City Mouse & Country Mouse

My dad has never done anything half way. He truly is a force of nature. He is not fiery exactly, not earthy, certainly not airy. His energy is purely electrical. He looks and acts remarkably younger than his 74 years. True to his nature, he has been an electrical contractor for almost his entire life, before which he worked a slew of other jobs, from stock boy to delivery boy. He has worked steadily since he was young, and he has prayed since then too. Even as a child he would wake up in the dark to trudge miles to Mass every morning before breakfast and before school, like a good Irish Catholic son.

I suppose it should seem fitting then, in a sense, that tests have revealed that my father is potentially at high risk for ventricular fibrillation, which causes cardiac arrest – also known as sudden cardiac death. Cardiac arrest, I’ve learned, is different from a heart attack, which occurs when a blockage of blood vessels interrupts the flow of oxygen rich blood to the heart, causing the muscles to die; a plumbing problem of the heart, if you will. Ventricular fibrillation, on the other hand, is an electrical problem, where the signals controlling the heart become rapid and chaotic, causing the ventricles to fibrillate instead of contract so the heart can no longer push blood to the rest of the body. Death usually ensues within minutes.

The news has sent our family into its own fibrillation. My sister Christina, my mother and I have all become nervous and jittery with chaotic emotions jumping from one extreme to another. Feelings switch on, then off again, unpredictably. My eye has started twitching. It feels like we are waiting for a clear signal.

Tomorrow morning, my father will undergo a procedure called an eletrophysiology of the heart. The way I understand it, specialists will actually try to instigate, through the use of tiny electrical impulses, the potentially dangerous arrhythmias they are hoping to halt. Electrode tipped catheters pushed through his veins will detect his heart’s electrical activity and help map the area where the arrhythmia is occurring. If necessary, they will implant a defibrillator.

And when they are doing this, while I try to forge through the ordinary routine of a Wednesday morning – getting Jack and Liam up and ready for school, I will do what my father would do if it were one of us. I will pray for him, mapping and navigating my love for him through an electrophysiology of the terrain of my own beating heart.

My Boots

My boots are going to the inauguration tomorrow. Unfortunately, I will not be joining them. They will accompany my photographer friend, Dorie, who did not deem her rubber toed duck boots fashionable enough for Washington, DC. So, my mud splattered size 5 1/2 brown leather, lugged sole, sheepskin lined Uggs will be there celebrating without me, presumably splashing through slush on their way to the capitol to hear Barack Obama make his inaugural address to our nation, keeping Dorie’s feet warm while she snaps photos documenting this historic occasion. And while part of me is glad to watch tomorrow’s events from the comfort of my warm home, my heart and sole (forgive me) will most certainly be in DC tomorrow.

In the meantime, I am still trying to digest the Miracle on the Hudson, the unexpected precursor to this inaugural week, which seemed to hold a heavy deal of symbolic weight for a nation suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder. My sister flew out of New York that same Thursday. I was driving when I heard the news on the radio that a plane had landed in the Hudson. “Not Elena,” I thought as both a promise and a prayer until it registered that the plane had been bound for Charlotte, not Chicago. It reminded me of 9/11 when I listened to the news on the radio that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers, while driving to the middle school where I worked. While I did not begin to wrap my mind around the scope of that catastrophe, assuming that it was accident involving a prop plane, my brain began trying to locate my father, who worked then in different locations around the city. I called him from the principal’s office since I didn’t own a cell phone. He was safe at work somewhere in Queens. The news had, of course, gotten unimaginably worse in the short time it had taken me to reach him.

Just over a week ago, on a frigid and bright full moon night, we went to a dinner party at our neighbor’s home. There we met a lovely couple with a three year old son, and a twelve year old daughter who was sleeping over at a friend’s house. All of our boys played together while we chatted around the kitchen table before dinner. As we got lost in the thick of conversation, a glass of wine tipped, the redness quickly permeating the cream colored tablecloth to its edges, and I found myself physically pushed back against my seat with the sudden, shocking recognition that the warm and resilient woman across from me had lost her husband – her daughter’s father, and numerous friends on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, where she had also worked. She hadn’t gone in to her office that day. Her life and the life of her daughter spun around like a car in an accident for years afterwards at the mercy of fate and circumstance and unimaginable grief, until it seems they crashed in Taos. Her then five year old daughter was teased and bullied on the bus on her first day of school here. She met a wonderful man, had a beautiful son. There was the sense that both she and her daughter were only very recently coming back to consciousness.

The US Airways accident seemed to me to introduce the idea to our exhausted national psyche that even when things go miserably wrong, somehow, by a combination of luck, preparedness, fate, leadership, and teamwork, the outcome can potentially be miraculous. After seven years of stars apparently aligning to produce the worst possible outcomes of inherently disastrous situations, what a stunning and almost giddy relief it was to watch people stepping off those airplane wings floating steadily in the icy Hudson into the arms of those reaching out from ferries, as if they had been just sitting waiting there for that particular plane to fall out of the sky in that particular spot in the river at that particular moment.

“Daddy our plane turned into a boat,” said a four year old boy on flight # 1549 to his father after the plane landed in the Hudson.

And in that spirit, on this inaugural eve, my wish for the incoming administration is that when things go wrong – as they inevitably will, may they unfold in a way (whether by effort, brilliance, chance, or grace) that allows our children to retain their natural sense of wonder, their innocence, and most of all, their hope.

We locked our children in the bathroom. There, I said it. Technically we didn’t actually lock the door since it’s impossible to lock the bathroom door from the outside of it, but Oban did hold the door shut as tightly as he could for about two minutes while Jack and Liam tearfully pleaded for mercy. I’d like to blame our ridiculous, mean, and embarrassing parental behavior on the full moon, which this month happened to be thirty percent brighter and fourteen percent larger in appearance than any of the other full moon’s we’ve seen this year, due to the moon’s proximity to the earth. Oceanic tides were extra large at this full moon due to the strength of the gravitational pull. Is it possible to excuse ourselves with the argument that what our family experienced was a period of Super Moon induced temporary insanity? I wish. It certainly may have explained why Jack and Liam had utterly transformed for five days prior, while the moon waxed into roundness, into Thing One and Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat.

Thing Two and Thing One! They ran up! They ran down! On the string of one kite we saw Mother’s new gown….Then those things ran about with big bumps, jumps and kicks. And with hops and big thumps and all kind of bad tricks

I could even try to blame our ineptitude on physical pain, as I had experienced a cystoscopy the day before that left me feeling like a needle was passing through my urethra. The medications I was prescribed to prevent infection made me nauseous and gave me a throbbing, unrelenting headache. When I returned from my book club that night, an oasis of sanity in my life, Jack and Liam were tucked into bed, looking positively cherubic while their dad read to them from Charlotte’s Web. I figured we had finally worn them out with a combination of school, skiing, and running around the zoo, aquarium and science museum (in Albuquerque where I had my doctor’s appointment) in the course of a couple of days. Somehow though , as soon as it was time to turn out the lights, complete chaos ensued; tumbling, joking, farting, flipping, running, jumping, hiding. In an effort to be “fair” we made our biggest and most obviously stupid mistake when we put both of our boys in the same room, the dreaded guest room/office/hamster room, for a time-out. Within seconds they had escaped and wearing only their pajamas scampered barefoot across the snowy ground in the backyard, reappearing through the sliding glass door in our bedroom, triumphant and energized. Game on.

Oban grabbed Liam and I went after Jack.

So, as fast as I could,
I went after my net
And I said, “with my net
I can get them I bet,
I bet, with my net,
I can get those Things yet.”

Before I knew it, we had locked them both in the bathroom, threatening to make them spend the entire night in there.

Then I let down my net.
It came down with a PLOP
And I had them! At last!
Those two Things had to stop.

Their wild whoops turned to genuine shrieks and it dawned on me that what we forgot in the heat of the chase was that they would actually BELIEVE us. When Liam began frantically begging for his blanket, my heart dropped and I made Oban let them out, ashamed that we had become the parents of our worst fears. Or at least I felt ashamed. Oban seemed to relish his moment of successful capture.

I prefer to torture myself with the knowledge that my sweet Liam, who is an absolute model of good behavior – at school and in public anyway, now leaves the door open when he uses the bathroom, scared not of monsters but of his own parents and that when Jack and Liam are one day in therapy we will not be remembered as the parents who didn’t sleep for years, who read to them before bed every night and sent them to a Waldorf kindergarten because of the kind teachers and humanistic educational philosophy, but the parents who locked them in the bathroom.

If only the Cat and the Hat had shown up to intervene.

“Have no fear, little fish,” said the Cat in the Hat. “These things are good Things.” And he gave them a pat. “They are tame. Oh so tame! They have come here to play. They will give you some fun on this wet, wet, wet day.”

My sister Elena and sister-in-law Kenly, two of Jack’s and Liam’s beloved aunties, both live in Brooklyn. They recently sent me this photo of Jack looking drunk with really big hair taken at our favorite restaurant in Southampton, and since I’ve been really needing a distraction from the feeling of carrying a bowling bowl around on top of my pelvis due to my current, torturous bladder infection, the photo thankfully transported me to summer days.

Oban is fond of saying that we do the Hamptons “ghetto style.” And while I’m not so sure about that, we certainly do it suburban style, often commuting about one hour from my parents’ house on Long Island (where we live for several weeks each summer) to the glorious Cooper’s Beach in Southampton with a car full of boys, pails, shovels, beach towels, boogy boards, and Starbucks, parking the Volvo we borrowed from my mother amid rows of spanking new BMW and Lexus SUV’s. We stay at the beach, intoxicated by the rhythmic, buoyant waves, the sparkling ocean and the sun, long after the familiar lifeguards whistle their last call, while the boys climb and leap off the deserted lifeguard stands into piles of soft, warm sand.

We then wrestle a worn out pair of sandy boys with raccoon eyed sunburns (since we never manage to apply sunscreen to their eyelids) into the chilly outdoor showers, change them in the parking lot, since they lock the bathrooms right at 5:00 in spite of the $40 per car entrance fee, and drive into town to La Parmigiana, a small Italian restaurant where we feast on mussels, linguine and penne a la vodka, amid families who bring their nannies to dinner and who will return to their $50,000 per month summer rentals. After dinner, if Oban and I have consumed an adequate amount of wine, we walk over to the candy shop on Jobs Lane where an exhausted Jack and Liam invariably melt down while trying to choose between overpriced gummy worms or fun-dips. When it gets dark, we put the boys, still smelling of sun screen and gritty on their scalps, their ankles, in their shorts, and in between their toes, into their pajamas – again, in the parking lot, for the drive back to my parents’ house. Jack and Liam always manage to keep their eyes open until we get there. It is one of our very favorite ways to spend a day.

Every summer, we also make at least one family pilgrimage from Long Island into Brooklyn, mostly to remind us of what unsophisticated hillbillies we’ve really become. In August we drove into the city to have lunch with Elena, Kenly and her boyfriend Mike at Kenly and Mike’s chic little apartment in an urban garden setting straight out of Dwell Magazine. We could have thrown a rock at Michelle William’s brownstone and actually happened to walk right by her and her adorable toddler, Matilda Ledger, while we were walking back to Kenly’s apartment from a shamelessly hip ice-cream shop. Needless to say, it is not my great-grandmother’s Brooklyn, but it sure is a friendly place to roam around with kids.

By the afternoon, Jack and Liam were getting antsy and Kenly suggested going for a swim at a nearby community pool. We drove a few blocks to Red Hook, which, with its abandoned factories, industrial warehouses and concrete playgrounds, certainly looked different than Prospect Park or Boerum Hill. We walked by a few New York City cops stationed outside the pool, climbed up the cement stairs to the pool’s entrance in front of an institutional brick building, where a rather imposing looking woman informed us that we would need to remove all our clothes before entering and lock our bags in our car since we were only allowed to wear flip-flops, swimsuits and towels. Stripped down to our Calypso bikinis (purchased during a good sale at the shop in Southampton), Elena, Kenly and I were separated from the men and boys and directed down a dark hallway and a long gymnasium to the showers.

“Here comes our Silkwood moment,” Elena accurately predicted before we were instructed to shake out our towels by the shower “attendants” who then watched us shower in shockingly cold, stinging water in order to determine if we had adequately decontaminated ourselves before heading to the the pool area. When we finally entered the sea of humanity, a massive pool ringed by at least twelve life guards and a handful of police officers, I spotted Jack and Liam coming out of the men’s door with blue lips, shaking in their towels, followed by their Brooklyn Queen dad in his pink floral Tommy Bahama swim trunks. Apparently, we do Brooklyn Hamptons style.

We laid our towels down in a narrow, unoccupied strip of sidewalk, where Kenly and Mike lounged comfortably in their urban setting, while the rest of us searched for a space between bodies wide enough to enter the pool. The uniform 3 1/2 foot depth of the pool was just an inch or two too deep for the boys to reach the bottom without inhaling water, and it was nearly impossible to find an available space on the side wall on which to cling so we swam with Jack and Liam through the swarms of excited children out to the pyramid structure that sits in the middle of the pool. The amount of chlorine wafting from the water was staggering, yet we agreed completely warranted in light of the number of swimmie-diapered toddlers being pulled around it.

After about an hour, we left the Red Hook pool, shivering and hungry, and walked three humbling blocks wearing only our swimsuits, Oban barefoot since he hadn’t brought flip-flops, past long rows of taco vendors back to our parked cars.

Crossing back over to the yuppier side of town, we ate a mouthwatering meal at a loud Thai restaurant. We meandered around Brooklyn in the warm evening, Jack and Liam contentedly perched on top of Oban and Mike’s shoulders while licking Italian ices. Driving home that night , we turned around a bend on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and were stunned by a vision of the dinner plate full moon hovering above the twinkling Brooklyn Bridge with its luminous waterfall installation flowing beneath it.

Jack and Liam didn’t fall asleep the whole way home.

“They better get him a popemobile,” my mother said, through tears of joy, in response to the outcome of Tuesday night’s election. Yes, mom, and we can call it the Obmobile. My mother has always had a way of getting to the heart of the matter. If anyone harms this man, with his sparkling, happy daughters awaiting their new puppy and new home, I swear I will personally hunt him down.

My in-box has been flooded with short, emotional e-mails since Tuesday night. My friends have been using an array of metaphors, allegories, song lyrics and art to try to express the meaning of it all. Heck, as Stephen Colbert noted last night, even the New York Times op-ed page has resorted to poetry. What else can we do? This moment is bigger than us.

My dad, meanwhile, is grieving John McCain’s loss, while I’ve been celebrating the beauty and grace of his concession speech, a speech which resurrected the John McCain we all knew and deeply respected before this election began, a man much braver and smarter and greater than the dangerous rhetoric of his increasingly desperate campaign.

My husband Oban (who can have an Obmobile too, if he wants), staring at Obama’s image on the TV screen as he gave his acceptance speech, said, “I feel like I just got out of a dysfunctional relationship. He’s pretty. He’s smart. He tells the truth. I can’t believe it can be this easy.”

And I couldn’t help but feel that he appeared, standing at the podium on that fateful night in Chicago, in a term coined by my young son Jack, a little “alonely.” Without his mother or father alive to witness his extraordinary achievement, and even more poignantly, still grieving the loss of the grandmother who largely raised him, he seemed to bodily recognize the weight and gravity of his new position. I thought of the prayer he had written on a piece of stationery from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, that was removed from cracks of the Wailing Wall and subsequently published back in July:

Lord, Protect my family and protect me.
Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair.
Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just,
And make me an instrument of your will.

On election night, Obama did not claim his leadership like a trophy. He gave it humbly and quietly, as a sacrifice and as a gift. And it was received that night, as such, by a grateful world.

The day before the election, I canvassed with a young woman from Finland, who had recently graduated with a degree in Arabic languages from a university in London and who was here in Taos on vacation. She is not an American citizen, yet she had arrived that morning at the Taos campaign office, eager to work on Obama’s behalf. “The people in Finland don’t understand the way Bush speaks, in slogans and catchphrases. They like Obama because they understand the language he uses – and they like that he discusses things,” she told me as we drove together to a neighborhood behind the soft adobe walls of the Saint Francis de Asis Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.

And while, for many reasons, I expected the worldwide outpouring of emotion and jubilation upon Obama’s election, what I did not expect was my own sense that the wizard behind the curtain had finally been completely revealed. When L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was originally published in 1900, the United States had recently experienced a predicament similar, in several respects, to the one it finds itself in now. Many believe that it was written not only as an entertaining fairy tale for children, but as a political and economic allegory for America in the 1890′s, particularly the Panic of 1893, a depression resulting from railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures. With a dramatic rise in unemployment, the once secure middle class could no longer make their mortgage payments and many were forced to walk away from newly built homes which, interestingly, gave rise to the image of vacant (haunted) Victorian homes in the American psyche.

The theory is that while Dorothy represented the hopeful Everyman, the Wizard represented the President, as a charlatan who played on people’s fears and tricked people into believing he possessed immense power. The Good Witch of the North stood for the electoral mandate while the Wicked Witch of the West symbolized the moneyed establishment. Even the word Oz conveyed the concept of gold and silver ounces, as the nation’s gold reserve had shrunk, resulting from the lavish overspending of the “Billion Dollar Congress,” weakening the value of the US dollar. The cyclone that carried Dorothy to Oz provided a metaphor for the political upheaval that would transform the drab, black and white country into a land of color and possibility.

Remind you of anything?

“You’re a humbug!” shouts the scarecrow (farmer) at the Wizard, as I would like to say to Cheney and to Palin and all those who tried to appeal to the the lowest common denominators of our nation, and to convince me of their collective power.

Doesn’t it seem appropriate that Dorothy should end up back in Kansas, birthplace of Obama’s grandmother?

“And oh Aunt Em! I’m so glad to be at home again!”

Upper Ranchitos Road in October

On a bright October Sunday afternoon, my friend Liana and I left our children at her house with their dads, who were perhaps a little too happily ensconced in the family room, eating barbecued chicken wings, drinking bloody Mary’s and watching football. We set out in Liana’s car, with a map and a list of addresses in hand, to go canvassing near my neighborhood on behalf of the Obama campaign in Taos. Our noble goal was to spread the word about early voting and answer questions on a range of related topics including poll locations and vote-by-mail ballots. Oban’s parting words of encouragement to us had been, “If a dog comes at you, just pick up a rock.”

Walking up to our first house together, I felt like a Jehova’s Witness. The last time I had gone door-to-door I was either selling girl scout cookies or trick-or-treating. We stopped first at this particular house, a sand colored trailer with pumpkins on the porch, because Liana wanted to follow up with a woman she had met last week while canvassing, and make sure she had finally received her vote-by-mail ballot which was late in arriving. The woman came out of her trailer waving and smiling, assured Liana that she had received her ballot, and thanked Liana warmly for coming back.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I said to Liana.

At our second house, a tiny brown adobe, the door was answered by a man. I can’t remember exactly what he looked like because I was so distracted by the hairy stomach that was hanging over his pants, protruding from beneath his purple t-shirt. We introduced ourselves, and asked if he had decided which candidate he would support in the upcoming election. Scratching his wiry, grey hair (on his head, thankfully) he told us, scowling, that he had a real problem with Joe Biden. When Liana noted that this was a fairly unusual comment, he explained that he didn’t like Joe Biden because of “all his Botox and plastic surgery.”

“So, you prefer Palin, then?” I ventured.

“She doesn’t have enough experience.”

“OK, so do you need any information on early voting?” asked Liana.

“No.”

“Alright, thanks,” we said, smiling, and made a break for the car.

We drove a little further down the road, until we found the next house on our list in a dusty barrio, no small feat in a town largely without road signs or marked house numbers. We recognized the sweet faced woman who answered the door. She works at the natural grocery store in town and invited us into our house. She shared a slew of good ideas, which included advertising free rides to the polls on the local Spanish speaking radio station. She bemoaned the fact that although she had never had the opportunity to go to school beyond tenth grade, she had managed to send her daughter to college to become a teacher and her daughter now earned less than she did. We could have stayed in her low ceilinged kitchen all day, chatting with her, her son – who hadn’t registered to vote, and her grandchild who was was playing in the living room while watching Pinky Dinky Doo. When we finally left, we asked her if she might know the location of our next listed address and she pointed around the bend.

We crossed a small bridge and ventured down an unmarked driveway that we thought might be the right one. Someone was sunbathing in the grassy yard. When we got out of the car, an older, wiry man, whose body language reminded me of the half-man, half goat satyr character from Narnia in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, pranced out to greet us and ushered us into the studio where he had been working. He was missing quite a few teeth. Lovely pieces of blown glass lined the shelves.

“They’re beautiful!” I commented.

Liana had realized long before I did that the delicate pieces of blown glass I so admired were either crystal meth or crack pipes. A smiling, scantily clad teenage girl scampered out a back door. It turned out we were not at the right address but the man certainly didn’t seem to mind at all.

“Sure I’m voting for Obama,” he said, high as a kite. “Pipe blowers for Obama!”

We thanked the satyr for his time and moved determinedly along. Our next stop was an old, two-story farmstead adobe that resembled a Tuscan villa melting into several lush acres, rimmed by orange cottonwood trees. The friendly man who lived there happened to be the president of the local ditch association (a distinction that is related to that of mayordomo, or ditch manager, of the local acequias, the community operated waterways in New Mexico used for irrigating fields.) He let us choose plump spaghetti squashes from a pile he had harvested in his field and helped Liana with her questions regarding the water rights on her recently purchased plot of land. He told us he planned on voting early.

We continued to zig zag our way around the neighborhood, talking with one woman who had already voted and who had a “God is coming and she’s pissed!” bumper sticker on the back of her pick up truck and with an elderly woman who finished dressing herself as she slowly made her way to the door with her walker. We felt sorry to have bothered her but she seemed to enjoy the company if only for a minute. She told us she was looking forward to voting on Election Day.

After trying a few more houses with no one at home, and intentionally avoiding a trailer occupied by two middle aged men who we happened to know sit on the stoop every day drinking beer out of tall boy cans in paper bags, our final stop was at windowless hovel seemingly attached to an RV from the 1960′s that sat only a couple of feet from the road. The tall, weathered, white haired man who lived there mysteriously emerged before we knocked, wearing a plaid flannel shirt, green down vest, Levi jeans and work boots. He looked suspiciously down at us. When we explained what the hell we were doing there, the man paused and twisted his mouth into a Clint Eastwood kind of smirk. There was a long silence and then he dove headfirst into a monologue about his long political involvement via the Internet on a wide range of social justice issues (in a conspiracy theorist kind of way) and concluded by saying he supposed he would vote for Obama as the lesser of two evils.

“We don’t really think he’s evil,” Liana pointed out. His face softened. By the time we left, we were all friends, and he helped guide us as we backed out onto road.

Our mission accomplished, we drove back to the Obama campaign office in town to drop off our map and paperwork. I felt like Lucy stepping back out of the wardrobe, relieved and bewildered and wondering if anyone would ever believe us.

Lucia is my goddaughter and is like a cousin to Jack and Liam. She is nearly eight years old and has the throaty voice and the husky laugh of a forty year old smoker. She is insightful, precocious, sensitive, opinionated, and occasionally, she busts out singing loud show tunes from The Sound of Music, Oliver, or Annie. And with thick brown ringlets bouncing near her round face, fair skin, and dark liquid eyes, she looks like she may as well have been plucked from a Broadway stage. As a very little girl, Lucia possessed a plate shattering scream. Her tantrums were legendary. Lately, she has acquired a stillness and a contemplative sense of humor that seem almost womanly to me, since I of course spend most of my time in the male dominated lunatic asylum that is our home.

Lucia goes to the same school as our boys. On the occasional days when I pick her up from school and bring her back to our house to play, Jack and Liam spend the time jumping and flipping on our couch incessantly like maniacs. Being two years younger, and boys, and twins who do not necessarily have their own language but certainly share their own dialect, they can barely speak English compared to Lucia. While they squeal, snort and giggle in a blur of constant motion, Lucia pulls a chair up to the kitchen table and settles in for a bowl of rice pudding, a glass of juice, and some meaningful conversation. She smiles, amused, watching the boys. Last week she surprised me when she asked, “So when can I have another sleepover, Jen?”

I pointed at the two whirling dervishes flying across the ottoman, and asked with amazement, “With them?”

I used to think the only reason Lucia liked coming to our house was because it was the closest thing she could get to a trip to Vegas. With ice-cream always waiting in the freezer, waffles and sausages for breakfast, cheetos before noon, dancing on furniture, a couple of little dudes to boss around, lots of plastic toys, videos galore, and plenty of chaos, our house seemed in her estimation to be its own little garden of Eden. Now I’m beginning to think she really might like us.

Lucia arrived for her sleepover on Saturday evening, responsibly clutching in one hand a tote bag containing her American Girl doll and an overnight bag in the other. She brought a homemade birthday card for Oban, a pretty drawing for our refrigerator and a glass jar filled with blue water and gemstones for the boys. Jack and Liam tried to impress her, Liam by donning a vampire costume complete with bloody rubber vampire teeth and Jack by strapping his Ninja swords to his back and performing a series of invented “karate” moves. I cooked Lucia’s favorite meal, spaghetti, while they played.

After a remarkably civilized dinner, the boys still trying to show off, they all watched a movie with Oban. I had struggled for almost forty minutes earlier that day in the video store trying to choose something that wouldn’t scare the B’Jesus out of Jack, who hasn’t slept for the last week. Liam, apparently in the spirit of the Halloween season, has become fascinated by the dark side as is evidenced by the tower of Dracula, myths, and monster library books piled next to his bed. I made the mistake last week of letting them both watch a short Hobbit cartoon video that Liam had also talked me into at the library, the freakiness of which managed to send Jack into one of his terror ridden bedtime spirals and kept him awake all night long. The fact that Liam is all too willing to point out goblins to Jack in their room as they lay in their beds at night has certainly not helped in resolving matters. So today I selected a DVD I suspected would be boringly benign, a Jim Hensen version of The Tortoise and the Hare.

They watched the movie without incident, ate caramel ice cream for dessert, and then Jack and Liam pulled out their sleepover pieces de resistance; transparent plastic balls in which we put their new hamsters, Tiny and Kookookutie, for their requisite hamster enrichment/torture time spent rolling themselves around on the floor. When Lucia and the boys got too hyped up and Lucia began bowling the hamster balls, with Liam wide-eyed and giggling over thrilling flashes of her underwear, we decided it was bed time. This provoked the usual displays of utter disbelief and outrage by Jack and Liam but Lucia quietly disappeared into the bathroom and emerged minutes later with pajamas on, teeth brushed and face washed. While I grew increasingly impatient and shrill with Jack and Liam’s stall tactics, from belabored book choosing to last minute toy repairs and arguing over whose turn it was for me to kiss good-night first, Lucia, of all people, remained the voice of calm and compassion.

“Can I help you guys?” she asked, sweetly.

And when, after Jack had kept me up half that night, ravaged by Tortoise and Hare phobias and a slightly sniffly nose, I emerged from my room in a dark and stormy mood, Lucia was there to comfort him.

“I used to be afraid of things like that too when I was your age, Jack,” she said.

“Really?” Jack asked hopefully, his very manliness at stake.

Yes, it was true. Lucia had been afraid of things like that. In fact, she had not so long ago been fearful of everything from the Count on Sesame Street to virtually all animated Disney movies. And it was hard to believe that this was the same Lucia who just this past summer, while at her grandmother’s house on Shelter Island, had sent Liam crying and running out of the clear water where they were happily swimming after convincing him she had seen a swarm of red jellyfish, in a way that reminded me of Liam identifying all the goblins in the room.

“ Yep. And after a week or two, I’d forget about it and I wouldn’t be scared anymore,”she added gently and knowingly. “Can I take a bath, Jen?”

Jack’s mood brightened, as did mine somehow. He took a morning bath after Lucia. The water turned the color of a swamp, since Jack is not typically a big fan of baths. Liam bathed next. I thought back to when they all could fit in a tub together. Lucia brushed her long, wet hair out, slowly and methodically, like – well, like a girl. I tucked a package of hair bands I had bought that were too small for my own ponytails but would be perfect for Lucia’s pigtails into her bag.

When her dad and baby sister arrived to pick her up, Lucia delayed her departure by playing a few rounds of Uno with Oban and the boys. When she left, I gave Lucia a big hug. With her head at my chest, all I could think of was how quickly she is growing up.