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Inventory: 28 Months

Declan is 28 months old today. It’s kind of hard to believe that’s all the time it has been. Mysterious coos and babbles have given way to complete sentences. Once unable to roll over on his own, he’s now the “sultan of somersaultin'” (named so by Dan). Frenetic waves have transformed into deliberate, dramatic hand gestures that accompany mini-lectures about space.

As a family, we’ve also been through a lot in that time. We lost a couple of Dan’s older family members. Dan nearly lost his eye. We lost our dear companion Samson. Even one of our cars and a laptop died (actually, Dan murdered it with ginger ale). And we’ve had horrible luck with landlords.

We had a terrifying bout with lead paint and for our trouble, got kicked out of our conveniently located (although rented) home by a man we had thought had more decency. Then the short-sighted landlord of Dan’s business helped put an unceremonious end to his nearly 20-year run.

But we also bought a house in a part of town where we have no baggage and the neighbors are cartoonishly friendly. We’ve forged new friendships with other new parents and enjoyed an awful lot of days just spending time on our own as a family. I’ve been able to do some writing work that I feel matters. We’ve learned a whole lot about space and physics, which tends to put things like craptastic landlords and life, death and illness in a very different perspective.

Tonight we’ll have cowboy-style Tuvan Throat singing, tomorrow we’ll go to a funeral for a man who has contributed a great deal to the cultural life of the city. Time, as they say, marches on.

Life soundtrack: Rufus Wainwright, I Am Sam soundtrack, “Across the Universe”
Rufus Wainwright - I Am Sam - Across the Universe

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Is it like a butterfly?

It was a perfect, temperate world last weekend. We spent lots of time on playgrounds and in parks, visiting with friends and family and finding places where we could let the dog run loose. On Monday, we had a picnic on a Granville hillside and met the early signs of fall during a quick walk through the woods. Declan stopped to examine details along the way: a pine cone, a fallen spray of Queen Anne’s lace (“I have a flower for you, mom.”), and a sprig with two deep red leaves on it that he spun between his fingers, asking “is it like a butterfly?

On the way home, the sunset stung his eyes and he kept sneezing. I tried to convince him to wear sunglasses or hold up a book to block the sun, but he was determinedly unhappy, desperately wanting out of his car seat now, now, NOW. I was relieved when we got to the Broad Street exit and began making our way up the long incline to the Hilltop.

Then I saw this body on the side of the road, this man with his face planted into the ground, his legs twisted around a bicycle, blood on the sidewalk near his head. I started grabbing for my cell phone and trying to form a sentence to tell Dan to slow the car down, that there was a person hurt or dying or dead and alone back there. We pulled up to the next intersection so I could look for a street number to tell the 911 operator where the man was. In spite of being the granddaughter of a surgeon, I really had no idea how to help this man other than to call someone who could. The three rings before an answer seemed like a lot.

“I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, he’s just collapsed on the sidewalk and I think his head is bleeding,” I told him. Head injuries. Don’t they come faster for head injuries?

By the time we waited through a light to turn back down Broad Street, two more cars had stopped and a group of five or six people now milled around the man, a couple of them with cell phones pressed to their ears, also calling 911. A helicopter circled. We still had a crying toddler in the back seat. Not to mention an anxious dog strapped into the seat next to him who was now beginning to sense some new level of stress in the air, and who would, therefore, probably start trying to dig his way toward the trunk momentarily. I gave the dispatcher my phone number and told him that we were heading home. Dan told the group that we had reached emergency services and someone was coming. As we reached the top of the hill, an ambulance passed us on its way down.

This is the second time inside of a month that I have seen a person prone along West Broad Street, and went home wondering for several days whether I was possibly looking at someone just moments before, or moments after, their death. The newspaper didn’t shed light on either situation. I don’t think it’s important that I know.

My hope is that in both cases, they are recovering somewhere, basking in the gift of having survived, ready to soak in a perfect, temperate world and twirl the brightly colored, fallen sprigs of a Midwestern autumn in between their fingers.

Life soundtrack: Lou Reed, Magic and Loss, “Magic and Loss”
Lou Reed - Magic and Loss - Magic and Loss

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Child of the Giant Corn

Corn, tomatoes and cucumbers give all Ohioans a reason to live through the muggy muck of August. And it took Declan no time at all to learn to love the food of his ancestors (his great grandfather and great-great Uncle were once the Grand Marshalls of the Millersport Sweet Corn Festival).

He went absolutely wild at the Field of Corn in Dublin the other day, surveying the giant kernels up close, and running, running, running through the rows of ears.

Imagine this from the perspective of a 3-foot-tall person.

Ohio State has an extensive site about corn, including a monthly podcast about conditions for growing corn.

That other state that begins and ends with a vowel and is also known for corn has its own Corn Cam.

Life soundtrack: Earl Scruggs & Lester Flatt, Foggy Mountain Jamboree, “Shuckin’ the Corn”
Earl Scruggs & Lester Flatt - Foggy Mountain Jamboree - Shuckin' the Corn

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Forget your blues

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”
Billie Holiday - The Incomparable Volume 1 - I'm Painting the Town Red

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The understanding of bliss


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 childness 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:
Willie Nelson - Rainbow Connection - The Rainbow Connection

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