Christmas List: Part 3

Christmas Gratitude List (2015), continued: 

6. Minecraft. This crazy game has given my son a thousand hours of flow. On the Xbox, on the computer, at the library after school, he spent the year building ever-more-fantastical houses in the Chinese style -- complete with libraries, dojos, and indoor waterfalls -- block by block.

With the devotion of a Talmudic scholar, he pored over Minecraft cartoons on the Internet, discovering clips the whole family could enjoy. Christmas with the Villagers, for example, includes the following exchange:

Minecraft Santa: Come sit on my lap!

Minecraft child: Hey, you're not the real Santa! You're just a fake!

[Pause]

Minecraft Santa [gruffly]: Get in the bag. 

This makes my kids laugh every time -- to be specific, 58 times and counting.

7. Nana Claus. While some families excel at singing around the piano at drunken soirees, my family excels at the most important Christmas activity: giving presents. Not that I'm awake at midnight on Christmas Eve -- because of course, I'm in bed waiting for Santa -- but if I were, I would be moved by all the thoughtful presents under the tree. I am especially grateful to my mom, who sends each gift pre-wrapped -- with exquisite care and attention -- by herself. When these magical-looking presents arrive, I simply lift them out of mailing box and put them aside till Christmas, after changing the kids' gift tags to say "From Mom."

8. Amazon.com. Every Christmas, I renew my pledge to support whoever is in charge of Amazon.com -- or, if s/he is busy, a senior executive -- for President of the United States. It is the most stunningly effective organization since . . . well, there is no human precedent. I feel certain that, over at Amazon, it is a no-excuses culture: If the Prime team were on the job, ISIS would be a smear in two days -- or your money back. (But nobody listens to me, do they?) Thanks Amazon, for giving everybody everything they want every day, at a reasonable price, delivered to their doorstep. Too bad you are "not qualified" to be President.

9. Mr. Right. Years ago, when I began to think about post-divorce dating, I had no idea what kind of person might fit the bill. I was forty years old with two kids, weary of every type of man I'd met in the entire state of California. He could be the nicest guy in the world, but a sharp dresser with a demanding job who was always on his phone, mulling Yelp! reviews of farm-to-fork restaurants, was not going to work: "I'm sorry, I just can't . . . Sorry."

I longed for a 50-foot banner to unfurl over my head, in the sky's vastness, that read -- like the Monty Python film -- "And Now for Something Completely Different."

Miraculously, it happened. Dave's basic character is so noble and decent, I sometimes compare it to "a bar of gold." Despite being genial and handsome, he is not cool or on-trend. He is old-fashioned yet unique, and completely defies classification. This is my favorite type of person, as it turns out.

I am so grateful for him and all our happy times together.

Merry Third Christmas, honey.

The Dark Side

We took the kids to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was really good!

While The Force seemed like so much nonsense in a popcorn movie about outer space, the perennial allure of The Dark Side seemed more real. In one character especially, it was unsettling and sad.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

And as my kids have said: "I will destroy you, Mom." And: "It is death time, Maggie."

* * * *

Horror movies about creepy kids abound, because even nice kids can be creepy as hell. Countless times, a shadowy figure has descended upon me in the middle of the night, whimpering and chanting "Mom mom" in a tiny voice. When it turns out all this creature wants is to crawl into bed with me, put its cold feet on me, and sneeze in my face, I feel strangely relieved.

In addition to scuffling around pre-dawn like the undead, kids can be so gleefully disobedient that they are, for all practical purposes, possessed. The other night, I was trying put them to bed, since it was bedtime.

This was not rocket science: Bedtime. Bed. Both have the word "bed" in them and are about bed and the proper time therefor. Used in a sentence: Get in your bed right now, and go to bed. It's bedtime! 

The kids responded like crackheads who'd never heard the English language. They jumped around, goading each other into fights, screaming and cackling.

To get my point (BEDTIME) across, I was forced to behave like a grizzled beat cop in a rough neighborhood, and not the "good cop" either. The other cop.

The kids looked baleful and hurt. Then, something in their expressions changed. You could almost see it happening: They were going over to The Dark Side.

One of them grabbed a piece of paper and a pen, and within seconds produced a giant, hairless face, crumpled in rage, saying -- presumably from both of them -- "I WILL DESTROY YOU MOM."

It is important not to seem rattled when things like this occur.

"You've already destroyed me," I replied crisply, suggesting a glamorous self in the distant past. "Now go to bed."

* * * *

A few days later, my daughter asked if she could start calling me "Maggie."

From her birth until the present day, I have called her so many ridiculous nicknames (Bunch, Buncher, Blumper, Blumpy -- I could go on), I couldn't decently say no.

"Okay, Maggie," she said. And, at night: "Rub my back, Maggie."

Calling me Maggie seemed to embolden her. As Mom I was an authority figure, sort of, but as Maggie I was just some chick with an -ie name whom she could lord it over.

One afternoon she was mad at me about something, or just bored. Standing at the table with a Magic Marker and a Dark Side glint in her eye, she penned a page-long criminal threat that began, "It is deth time Maggie" and ended ominously: "Biye biye." Next to these words was a figure with a sword in its teeth.

"That's me," she explained.

We had dinner and watched a movie about Santa Claus.

Later that night, possibly out of some vague sense of having crossed a line, she wrote me another message -- "Merry Crismas Mom" -- in her childish scrawl, illustrated with a happy elf.

I took it to work and hung it on my door, because it was literally the cutest thing in the world.

Everyone said so.

Christmas List: Part 2

Christmas Gratitude List (2015), continued:

4. Finitude. On a rainy winter's day, few things are more satisfying than a toasted cheese sandwich. It can be assembled in two minutes, while refereeing a cage match between cooped-up children. Fast on the heels of this first, all-too-brief sandwich is the follow-up sandwich. At this point, having crashed through whatever flimsy parameters were in place, you might as well just keep eating sandwiches, with a molasses-cookie chaser -- but wait! There is only one slice of American cheese left -- so, never mind. Instead of gorging on an endless supply of cheese until you never want to see cheese again, you have been saved by the grace of finitude and left with a delightful memory.

5. Divorced women. How awesome are divorced women? We have all the good stories. As referenced in John Mayer's alt-country ballad, "You're No One 'Til Someone Lets You Down," divorced women tend to regard non-divorced women as the Junior League. Until you have gracefully hosted a party in which your ex, your children, your ex's significant other, your own significant other, and your significant other's children, mingle in a pleasant and civilized fashion, you are not going to impress us with your maturity, because we are a freaking Master Race where that's concerned. More wine?

[To be continued]

Christmas List: Part 1

Like all Californians with a wedge of fine cheese and a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge, I can be a bit "entitled." There are certain things I expect from life and even take for granted: shelter, clean water, on-demand streaming video, a large array of commercial hair products from which to choose, and the ability to buy lunch at the Macy's cafe, because that is just -- as they say -- "chump change."

What problems I have fall squarely in the First World category. Most days, my biggest gripe is that "gas station robots" are not a thing, or that my kids somehow acquired a dog-shaped guitar that plays songs "sung" by barking dogs.

Though mostly oblivious to my good fortune, I have been feeling -- as Christmas nears -- a few stray pangs of gratitude. Before the moment passes, I will jot down the following:

Christmas Gratitude List (2015)

1. New Christmas tree stand. My old Christmas tree stand was forged by the Devil's minions in the foundries of Hell. It was so hard to use, it was -- for all practical purposes -- anti-Christmas. Just the sight of it, leering down at me from a high shelf in the garage, made me resolve to get a plastic tree this year. Long story short: I got a new stand, invented by people who don't loathe humankind, and a real tree after all.

2. Healthy children. At a recent pediatric visit, we discussed the fact that my daughter was not quite as tall as expected. Perhaps it was because she just turned seven and was being compared to seven-year-olds who were, on average, older. Perhaps it was because she was a "late bloomer" who would shoot up at thirteen, or perhaps it was because she was living on Twizzlers and Gatorade, with the occasional potato thrown in for fiber.* The luxury of this conversation, in the absence of  anything else to talk about, was not lost on me. In gratitude, I will be doubling the kids' potato ration in 2016.

3. Lena Dunham. While I don't endorse everything Lena Dunham has said and done, I'm enjoying her show, Girls. To anyone wondering what I'm doing alternate Friday nights: I'm watching Lena Dunham plumb the mysteries of the human heart, like the time Adam took up with a new girl while still in love with the old girl, hospitalized at the time due to a self-inflicted injury to her ear. Thanks, Lena!**

[To be continued]

*Just kidding.
** Thanks also to my sister, also named Lena.

Cluckington Island

Yesterday my son brought home his school project: a clay sculpture of mountains, rivers, and other natural features, shaped and painted like a chicken's head, with a black volcano for an eye.  He called it Cluckington Island.

Prior to this, "Cluckington Island" had been mentioned around the dinner table, but as I had no idea what he was talking about, I simply nodded and moved on.

Now seeing the thing for myself, I was impressed. My son had used a topography lesson to make a chicken-shaped world, populated by chickens, in which all human-imposed labels were irrelevant. Cluckington Island!

Nature is a big theme this school year. For months his class studied "the wetlands" across a variety of platforms. They journalled about the wetlands after viewing wetland-themed documentaries. They took a field trip to the wetlands to see, firsthand, the storied interplay between water and land. Their math problems began, Two ducks and a cormorant walk into an estuary, or maybe those were their little wetland-nerd jokes, swapped merrily amongst themselves.

"Aren't you done with the wetlands yet?" I'd ask. No, there was still much to be learned!

I tried to summon every fact I myself knew about the wetlands. It came down to a single Onion headline -- an off-color joke about "federal wetlands" --  but that hardly seemed an appropriate subject for third grade.

Anyway: Cluckington Island. It sounded like a place Thomas the Tank Engine would let off passengers before resuming his loop around a pastel-colored postwar Britain.

Back in Oakland, where my three-year-old son watched a lot of Thomas & Friends, I began to develop "feelings" for the human chief of the railroad, Sir Topham Hatt. He was so powerful and confident, so dapper in his eponymous top hat! Through narrowed eyes I regarded the potato-shaped Mrs. Hatt, who lived in a beautiful house by the railroad without a care in the world! If only Sir Hatt would turn his gaze from the tracks and see my heroic struggles, perhaps I could lure him away, for he could not bear to see me suffer in this manner . . .

I was sleep-deprived, and my thinking tended toward the dissociative. Every time we visited a place, I would speak -- jokingly! -- of running away from home and beginning a new life there under an assumed identity. If I could not be Lady Hatt, I would be someone else -- anyone else. Of course, I would -- after a period of recuperation -- send for the children, and we'd live a pastel-colored life, far away from Oakland, California, on Cluckington Island . . .

And it has worked out just that way.

"Your island is fantastic," I remarked to my son, now almost nine, as we walked across the school playground with his sister.

"Thanks," he said.

No news

After the massacres in Paris and Mali, the downing of a Russian passenger jet, the first months of the 2016 presidential race, and various dust-ups on American college campuses, I am taking a break from the news. I feel like I have heard it all -- every angle that can possibly be expressed on every topic, repeated in a thousand variations, every day -- and I have had enough.

Until November 30, I will not so much as swipe a fingertip across my phone to read the news. Unless a town crier from a Renaissance Faire wanders by screaming the headlines into a bullhorn, I will know nothing about anything happening anywhere, all week.

(My six-year-old just came in and informed me, in detail, how she washed her hair in the sink, sprayed detangler on it, and combed it. Here was a bulletin from my world. Editorial spin: Great job!)

* * * * 

Back when I was riding the bus into San Francisco, I sometimes read from a tiny book called The Pocket Thomas Merton.  An idiosyncratic monk who died in 1968, Merton was an endearing figure: At some point, the hustle and bustle of a Trappist monastery became too much for him, and he retreated to a tool shed on the monastery grounds to think and write in PEACE AND QUIET.

Having lived a normal life as a college student in New York City, he had a great many acerbic observations about normal life. In a chapter called "Events and Pseudo-Events," Merton had this to say:

 Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten-tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint, creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. . . . 

My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To 'fall behind' in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.

In "Events and Pseudo-Events," Merton was distinguishing, as usual, between the real and unreal. What made a person or event "more real"? What existed but was "not real"? For Merton, these were not matters of opinion. They were matters of fact.

My own life existed all right, but very little of it seemed "real." Merton's confident parsing of lived experience -- real/unreal, real/unreal, real/unreal -- was fascinating, like a coin trick. How did he do it? Based on what?

Between long moments looking out the window -- sailboats on the Bay! -- I tried to figure out the trick.

* * * * 

This morning, after three hours of not-looking-at-the-news, I felt good. It was 10 a.m. on a Saturday.  The world could be in flames for all I knew.

I was sitting in a Vietnamese nail salon, awaiting my turn and not reading the magazines.

With nothing to think about, I gazed at the shelves of nail polish on the opposite wall. There was a painted mural of a tropical scene with a parrot in it. The bottles of polish -- pinks, reds, and purples -- shone in the sunlight from the shop window. Jewel tones.

A red goldfish swam in a nearby tank. Asian music -- a bow sawed moodily across a two-stringed instrument  -- played on the stereo.

On my occasional trips to this nail salon, the waits annoy me. After about ten minutes, the place feels like purgatory. Enough with the music already! Is it my turn yet? Aren't there any better magazines?

Today I felt at peace. Alive! How lucky I was to be at a nail salon!

Later this afternoon, I went to the kids' room to fold laundry. Normally I would put off this task by scrolling through the latest updates on my phone, but today -- again, with nothing to think about -- I simply lay down and dozed off.

For fifteen minutes, I took -- literally -- a cat nap, as like a cat I had been staring at a spot of sunlight on the wall. It seemed interesting for ninety seconds, before I succumbed to oblivion.

Then I woke up, and the rest of the day was awesome.

Operation China

At the risk of offending several billion human beings: I have never had much interest in China, or (except for a few pockets of relatives) the Eastern Hemisphere.

My idea is of a nice vacation is eating chocolate in a lace-curtained chalet, followed by a cheese plate, followed by a walk down cobbled streets to an immaculate 18th-century church, followed by probably a nap at that point. I would like to visit India -- to be overwhelmed by the scale of human suffering and attempt to reach my dad's hometown via a hideous train trip -- but am fine giving every other country in that neck of the woods a pass.

In an unforeseen twist, however, my son is obsessed with China. And Japan. And "Korea." Drawn by the martial arts and a high-minded, vaguely Asiatic approach to life (comprised of honor, ritual, and every maxim ever uttered by The Karate Kid's Mr. Miyagi), he often announces his plan to "move to China" as soon as he reaches legal age.

In near-total ignorance of what I am talking about, I either (1) tepidly support this idea, or (2) try to suggest, gently, that living in China isn't "that great."

"Is it like here?" he'll ask.

"No. It is not like here. The government is very different. You don't have the same kind of freedom you do here. But I'm sure the culture and people are very nice!"

"Okay, then. I'll move to Japan. Is that like here?"

"No. I don't think so. It's a small island, and it's crowded."

"What about if I move to Korea?"

"Well, you should know there's a Good Korea and a Bad Korea. The Bad Korea is very bad. Just . . . incredibly bad. The Good Korea is okay, I guess."

"Is it like here?"

"No. No place is like here."

"But in Korea they have a special 'birth ceremony' -- "

"Okay, but why do you have to move to Korea and all these places? Can't you just visit them?"

"It's my life, Mom!"

Looking back, there is some family precedent for this sort of thing.  My dad wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Sino-Indian relations (executive summary: not good), and my son's dad researched Chinese history when co-writing a book about a suspected Chinese-American spy who was eventually set free.

As someone who has practically worn a "China: Who Cares?" t-shirt all my life, I am beginning to think I should acquaint myself with this vast, ancient land and its people, or by the time he's ten years old, my son will realize I have nothing of value to say about, oh, half the world.

(And no, recounting the plot of The Painted Veil, in which a British socialite is hauled off to China by her husband as punishment for adultery and comes to like it there, in a way, after taking up with a coterie of French nuns, probably won't cut it. Was my B.A. in English literature good for anything?)

When I lived in Oakland, a Chinese-American writer just up the way in the Oakland Hills won a MacArthur genius grant for her novel, The Vagrants, which "depicts life in a provincial Chinese town during the turbulent years following Mao’s death in the late 1970s. The novel opens on the day a young woman is to be executed as a counter-revolutionary and proceeds to trace the intersecting fates of a wide-ranging cast of townspeople. In these and other works, Li crafts deeply moving fiction that offers Western readers a window into unfamiliar worlds as well as insights into human nature that transcend ethnicity and place."

Even back in Oakland -- with two kids under three, a demanding job, and an all-consuming preoccupation with my own problems -- that sounded like a terrific book, not that I'd ever have time to read it.

Now, since my son's thinking about moving to China, I think that time has come.

(Image: Chinese sugar painting by Anna Frodesiak (own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons)