bearing blog

Two museum days. (I)

On Monday, Labor Day, we headed for the Boston Museum of Science.  I had been there at the 9yo’s age and fondly remembered the giant van de Graaff generators and the lightning show, which to my delight is still running.

This is on the same peninsula with where we are staying in Charlestown, so we walked there.  There is a long viaduct to cross, which took us over a lot of railroad tracks and an exciting construction site.

The Boston Museum of Science is a good-sized museum with a lot of well-designed exhibits.  I think the  designers of the permanent exhibits here have done a better job, on the whole, than the ones at the Science Museum of Minnesota.  They seem to invite kids to sit down and interact for a longer time, rather than running around whamming buttons.

Among the many imaginary jobs I fantasize about having is “science museum exhibit designer.”  I would like to study what sorts of features encourage different sorts of people to spend more time with the material.  

As it is I am only left with a visitor’s impressions, not data, and of course the problem is that I am a particular sort of person, and probably an oddball of a visitor myself.

One example of the kind of thing I think about in science museums:   It seems to me that a linear design that nudges you to pass by things one at a time (deciding at each location on the path whether to stay longer or move on) is better for deep engagement than the sort of exhibit where a big open room has many freestanding stations scattered about.  But maybe the big open room works better when sixty field-trip children descend on it at once.  This museum had a mix of both, though, and they both worked pretty well.  I must say it is a lot easier to go with Mark than if it is just me.

One thing that surprised me:  a number of exhibits involved animated models that in my opinion worked extremely well.  There was a hands-on flow-of-a-river exhibit tucked away in a corner.  From a distance I saw the 9yo playing with it, moving blocks around in the river, and thought, “Oh, it’s like the river model in the Mill City Museum at home, where you build structures in a channel of moving water and see how the flow changes.”  But when I got closer I realized that the river was animated via projection from the ceiling, and switching out the blocks triggered a change in the story the animations were telling.  So—an interactive animation with a lot of physicality.  It didn’t teach the same thing as a flowing water channel wet lab, but it did what it did very well.

 

Another pleasant surprise was that my 5yo, unlike all his siblings at that age, was relatively uninterested in running around whamming buttons to see if anything would happen in less than two seconds.  He wanted to sit down and work his way through things, and spend lots of time on a single exhibit.   Such as working through a lovely little interactive where you get to touch and examine an animal skull, and then (by pressing buttons that let you make binary choices) decide which of three animals the skull came from.  Was it predator or prey?  Have a varied diet or a monotonous one?  Did it have a strong bite or a weak one?

He sat there, with me and later his sister, reading the questions to him, and went through all six skulls.

Another thing he got totally absorbed in was a game where you select from a bin three different malaria-mitigation measures for a population of at-risk individuals, constrained by a rudimentary budget, and find out how well the combination worked based on how many animated mosquitos disappear from the screen.  We had to entice him away.

As promised, we made it to the lightning show.  I was delighted, once inside the Theater of Electricity, to discover that the whole room was essentially unchanged from when I visited in the eighties.  The leaping aluminum disk, pinging into the air and clattering back down every few minutes as museum visitors charged the electromagnet and released it, I had forgotten but remembered as soon as I heard it again.  There is a decidedly old-school exhibit on the history of mathematics tucked into the back:  it has not changed either.  I remember the model of the Mobius strip, a little mechanized arrow clicking along on a track, traversing the whole thing to demonstrate its one-sidedness.   Lots of text and pictures.  Nobody would make this exhibit today.  But I remember it with fondness.

And of course there is the world’s largest van de Graaff generator.  I walked around it, running my hands over the smooth wooden railing, and felt the same as I did at age eight when it towered above me, because of course it still does.  

And my 9yo loved the show, so there’s that.

Later, after a long rest in the apartment, we ventured out in the pouring rain to a pizza restaurant at the other end of Charlestown.  It had a stellar beer and wine list and great food.   We split a few pizzas and salads, and I drank a sour named after a banh mi sandwich and then discovered a Ligurian rosé on the menu, which I never ever ever see, so I had to have that, and it was awesome.

The little guy was still tired, and didn’t have much appetite.  He needed his sister’s hat and a napkin cape to stay warm, and later ate cereal in the apartment.   Hurray for a kitchen.

 

Boston!

I have been wanting to take a family trip to some city—any interesting city!—in the U.S. for some time now.  For a while I thought we might lug the kids to D.C., and then Mark’s parents decided to take them there (and to Gettysburg and Colonial Williamsburg) a year or so ago.  I didn’t really feel ready to tackle NYC, and I have been to Chicago myself enough times (and really it is close enough to drive for a long weekend).  

What is reasonably educational, big but not too big, and features people I know from the internet?  Boston, of course.

Seriously, you can walk this entire area, which contains plenty to do for a week.

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Mark insisted that I do all the planning of Things to Do, but he agreed to deal with the airplane tickets and rental home, for which I am grateful.  As for the former, that’s fairly straightforward: direct from MSP to Logan, many choices.  As for the latter, he says that back when we planned the trip he was only able to locate two places in the price range he was happy with, one near Fenway Park and one in Charlestown; he reserved the Charlestown one with plenty of time left to cancel and told me that if I could find something I liked better I was welcome to switch.  

I was not motivated to do that work, and now that we’re here I am perfectly happy with what he found.  It is an airy and open row house, a couple of blocks from a transit station (which he did on purpose) and across the street from a grocery store (which he did not do on purpose but I am glad about).   It faces a busy street, but as I suspect that you pay a premium for being able to see Charlestown’s charming brick and painted clapboard houses through your windows, I do not mind.  Everything is crisp and white, with sunny abstract paintings on fringed canvas stapled to the walls, and the utilitarian loveliness of a comfortable home that has no personal possessions in it whatsoever.

I like staying in hotels when I am alone, but when traveling with a family for more than a day or two, nothing beats having a kitchen and enough room to spread out.  Besides, I rather like the fantasy of becoming a citizen for a couple of days, having a neighborhood to call one’s own and explore.  And if you are going to become a citizen of Boston for a couple of days, historic Charlestown will certainly do.   

Saturday, after a long travel day of taxi van-airplane-airport shuttle-“the T”-walking, we found our apartment, ate a very late lunch at a local chain restaurant, bought groceries, and rested.  I wandered around Charlestown a bit, without going up towards the monument, peeking in closed coffee shops and reading the menus in the windows of restaurants, and went back out twice to buy first wine and then bottles of seltzer.  The kids ate quesadillas and cereal for dinner and collapsed early.

Sunday I had exactly two plans:  go to Mass and then take the Red Line all the way to the end to meet People from the Internet....

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Mass first, I will be brief.  We went to the eight o’clock at St. Mary-St. Catherine in Charlestown, in the old St. Mary’s church.  The building is lovely, a Gothic exterior and a wedding-cake of statuary and wood inside.  My 9yo studied the windows and the carvings with wide eyes.  I did too, especially the series of Marian windows on pewsitter’s right and the carved angels in the ceiling.  I poked Mark and told him to look up.  “They’re like ship’s figureheads!” he said.  

I typically don’t take photos inside churches unless there are no worshippers present, but you can see photos and read about the building on the parish website.  Very much worth looking at.

Mass was concelebrated by two visiting clergy, one of whom was being welcomed to the rectory just that week and would be doing graduate work at Boston College.   The new priest was introduced as being from south India; my guess is that the main celebrant is Nigerian.  He introduced himself as a missionary priest.  He gave a good, organized homily, with many references from Scripture, on the topic of humility as resting on the “two arms” of truthfulness and generosity.  Music: Gloria not sung, piano accompaniment, Gather-type hymns from the annual missalette.  Attendance:  few families at 8; the 10:30 is advertised as the “family mass.”  It was a warm and welcoming environment, with plenty for the  younger kids to look at, and a fantastic pew like a box that trapped the 5yo inside!

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After Mass and breakfast in the apartment we headed for the T station, and an hour or so later were picked up in a big white van by.... Melanie Bettinelli of The Wine-Dark Sea!  

Domenico Bettinelli’s blog Bettnet was one of the first blogs I ever read way back when the blogosphere was taking off and the universe of Catholic blogs seemed smaller and friendlier.  Since then Melanie and I have interacted a lot more—hers has always been one of my favorites, and the rise of Facebook has allowed for those smaller but more frequent interactions, less like long thoughtful letters and more like an ongoing conversation.   I am pleased to report that coming into the Bettinelli’s house with my own boisterous family was one of those great experiences of feeling like you already have known each other IRL for years.  The younger kids flailed at each other with toy weapons and the older kids sat or stood in the kitchen and talked with the adults about tech and camping and saints and books.  We came before lunch and we left right before the kids’ bedtime, stuffed full of Melanie’s quiche and Dom’s fajitas and some really good craft beer, and I could have stayed for hours more.  

The best way to make friends is to spend, like, eight to ten years not meeting them in person.  I swear.

Tripping.

I am sitting at my kitchen counter, waiting for the pizza that will feed my three kids and their grandma and grandpa, my husband’s parents, for dinner.  Not long after the pizza man knocks, the bell will toll for me, and it will be a taxi taking me and a suitcase to the airport.  

Grandma and Grandpa are here all week, spending Thanksgiving with the kids at our house, and me?  Well, I am going to be... elsewhere!  And (except from 8 to 5) with Mark!

I will have plenty of time during the day while he is at work, assisting with tweaking the controls on the startup of a snack-food line.   Keeping my fingers crossed that when Friday rolls around he will not be needed anymore and we can dash off for a weekend before both of us return home together next week.

At this point I should pause and note that we have spent exactly one night away from the children since our oldest was born at the turn of the century, and we have never gone anywhere just the two of us on a plane since our honeymoon.

The time went by.... really fast?  And we enjoyed going places with our kids, and occasionally alone while the other stayed back?  What I am saying is, no regrets.

But just in time for our twentieth anniversary is a good time to go have a little fun.  (Thanks to those lovely grandparents.)

Perhaps I will report back later?

 

Reading matériel (II).

Continuing from the last post.

I was thinking this morning, it's too bad that I didn't buy anything in Italian.  I have exactly one book in Italian (not counting the first one that I set aside after discovering that it famously includes lots of Sicilian which is impenetrable by all my Italian dictionaries), which I was using to slowly improve my Italian before leaving.  I'd like to continue studying Italian---and also to maintain my French---and to reprise my haphazard study of Somali out of local interest---argh, so many languages, so little time.

Oh well, I do have French covered for the next couple years of reading, anyway.  That's pretty optimistic, actually.  I doubt I will get through these all in two years.

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Cuisine Facile pour Parents Pressés, from the "Mon Cahier" series

 

All the bookstores I entered in France had a spinning metal rack stocked with these little self-help paperbacks, all labeled with some variation on "Mon Cahier" (My Notebook).   Recipe books, diet advice of all kinds, home organization, budgeting, meditation, juicing, controlling your temper, positive thinking.  All the ones I picked up begin with a Cosmo-style quiz to find out what sort of cook/housekeeper/thinker you are and purport to design their approach to your type. 

I am fascinated with cross-cultural self-help advice and I was sorely tempted to buy several.   I restricted myself to one that might actually be useful to me.  This one, in case you can't tell, is "Easy Cooking for Busy Parents."   (I wish, now, that I had also bought "Cooking for Less Than 3 Euros.")  

Do you want to know what French "Easy Cooking for Busy Parents" has for main dishes?

Open-faced sandwiches with meat, cheese, and pickled cucumbers and onions; risotto-style shell pasta with mushrooms, Mimolette cheese aged six months, and ham; "authentic Cantonese rice" which is essentially fried basmati rice with egg, chives, peas, ham, and five-spice powder; croque-monsieur type sandwiches stuffed with duck breast and tomato marmalade (or maybe it's dried tomatoes in oil); potato galette with smoked salmon.

I think I will enjoy playing with some of these.  But I don't know that it will be any easier than what I've been doing.  On the other hand, it will give me an excuse to find out if any of the cheese shops around here carry Mimolette, which Googling taught me just now is "A gratable, melting cheese ike parmesan, but brilliant orange."  Orange cheese!  And French!

 

 

 

 

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Aurélie Valognes, En Voiture, Simone!

 

 I picked this up from a bestseller table, knowing nothing whatsoever about the novelist or the book.  The title appears to mean Get in the car, Simone!; the previous title advertised on the book sleeve apparently means Grandma in the Nettles.

I picked it up because the setup didn't sound amusing but it claims to be a comedy novel; I was curious because of its apparent popularity.  It's exactly the sort of book I would never pick up in English.   I'll just translate the back of the book for you:

Recipe for an irresistible family comedy:  one despotic and selfish father (Jacques), plus one mother (Martine), rebelling after forty years of marriage.  Also their sons:  Matthieu the eternal adolescent although father to three children; Nicolas, chef by day and authoritarian [I think?  the word is literally "castrating"] all the time; Alexandre, the dreamer and  slacker.  And... three deliciously insufferable daughters-in-law!  Stéphanie, the anxious mother hen; Laura, the anxious vegetarian; Jeanne, the newest addition, feminist and bewildered, whose arrival is about to throw the family out of balance.  Put everyone in a big house in Brittany.  Add to this mixture Antoinette, a grandmother with wisdom to rival the Dalai Lama; and one tagalong dog.  Stir well, let simmer... and enjoy!

Like I said, this is the sort of book I would never pick up if it were in English and set in the U. S.  I generally don't like insufferable characters and am hoping that the dog is the protagonist, or possibly the grandma.  But we shall see.  It got a lot of one-star reviews on Amazon, but many of these seem to be by people who were disappointed because it was the same as a book sold previously under a different title that they'd already read.  So I will keep an open mind.

 

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Jochen Gerner, Repères:  2000 Dessins pour Comprendre le Monde

 

 Benchmarks, 2000 Cartoons For Understanding the The World.

The author/artist is the cartoonist for a weekly independent, ad-free newsmagazine called le 1, Un Journal pour Comprendre le Monde (The 1:  A Paper for Understanding the World).  That's its logo in the lower right corner of the cover.

The paper is called "The 1" because each week's issue concerns one sole topic, about which it says it includes articles from different points of view.  It's also a really short newsmagazine, only 16 pages.  (Nine euros per month for a digital subscription, in case you're wondering, or about $2.60 an issue.)

The cartoons are mini-lessons in history, culture, and current affairs.   A number of them concern topics internal to French policy and government, which I thought I would find interesting and educational; also a great way to learn some vocabulary I don't have.

 

More of my purchases in another post.

Reading matériel (I).

I took advantage of a sojourn in France to get to a bookstore and browse titles, looking for things that might be fun to read. 

Obviously, it's easier than it ever has been to obtain media published in other countries; I've ordered from Amazon.fr and Amazon.co.uk numerous times, when there was something specific I was looking for.  But when I'm looking for something new and interesting to read, there is no substitute for walking into a library or bookstore, full of physical books, and browsing:  reading the backs of the covers, the tables of contents; seeing how books are jumbled together on tables; opening to a page in the middle and deciding if I like that sort of style.

Limited, of course, by luggage space, I couldn't buy everything I thought I might like.  But I tried to get a sampler of things that might keep me in French, whenever I felt like attacking some, for a few years.  

Note:  I still have not read any of these.  The books are on my bedside shelf, waiting for a moment when I don't drop to sleep the moment I hit the pillow (yes, still jetlagged).  The magazines are stowed in a holder and I've set an email reminder to order myself to "deliver" one to me every two months for the next year.  

Here are a couple of the books I bought.  In the interest of getting a post out today, I'll save others for another post. 

Michel Bussi, N'Oublier Jamais  

 This is a novel by the same author as Nymphéas Noirs (now in English translation as Black Water Lilies), the detective novel that I read all summer to get myself back into a French-speaking mindset.   

Nymphéas was a real page-turner, perfect for driving me forward through the difficulties of reading in French (my best second language, but still so much slower than reading in English).   

I had also bought a republished form of the author's first novel, originally Omaha Crimes, now called Gravé dans le Sable, which began with a sort of apology for it because he wrote it when he was relatively inexperienced at researching the details of the settings of his novels.  Let's just say:  the setting was the U. S., and the apology was warranted.

But I enjoyed the author's style very much, and I have more hope for this one, supposedly a standard roman policier.  At any case, I've definitely learned that mysteries are an effective way to keep the pages turning even when it takes effort and a dictionary app at hand.

 

 

 

 

 

Marielle Blanchier (with Pascale Krémer), Et Ils Eurent Beaucoup d'Enfants...

The title of this memoir, I think, is meant to evoke a fairytale phrase of sorts:  "and they had many children."

I'll just translate the back for you.

Marielle has twelve children.  When she got married, this trained chemist never imagined she would find herself at the head of such a household.  But life and love played a pretty trick on her.

In this book, she relates the great joys and the little troubles of her daily life:  back-to-school season, Mother's Day, birthdays, chores... But also the baguettes (36 per week), the milk (100 liters every month), and the ultra-fast recipes.  At the same time, she shares some principles of childrearing and her scheme of organization, down to the millimeter, that allows her to devote some time to everyone.  A fascinating and extraordinary adventure that confirms the adage: a big family makes a happy family!

I think this will be interesting precisely because large families, even "medium" ones like mine, are so very, very rare in France at this time.  It's not that I need her tips, tricks, and principles (although I'm always up for those); it's more that I am curious how this author presented herself and her family.  And if her background is in chemistry, well, she and I will have that in common as well.  Looking forward to it.

 I'll share more books later.... 

Setting off.

"Are you ready to go yet, Mom?  Are you ready?  Are you ready?"

 No.  No, I am not ready.

 And at the same time I am so very, very ready.

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 Remember how a few years ago we went abroad for a month, took all the kids to the French Alps and then down to Rome?   

 (If not, the first post is here, and you can page through subsequent posts at your leisure).

 So here is a piece of news I have been sitting on:  We are about to take another Big Trip With The Whole Family. 

 

 It's likely to be the last chance for such things, as our oldest is now writing college applications, and that's why it is now and not later. 

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The first part of the trip is a return to the Alps, back to Chamonix.  It's my husband's favorite place.   Early in the late-summer morning the only sound that can be heard, besides little street-sweeping trucks, is the clinking and clanking of carabiners and ice tools hanging about the persons of people shuffling to gather coffee and wrapped sandwiches before heading up the mountain.

Last time our big boys went with Mark and a guide for an adventure day of crampon practice and glacier climbing, and later for a long multipitch  climb on rock.  Last time I rock-climbed for the first time ever on a well-known crag outside of town, and had a great time.  Last time we attempted several "family hikes" that completely wiped us out but that took us through some of the most beautiful country I had ever seen.  Last time we met a family of expats who welcomed us into their home and became long-distance friends.

 I am not sure what awaits us this time.   Mark has been living with chronic back pain for years, which some months ago erupted to a new level -- possibly because of a herniated disc which an MRI earlier this month has revealed, but you cannot really be sure--and left him unable to do any climbing or to hike while carrying weight.   So the trip will look different for him, and consequently for the whole family, than it did when we originally planned it more than a year ago.

 Change of plans.  We shall see.

 Even if it proves difficult for us to do the mountaineering-type activities that we originally planned, there are other things to do in the Chamonix Valley and on the other side of the Mont Blanc tunnel.  We enjoyed a day trip to Aosta last time, and didn't get to see everything there; there are many castles dotted throughout the Aosta Valley, some open for tours.  Lyon is a long but do-able 2-hour drive.  Simpler hiking that doesn't require us all to carry full packs is probably within our reach.  And some of our kids are determined to try parasailing, which is a thing you can pay people to take your kids to do, so there's that.

Also there is wine in Chamonix, and a great deal of melting cheese.

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After a while in Cham we have a still-unplanned week which is tentatively devoted to driving somewhere in Italy and taking our chances.  Genoa?  Piedmont?  Not sure.  Probably no farther south than Genoa.  In any case we will return the car (van really -- there are seven of us, after all) to the Geneva airport and fly... 

...to London!

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Having taken the kids to Rome, and wanting to do another Big Historical City With Plenty To Fill Multiple Days, we settled on London almost immediately.  

London didn't settle on us, though.  We made a tentative trip budget last summer based on a survey of asking prices for AirBnB properties.   This budget was suddenly impacted by AirBnB's decision to force its hosts to abide by zoning regulations by limiting them to 90 days rental per year, which immediately decreased the supply and raised all the prices.  Besides the price increase, it took a long time even for us to find a property listing that wasn't a fake (we'd find identical photos used to illustrate multiple listings, or we'd contact an owner through AirBnB and then the alleged owner would email back with "ah, sorry, we've had a technical error, that property isn't really available on those dates after all, but if you send me an email at my other [i.e., non-AirBnB] email address I'll be able to show you a bunch of similar properties...").

In the end it all cost a lot more than we expected.  But at just about the same time that we were having to accept that there was no way around the price increase, I received a couple of checks in the mail, part of the inheritance left me by my globe-trotting grandmother who had passed away in April.  I couldn't think of a better thing to put the money toward than traveling with our children, and I'm sure Grandma would agree.  

So --- that worked out.

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London, then, for more than a week.  I have plans for myself.  The British Museum, of course -- and Parliament -- and the London Science Museum -- and the Victoria and Albert.   The martyrs' shrine at a distance from the site it honors, Tyburn.  The Churchill War Rooms.  Taking the children to Kensington Gardens, and my lion-loving seven-year-old to see the statuary beasts keeping watch in Trafalgar Square.  A day in Greenwich, straddling the meridian.  Bletchley Park is supposedly an easy trip by train.   There's too much to have the lists all worked out in advance.  (I'm aware that I've left off a number of the Things You Must See in this paragraph -- it doesn't mean we aren't going to go see them -- I just have to stop somewhere...)

I don't know what we'll do.  We'll just trust that it will work out.

Now if we could only get everything into these suitcases.

Catchup post: a good son, a Chicago getaway, my IT band, and something to read.

On account of the two weeks since I last wrote a post, I'm going to do a catch-up roundup.  Here we go:

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In mid-July I wrote about sending my oldest off to World Youth Day.   He spent  twelve days there, and returned safely.

I didn't make it a secret that I wished I could have gone along (even if I didn't have small children to care for, the chaperone spots filled up rather quickly).  "Text me and send me pics," I asked, "not because I'm trying to be a super helicoptery parent, but because I want to see the things."  And... he did!  I didn't expect him to send me so much, but he sent me pictures every day that he had access to wifi.

 

 

 

 

 

He told me about the deafening, constantly circling military helicopters, the grapefruit-flavored Oshee brand soda (so ubiquitous he was sure that Oshee was sponsoring the event), the crush of the crowd waiting for the Popemobile to pass by, the poutine he bought from a stand.  He told me about the huge arena for English-speaking pilgrims, and how a few rogue groups of young people impulsively ran in circles around the arena with their big national flags, an unauthorized parade of nations, to pass the time while waiting for the start of catechesis.  He told me that Filipino Cardinal Tagle gave a great talk and that NY Cardinal Dolan gave him a pat on the back while he was venerating the relics at the stadium.  He told me about the food in the pilgrim package ("This stuff had the same dimensions and texture as bird food blocks.  Tasted awful") and how a couple people in his group got heatstroke.  He told me about how their group hashtag became #InDmitriWeTrust, Dmitri being their local escort employed by the tour service they had contracted with.  He told me that when they got tired of singing hymns they walked along singing "Hotel California."

 

 

 

And he told me about the ambient noise of a million people sleeping in the field, of his surprise to find that the daily routine never got repetitive but was different every day, about how the park was sometimes loud and sometimes peaceful, about how the exuberant atmosphere almost changed instantly when Mass began.

I don't know if I've been able to express to him how appreciative I was and am that he took me along, so to speak.  I was moved.

He asked to go out to a barbecue restaurant for his sixteenth birthday, just a few days after coming back, and we gladly obliged.

 

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I went to Chicago for a couple of days, the day after my son got back from Poland.  

The occasion:  my youngest child, at 2.5 years old, is now night weaned and sleeping all the way through the night.  And I am not pregnant.  So I took the opportunity to spend two nights in a row away from my entire family... for the first time in sixteen years.

I'm a little sheepish even writing that.  Doesn't it seem like I should have managed to get away once in all that time?  But, you know, we set up our family to work a certain way, and I haven't needed to for any reason, and there's nearly always been a nursling around.  I've been away from home, yeah, but I've generally had a baby to tote with me. 

So when I realized this was possible, a few months ago, I texted my good friend from high school, the one I used to hang out at the mall with when we were twelve, and asked what she thought of a Chicago getaway (Chicago is close to midway between where I live and where she lives), and -- bless her, may she live long and prosper -- she did not say "maybe" or "I'll check and see what's on my calendar" but immediately said YES and figured she would work out the details later, which she did.  She reserved a hotel room, I bought a plane ticket, and off we went!

I know.  It is not that big of a deal to buy a plane ticket and spend two days away from home.  But it felt like a big deal.  

Here's the thing.  I could have done stuff like this at times over the past sixteen years if I had made it a priority.  Generally I'm pretty good at giving myself the things I need, rather than letting the needs of the family always take precedence over mind.  And the things I need, on a daily basis, to keep myself fed, are a steady diet of little things, which I've made space for by insisting on a few hours to myself every Saturday.  Breakfast out by myself, a quiet coffee shop in which to knock out a few items on my to-do list in peace, time to shop for my own clothes or get my hair cut, a visit to a local museum, Mass on my own, a run around the lake.  All that keeps me satisfied enough that I haven't felt the need to ask more of my family.

So it suddenly got to the point where it wasn't really asking too much to be gone for two whole days, and I took it.

It wasn't a complicated itinerary.  We stayed at the Drake and had access to the executive lounge for the free fancy breakfast (thank you, friend's husband's Hilton points) with a view of the lake.  We went out for nachos and margaritas close to our hotel the first night.  The next day we walked up and down Michigan Avenue (she bought candy for her daughter; I bought a hat for myself) and spent 3 hours in the Art Institute.

 Then we got gratuitously dressed up, and had dinner and drinks in the historic hotel restaurant.  And the next morning she dropped me off at the airport, where I killed time happily browsing through bookstores and finding a tasty box lunch to take on the plane (sixteen years of only traveling with kids can make solo airport time not suck at all), and I flew back home and took the train back to our 'hood.

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I think my hip pain is getting better.  After a frustrating few days of attempting to exercise carefully, and then hobbling around with pain for hours afterward, I settled on the following regimen:

• Assume, arguendo, that I have bursitis.
• Take sodium naproxen faithfully every twelve hours to reduce inflammation.
• Stop running.  Switch to swimming and the occasional walk of no more than a couple of miles.   Get full rest days after exercise.
• Stretch the IT band whenever I think about it.
• If it's not better in two months, go see the sports med doctor.

I'm kind of bummed that I'm missing the best time of the year to go running outside (well, if you're like me and don't get bitten by mosquitoes much, and like to get up early), but I'm already seeing some improvement.  So maybe I self-diagnosed correctly after all.  One piece of evidence:  Taking the naproxen makes the pain go completely away for at least eight hours, which makes me think that all the pain is coming from inflammation and that I haven't actually torn or sprained anything.

A nice thing about IT band stretches, relative to other kinds of therapeutic stretches, is that they are very easy to work into your daily life.  There are standing IT stretches, sitting IT stretches (I'm doing one now while I type!), and lying-down IT stretches that you can do in bed.  So wherever you are, if you think of doing one, you can do one without interrupting your activity much.  You don't need to take off a shoe or go find a towel or a yoga block or clear a space on the floor. 

+ + +

That takes care of three old things.  Now here's one new thing.  I've recently discovered the webcomic (graphic serial?) Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg, a Swedish-Finnish artist who writes in English and paints in digital.  

I encountered SSSS by accident via a link to a piece of her art, a language tree from the comic, reproduced below (link to full size at her site):

I'm a sucker for linguistics, and this really drew me into the SSSS world.  Post-apocalyptic literature is fun enough on its own, of course, but this comic is especially fun if you are interested in languages, because linguistic and cultural differences between the characters drives a fair amount of the plot.  

I would classify this as a near-future post-apocalyptic novel of the Zombie Plague type, although it isn't exactly zombies.  The general background is that a worldwide plague has shrunk the size of the "known world" of the comic to Iceland and scattered parts of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.  (That's why the language family page only includes two families).  Fantastic elements (e.g., some characters are mages) draw heavily on Nordic and Finnic mythology and traditional culture.  

The world is well built and intricate.  The art is beautiful:  spare in its color scheme, eerie, and (though digital) resembles brushed watercolor.  People and animals have wonderfully expressive faces.  There's plenty of action scenes with monsters to chop up and buildings going boom, but the real drama is psychological and interpersonal so far.  Another fun aspect of the website:  the well-populated fan forums and comment sections, which include people from all over the world, sometimes offering fanfic and fan poetry, and helpfully translating text that appears in the background art for the benefit of non-Nordic, non-Finns.  

Catching up on the nearly six hundred pages already posted was a weekend's leisure reading, and now I have to settle down and resign myself to reading updates just one day at a time.  

Cats are extremely important, so if you are particularly fond of kitties, there are many drawings of them to enjoy.

To start reading SSSS from the beginning, go here.

Debugging Grandma.

"We really won't have time to miss any school this year," I remember saying at the beginning, "we'll have to make up any time we lose."

Remind me not ever to say something like that again.

+ + +

So, I am in a hotel suite just outside my hometown with my sleeping toddler and my sleeping 94-year-old grandma. I found a place with separate sitting rooms and a pullout sofa, so the baby would not disturb Grandma, and a full-service restaurant, so we could stay here all day.

We are here in this hotel because today Grandma's house is being treated for a massively terrible bedbug infestation. Do you know what a scourge bedbugs are? If you do not, now is the time for you to take a side trip to Google and educate yourself. I have dealt with roaches, and I have dealt with mice, and I have dealt with head lice, and I would take all of them over bedbugs in a hurry (I guess as long as the mouse infestation did not give me hantavirus; one thing that you can say about bedbugs is that they do not carry disease).

My grandma is really a very remarkable lady. She is frail now, but has only really been frail since she was 88 or so; up till then she always seemed the same to me, although maybe my cousins and brother would tell me that my memory is off or that my impressions were poor. She moves around by herself slowly, and you think she is tottering and in danger; but as you watch her, you see that she moves carefully, and pays attention to where she puts her feet. If you walk with her and give her your arm for support, you find (because with your arm out you are thrown a bit off balance) that you are struggling a little to keep up. She keeps track of her medications by lining them up in order on the kitchen windowsill, and every morning and evening after she takes her pills she sits down and enters them by hand in a notebook log, and marks the date. (The log also records COFFEE in its proper place, between the meds that must be taken on an empty stomach and the meds that don't have to be.) She keeps her checkbook register meticulously, paying all her bills and carefully entering them, along with $5 checks to every direct-mail charity who asks her for money and the occasional $11.49 payment to random sweepstakes contests, which my cousin had warned me Grandma thinks she's really going to win (more on that later).

Grandma was widowed 35 years ago; my grandpa, a plumber with his own business, died at 59 when I was five. I barely remember him, but he is legendary, and my impressions from the family stories are of a man who could be loving and exasperating, rough and gentle both. My mother often reminisced that he would shed tears whenever he saw anyone perform anything well or beautifully. There is also a story that he refused to leave a baseball game (or some other sports event?) when my grandmother went into labor, and the baby -- I don't remember which of her three children -- was nearly born on the way to the hospital. I really only remember sitting on his lap, playing with him with a deck of cards marked on the back with the name and address of the plumbing business.

After he died, Grandma became a world traveler. She took at least one trip a year throughout my entire childhood, with the same tour group. She never made it to South America, but she has been everywhere else. Stacks of photo albums prove it. She took my older cousin to the British isles, she took the next cousin to southeast Asia, she took me to the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, all when each of us were fourteen. Her last trip was to London to go Christmas shopping. I don't remember when that was.

+ + +

So, another relative whom I love very much, who values privacy, has been living with Grandma and watching out for her for several years now. This relative has had some health problems of late that got worse and worse over the past few months and maybe 5 weeks ago became uncontrollable and dangerous. The relative was then suddenly hospitalized, although not so suddenly that there wasn't time for the relative to line up half a dozen of the relative's own friends to bring Grandma groceries and check on her every day. (Everybody who meets my grandma adores her. It was not hard to get people to promise to bring her food and fix her thermostat when it went on the fritz.)

One of my cousins who, of the four grandchildren, lives closest (same state, different city), and on whom a lot of the responsibility has fallen because of that proximity, went to visit Grandma at Grandma's house and discovered the bedbug infestation. They had had them before, and it had been treated by Terminix twice, but apparently neither treatment eliminated them completely; and when the population grew a third time, the health problems of my relative had interfered with her ability to act promptly, and so the infestation had grown unchecked for several months.

So my cousin contacted the rest of us, and for a variety of practical reasons, it turned out that Mark and I were the ones best able to respond. We were delayed about three days because of some of Mark's work responsibilities. Then we piled everyone in the hastily-packed car and drove out of town.

+ + +

The bedbugs in Grandma's house being descended from the badasses that had survived two applications of pesticide, my cousins had selected a different kind of treatment. Heaters and fans and blowers are to be brought in to raise the temperature to 140 degrees everywhere in the house.

Mark and I left the kids with his parents and showed up Wednesday morning with the checklist that the new exterminator (not from Terminix) had given us. We needed to remove all loose items from the rooms, take all the clothing (except hanging clothes in closets) away to be dried on high (the kill step) and washed and dried again, disassemble all the beds, empty all the drawers, take everything off the walls, remove all papers and books to be later fumigated before returning to the house), remove all outlet covers and switchplates, unplug everything, and take the wallpaper border off the upper walls.

Since Grandma's house, though tiny, was packed top to bottom with her collections of antique glassware, porcelain plates and figurines, photo albums, and travel souvenirs, this was a formidable task.

It took three days. We fell into the traditional roles that seem to work so well: Mark mostly dealt with the furniture and switchplates and things, and I dealt with the clothes. There wasn't time to sort, really, so I packed all the clothes and towels and bedding in the house into thirty clear kitchen garbage bags, tied them shut and marked each with a knot of orange ribbon, and piled them in the living room. The next day I piled them on the lawn, put them four at a time into clear contractor bags, tied those off, and tossed them in the tarp-lined back of my van. Then I spent six hours at a laundromat with wifi, although there was little waiting time. It takes so long to load that much laundry into machines that by the time the last load was in, the first load was done. I hardly stopped moving for six hours.

One bright and pleasant spot: my best friend from high school stopped by between places she had to be, and kept me company folding clothes with me for an hour.

Those done, I bagged the clothes back up again, this time marked with a knot of green ribbon, and hauled them back to the house, to be stored in the bug-free basement until the treatment ended.

+ + +

Meanwhile Mark busied himself at the house. The second and third day, we brought our 15yo son to help. He moved furniture, scraped wallpaper, fetched and carried. He also spent a fair amount of time with his great-grandma, asking questions about the items he was helping pack into boxes, sorting the old foreign coins. He was delighted to discover a small container full of steel pennies from World War Two; when Grandma offered them, we gave him permission to accept these as a gift in exchange for his work.

Mark told us later, "I can tell that it was a plumber who hung that curio cabinet, with the figurines." It had been attached to the wall bolts with the kind of nut you use to install a toilet. We assumed it had been my grandpa who hung the cabinet, but Grandma told us my uncle -- also a plumber/pipefitter -- had done it.

I do not get back to my hometown very often, mostly on busy holidays. We all spent more time talking with Grandma over those three days than we had in the past several years. As the days wore on, I grew to realize that she really is still on top of everything. Mark had to ask her a lot of questions about various papers he came across, so he could store them retrievably; she carefully explained details about each insurance policy (sometimes misremembering the most up-to-date name of the insurance companies, due to mergers and takeovers across the generations, but remembering accurately the value of each policy and an overview of the coverage details). Occasionally she picked up her checkbook register to confirm dates and amounts. Wanting to know if Grandma would need to be taken to the bank to move money from savings into checking, Mark asked about her accounts, and received more details than he needed about Grandma's system of automatic deposits.

At the end of the third day Grandma and I decamped for the hotel, while Mark stayed to meet the exterminator.

We couldn't settle in until I made Grandma change all her clothes. Nope, I said, you can't change into new pants and then change your shirt. Nope, not even your underthings. Everything off and into the bag to be sealed, and then you can have your new things out of this sealed bag of clean clothes.

"Really?!" She gave me an unmistakeable I'm too old for this look.

"Really."

That done, with minimal help, she combed out her hair, put it back up in a bun, freshened her makeup, got into the bedroom slippers I had bought for her that morning, and picked up the new purse I had bought on the same errand. I gave her my arm and we went down to the hotel restaurant.

I tweeted a picture of smiling grandma to my cousins.

 

And then a picture of my glass of wine, which all agreed I deserved.

+ + +

Partway through dinner Grandma looked straight at me and said, "Now Erin, I know I'm probably not going to win those sweepstakes. I have enough money, and it's something to do. Same with giving money to my charities. It's only five dollars for each of 'em. I don't have a lot of things to keep me busy anymore, and I like it. So I'm going to keep doing it."

I looked her in the eyes. She meant it.

Well, okay then. She knows what she wants. I'm going to listen a little harder from now on.

 

 

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Montana trip, and a "we're not from around here" moment.

We're on our way back home after five days of skiing in Montana at Big Sky Resort. It is one of my favorite mountains to look at from the bottom:

And also from the top (well, midmountain anyway -- you'll have to ask Mark to take a photo from the actual top, because I don't go there):

 

Big Sky is now bigger since it bought up its neighboring little sister resort Moonlight Basin. This was a little bit of a disappointment for us, because we loved Moonlight (we've been there twice before); it was smaller and cheaper, with a homely little vibe that said "We are about skiing, not about seeing and being seen in your expensive gear."

Now it is bundled with the other side of the mountain, like the one good cable channel that you cannot buy unless you also buy all the others you don't mind watching but you really don't need. As I was putting on my boots in the parking lot for my first day, an older man with two young men -- my guess is it was his grown sons -- clomped by shaking his head, on his way back from the ticket office. "Things have sure changed," he said. "Next year I think we'll stay in town and drive up to Bridger."

But all the things we love about it are still there, so we had a great time even with a bit of sticker shock.

+ + +

Mark's dad and mom met us out there, which was what you call a win-win situation.

We got to visit with them, which is always a good time.

Chip, meet old block.

The kids all got some wonderful grandma-and-grandpa time. Especially the one member of the family who can't ski.

And that meant that the six of us who do ski had plenty of time on the slopes together.

The five-year-old skied from the lift for the first time this trip. Exciting!

 

And Mark and I even got in some time together, on the slopes and in the slopeside restaurant and in the hot tub outside on the deck with snow blowing down on us keeping our beer cold.

Sorry, no hot tub pics.

We chose the more expensive route of a slopeside (sort of) resort condo, instead of staying in town and driving to the hill, because that makes it much easier for me to come back and nurse the baby without it putting an end to my skiing day. While I am not usually prone to leave my nursing one-year-old behind for hours and hours in a single week -- I took the opportunity to spend some time skiing with my 14-yo and 11-yo.

(That's them, at the top of an expert gully called "Sticks and Stones." I took the picture, then skied around another way and met them at the bottom.)

 

Because babies don't keep, it's true, but neither do teenage boys who want to ski with their moms.

+ + +

We had more than eight hours' driving time ahead of us from Big Sky to Bismarck (whence I am writing this morning), so we left at six-twenty a.m. on Saturday. I usually drive the first shift, since I'm quite awake after I have had my coffee, but I gladly let Mark start the drive down to the mouth of the valley as he has logged more driving hours in the mountains than I have. It was dark and a bit drizzly, with some sloppy snow on the road, but the conditions were not slippery.

We sipped coffee from a thermos as Mark made his way down the winding mountain road. We had not yet reached the little village with its grocery store and gas stations, when Mark interrupted me to ask, "Are those cars flashing their lights at me?"

I looked up. There were not many cars on the road, but there were more of them driving up than down. Several came around the bend, and the posts strung along the median passed between us and their headlights, causing a flickering effect. But then I thought I saw one of them flash its brights at us. Or was it just the flickering? "I'm not sure. Do you have the brights on?" I leaned over to check and he squinted at the dashboard. No.

"I wonder if there's something wrong with the car?" We were both thinking of the cargo container strapped ti the top of our minivan, the one with all the ski gear in it.

"If it was loose it would be making some noise," I started to say, and then Mark interrupted me again.

"Look," he said, "there's another one flashing at us."

I thought I had seen it too. "That's weird," I said, "that guy only just came around the bend. He didn't have time to see us."

"That's what I thought, too," said Mark.

"The sign says there is a turnout in a quarter mile," I pointed out, "why don't you pull over and check the car. Be careful," I added.

On the mountain roads, when there is only one lane in each direction, the roadbuilders leave a turnout every so often, a place (usually on a curve) where a wider shoulder is carved out of the mountain. Slower cars and trucks can pull over there to let the faster drivers pass, so that each slow vehicle doesn't accumulate a long queue behind it as it makes its way down the curving road.

Mark pulled into the next one and leaned over to rummage through the glove compartment for the headlamp we keep in the car. "Be careful," I said again, "put the blinkers on," and he did and shut the door. I listened to the blinkers clicking on and off and watched the swinging shadows as he went all around the van with the headlamp in his hand. I watched his expression as he came in front of the car to look at the cargo container -- easy to imagine an "Oh shit" moment right the -- but there was no alarm, it must be fine.

"Nothing," he said, getting back in and buckling up. "I wonder..."

"Maybe we were imagining the flashing," I said. "Those posts in front of the headlights."

"Maybe," he said as we pulled out and headed around the next bend, "maybe -- HOLY COW!"

I looked up and saw the leaping shadows on the road in a strange shape that resolved itself before my eyes into a big, square rock -- maybe half the size of a small refrigerator -- right in the middle of the single northbound lane just ahead. There was room -- the next set of oncoming headlights was just coming around the next bend down hill -- Mark steered into the oncoming lane and around it, then back into our own lane. It was sharp-edged, roughly cube-shaped, and almost a meter on a side.

"Whoa," I said. My heart pounded.

"That was huge!"

"Thank you, Montana drivers," I said.

"No kidding," said Mark. "I was on edge and going slow because of the flashing. I knew it was something, and not a speed trap up here, but I didn't know what it was."

"I'm glad you were driving and not me," I said after a while.

"I wasn't going to say that," said Mark, "but I was thinking that."

 

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Near misses and the maternal instinct.

Amy Welborn -- whose travel with her two youngest sons was one of the things that inspired our family to take the plunge and take our five kids to Europe this past September -- shares a story of a "travel disaster:"

[W]e each had a suitcase, plus a backpack.  And remember, the boys were two years younger then – Michael was seven and Joseph, twelve.  My point being that getting these suitcases in and out of trains without letting gravity pull an overloaded child determined that I CAN DO IT MYSELF under the tracks was…a challenge that required speed, negotiation skills, and balance.

As we pulled into the station, I knew that we would only have a couple of minutes, since trains don’t spend much time at all on these stops. I also didn’t want anyone – especially Michael – to take a tumble as they struggled with luggage.

So I told them, as we gathered near the door, that what I wanted them to do was get off, stand on the platform and take the suitcases as I handed them down to them. Sounds good.

The train stopped.  The door slid open.  The boys got out. I handed one suitcase down.  Check.  I reached for the other.

The doors shut.

There was some sort of green button next to the door.  I pushed it.  Then punched it.

The train started to move.

I punched and started shouting. I tried to will the doors back open.

The train sped up.  As trains do.

And the last thing I saw as we slipped away, doors shut tight, was Joseph on the platform, arms outstretched, trying to run but being held back by someone, crying out, “MOM!”

I had to skip to the end of this one to be assured that it all did turn out fine, because my heart was in my mouth reading it.  Oh yes, I can imagine what it feels like to be in the train and seeing your children trying to get to you and not be able to.

+ + +

It's very interesting, being a thinking animal.  

I remember being a child and learning about "instinct," which I (being a child) conceived of as some inborn knowledge of HOW TO DO IMPORTANT THINGS -- how, and when, I guess -- that animals had and that human beings did not have.  Animals have instinct to make them eat the food that is good for them, to make them mate, to make them protect their offspring. I could not feel any instinct inside me that told me how to live my whole life; I certainly hadn't, to give an example that occurred to me when I was nine or ten, figured out where babies come from all by myself.  (I had deduced that bit by extrapolating from the chapter about breeding in a book about miniature schnauzers that I found on the shelf.)

We humans, I decided, had to do everything we do on purpose, because we are taught to, and because we know we are supposed to.

When I was a bit older, though, it occurred to me that humans do have something that corresponds to my crude idea of animal instinct.   A thing inside us, a response to outside stimulus, that does not rely on our intellect to make sense of it for us to act.   We have pleasure -- more than that, we have something transcendent, spiritual, that gives our pleasure meaning -- we have joy.

 It is good for us to eat a variety of different food -- and we find the different flavors and textures of food pleasurable, so pleasurable that we reward ourselves (and each other) with all the different tastes and sensations that food has to offer.  We can, of course, go overboard with it, but we can also elevate food-gathering and food-preparation and food-presentation to an art form.  To social ritual.  To reinforce relationships and have those relationships in turn reinforce the rituals.  All of it connected to that base pleasure, pleasure in flavors and textures, and the base desire for food, hunger and appetite.

I thought to myself -- Maybe this is what "the animal instinct" to hunt or to graze, to search for the right food and to consume it so that it may be digested and give health, looks like when it has been transformed and elevated into human-ness.  

That made me look for other human glimpses inside the so-called animal instinct, such as the great pleasure we take in crawling tired under the covers in our beds and falling asleep, and the instinct I had (as a child) to stay close to my parents and to want to be with them and to fear them leaving me behind.  Much older me had an opportunity to see inside the mammalian drive to mate, and to muse on its particular transcendence as I prepared for marriage, reading the theology of the body.

The funny thing about such instinct (as it is with grace) is that it never appears until one needs it.  So, of course I hadn't figured out where babies come from all by myself at age nine.  It's funny to me now that I thought, if something is inborn, then it would be inborn as knowledge.  That I should understand it from birth, rather than carrying it within me as a sort of vegetable embryo to blossom (and not as knowledge either) when needed.  

So it is that I looked forward to becoming a mother, in part, because I felt that it would answer the question of What is this like -- this human form of the instinct to lay down one's life for one's offspring?  Because even as we hoped for our first baby, it was almost impossible for me to understand this concept.  I had been told that mothers "instinctively" love their babies and would do anything to protect them.  I understood that, as a mother, I would be supposed to protect my baby at the cost of my own life.  But I really didn't, you know, grok it.  I couldn't imagine putting myself in danger on purpose for anyone, really.  I certainly couldn't imagine wanting to.

So I waited, part of me wondering if I was some kind of monster for not having figured it out in advance (even from books), and part of me hoping this "maternal instinct" thing would turn up when necessary.  

I was pretty confident (from books) that the easy desires -- to feed the baby, keep it warm, and cuddle it -- would show up right after birth.  And they did.  

I was still not so sure about the willingness to lay down your life for the child bit.

But eventually, after having had a few frightening scrapes of the completely ordinary type -- as parents and children together are wont to do when they are learning how to be in the world --

-- like sitting up all night with a wheezing, coughing baby and finding that, tired as I was, it was not difficult because I wanted to sit up with the baby more than I wanted sleep --

-- I figured out what that looks like from the inside.  At least for me.

And what it looks like for me is a terrifying empathy, the dark side of the self-protective "instinct" I had as a small child, the one where I wanted to stay near my parents and not to be left behind.   The power to lay down my life for my child is the mental image of  my child reaching out to me for help and being left behind.   The thought (the image) fills me with a stark, animal horror, and rehearsing it in nightmares and idle thoughts that turn dark, I know that in that situation my life would be worth nothing to me, nothing at all, in comparison with doing everything in my power not to leave a child behind, not to leave the call unanswered, not to have the child realize I am alone and in danger; My mother will not help me.

Such visual replay comes to me again and again after near-misses and even not-so-near ones. Like the time that my second son, aged three, started to slip down a slope on a family hike and was caught by the trailside fence, put there exactly for that purpose; I might never have thought of it, but there was a gap under the fence a few feet away, and for months after that my brain happily played vivid reels in which the three-year-old slips under the gap and, calling for help, slides down and down and down.  

My brain also likes to play such reels for me even when no near-miss happens.  Riding ski lifts with a small child (the kind where the cable soars over the tops of the pines and carries you over steep cliffs) is a particularly fertile ground for the maternal visual imagination, I find.  I avoid news articles about people being swept away in hurricanes and about children being removed from their parents by social services.  I find them... not pleasurable.

+ + +

So Amy's description of the scene in the train station as being "one of the worst moments...of...my life. Second worst, I’d say. Yup. That bad" rings true.  It's literally the stuff of nightmares.

The stuff of being a thinking animal.  Which is nightmarish, sometimes.

+ + +

When I sat down to write this blog post I thought it was going to be about me wondering if we, taking our five children to Europe (ages 14, 10, 8, 4, and 8 months) had done enough to prepare them for the possibility of just such an accidental separation.  Or, as Amy puts it, the thing that gave her some confidence was having rehearsed:

What do you do if you all get on the train, and I don’t?

We get off at the next stop and wait for you.

What do you do if I get on the train, but you get left behind?

We stay where we are and wait for you.

So I knew they’d stay there. Well, that’s comforting. They’ll stay! In Padua! Italy! By themselves!

We hadn't done much train-riding, and there being two parents on most trips we had gone with the one-parent-in-the-front, one-parent-bringing-up-the-rear method of child-herding, plus the 8- and 4-year-old were usually held tightly by the hand.  We probably should have worked something out with respect to Roman buses.  

Maybe we did tell them something like that, and maybe I only don't remember it because no one ever got separated and so our emergency plans never got seared  into my memory.  Mostly we relied on our cell phones:  the older kids carried cards with the numbers, and how to ask for help,  in French and Italian; the younger kids had the same information on a strip of masking tape inside the hem of their tee shirts, with instructions written in the appropriate language to a hypothetical helpful bystander.  Not long ago, doing laundry, I peeled the remains of one of those pieces of tape, well-washed, from a summer shirt, and thought of those rehearsals fondly (not with horror).

+ + +

A terrifying empathy.

Those are the words that come to mind when I try to put words to the feeling of loving a child, really loving him to the point where you would, in fact, lay it all down to answer a cry of terror.  It is an instant of seeing the terror through the child's eyes, so that even if (I, the grownup) can see "The child is mistaken, there is no real danger," I must respond, must not let this small person remain terrified.  It's unbearable.

The psychologists tell us that some people are born without such a thing, or maybe it is killed in them at a young age, an adaptation to a fearfully bad environment that is protective and yet maladaptive  to normal human relationships.  

I can believe that.  This is a supremely uncomfortable feeling.  I can believe that, faced with its unbearableness, perhaps combined with a kind of fear or powerlessness, some people become hardened to it rather than becoming driven to act.

I am grateful for the discomfort, even for the nightmarish visual imagery that seems to be part and parcel of motherhood.  (Do fathers get this, I wonder?  Are all mothers like me?  I don't know, I can only see inside myself.)  It is a rehearsal, an emergency procedure:  an internal one that keeps me (I hope) ever ready to act without thinking if it becomes necessary.  And it helps me to know -- without having to trust in books -- that I do love my children, deeply; that I can (and do, many times a day if not every time I get the chance) set aside my own selfishness for their good.  It is a grace, one that I did not earn, and one that I intend to safeguard. 

Pity those who lose that pain and terror and fear, that empathy, or who never have it in the first place.