motherhood

Preschool woes

March 26, 2007 tinymantras Leave a comment

We took our first mom and baby yoga class when I was still counting my son’s age in weeks. Because the instructor was also a preschool teacher, the small talk on the very first day revolved around the process of enrolling kids in preschool. Her main message was that we not wait – we should get our babies on wait-lists months, if not years, before we wanted them to start school.

This is a bewildering situation, given how mysterious children can be, and how long it may be before their personalities, abilities and learning styles come to light. I’ve looked and asked around casually, comfortable that he’s probably best off at home. But in the past three months, Declan has revealed his incredible ability to memorize and retain information. As the year began, he mastered his shapes in one week, colors in another, the next he was counting to twenty and identifying numbers up to nine pretty handily. He forms sentences about subjects that I don’t remember talking to him about in the first place. Yesterday, we took a walk in a park. As we started up an incline, he repeated “walk up hill!” over and over. He’s blowing my mind.

Just a few months ago, the periodic visits with kids at library reading hour, COSI and the park seemed like enough outside stimulation. Today, I’m having a hard time finding any preschool with programming for children under three – I was hoping there might be one that just does a half day or two a week for that age nearby, but no luck.

Tiny Mantras

Tag Archives: adventures in normality

Oh My Stars! Or, an ordinary woman tries to comprehend the size of the universe

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West Side Story, Chapter 2

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Dark & Elegant Matters

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Forget your blues

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Funderstorms

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“You’re Already Home”

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Chasing the moon

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The understanding of bliss

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Moon drops and perfect days

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Preschool woes

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Smooching infinity since 2005.