where the readers are

It's just remarkable, said the old lady, what photos this i-phone is capable of taking.  Forgive my astonishment at the beauty captured almost carelessly with my phone. I date back to 35 mm film for the serious photographers, which was decidedly not me (and I'm not even going to get into the phones--just one image: the stretched out cord of the phone as is snaked from my parents' bedroom into the spare room, where I could hide for privacy for my really important calls.  And maps, good grief.  Okay, I digress).  I had a disc camera---anyone still with me? And of course, my sister had a Polaroid Instamatic camera.  Just pause on that for a moment.  The thrill of that camera, with its expensive film and horrible production values, was that you could see the photo instantly.  You clicked, and it whirred, and then a blurry photo of you and two of the friends at your seventh grade sleepover party appeared in the frame. This was before midnight, when you still considered these girls friends, before they turned on you in the dark pre-dawn hours, picking sides and exchanging gossip like coins.  And the name: Instamatic. It was futuristic, right down to the borrowed tic, but it was now. And the promise it made--of all things quicker, on demand--has more or less come true. This week my Whole Foods teamed up with Amazon Prime and offered me groceries for free, in under two hours.  Which one ups the Instacart service I have been using since I got cancer in that it is "for free," save that I pay for my Prime membership each year, and of course--the tip. Instacart is just a turn of the wheel from Instamatic.  My i-phone captures beauty everywhere, though.  It caught the shimmer of the water at the bog this afternoon as I walked Sebby.  It didn't capture the slow release of heat we felt today, an underneath kind of heat on a day with cool breezes and that bright blue of summer you sometimes see on a bright winter day when the snow has just fallen and the piles of white snow layer up against the sky.

Sunday morning, Asher paused and said,"Wait, where does the first baby come from because if there is a baby then there is a mom and dad and they were babies and so then they were the first, so how do you get the first baby?" I began a long, convoluted explanation of evolution that tried to also allow for mystery and God and ended up giving up the argument and agreeing that it was possible, how do I know, that humans descended not just from gorillas and apes but also from lions and tigers.  Look, I got some information out there and I know I'll get another bite of this apple.

I've botched these kinds of conversations before, as my long-time listeners will recall.  Years ago, after a particularly difficult set of immunizations--let's not forget that there was a time when I had four children under the age of five, and I took them to the doctor en masse because that was just how it was and it wouldn't have occurred to me to hire a babysitter because I didn't have the money at the time.  Anyhow, I had four small children in the minivan and was trying to explain to a particularly unhappy Zach why it was that I allowed nurses to stick needles into their arms with a hapless lecture on the nature of immunizations, sort of, something along the lines of sometimes you need to endure a small kind of injury because it prevents, later, a larger kind of injury, like mumps or measles, when suddenly our car went past a graveyard and Zachary interrupted me with a plaintive, "I don't want to die!" Well, me in the front seat, undoubtedly postpartum, suddenly trying not to cry myself, likely as much from exhaustion as anything else, said something like, oh, it's okay that people die---you see there is a time for being born, and a time for dying, and was warily realizing I was sounding like the Elton John song,The Circle of Life, from the Lion King, damn you Disney for getting into everything, and then Zachary said, in a tone of abject horror: "Babies come out of graves!?"  And I had officially wrecked a whole conversation on death and sex in one fell swoop.

Since I wander around with the twins these days and don't necessarily have any kind of signal to tell people I had an entire brood of children before these two, I get a lot of well-meaning advice from the mothers with older children and it bothers me as much now as it did the first time around.  I can't stand when someone says, oh, you think it's hard now, do you, well, wait until they are teenagers.  What on earth can be gained from telling someone that except some sort of smug, suffering award--besides, it's simply not true. Whatever is hard about whatever phrase you're currently in with parenting is particularly hard for you and knowing it's going to continue to be hard, in different ways, is no help, of course, and my own sense is that it really does get easier over time.  Sure, the stakes in worrying may get higher--it can tear your heart up to worry on a dark night with no return texting--but I loved having older children, with their wry perspectives and knowing wit.  And having adult children has been just a pleasure. I know I'm quite lucky to have such a lovely bunch of grown people who all want to come home for the holidays and over the summer. I come from a history of adults who come back home, with their beautiful new lovers, dirty laundry and late nights of drinks and trivial pursuit and scrabble.  I know the future holds the promise of babies and the dream is to be here to witness that.

If I'm not around, for any reason (I told you, my attempts at black humor are fairly tetchy), I'm very confident that these people will carry the traditions on--but it has come to my attention that I have not done a terrific job of teaching them how to make certain dishes they expect--the rugelach and the challah, the caesar salad with parmesan crisps, the thai peanut chicken we can only have when Asher, with his peanut allergy, is not here, the meatballs, the lime corn, the sugar cookies, the sourdough bread.  I'm on it. I've been writing the recipes down and making dishes with the big kids when they are around.  The traditions of talking into the night, of showing you love someone by teasing them, of repeating the one-liners and the insider stories--that's seemingly bred in the bone.

And this blog of course, will be here as a kind of repository. It's the same kind of insta--.  I can drop by, have a few words with you, and instantly, or insta--anyhow, I can tell you something from the day, from the cancer wars, from the past.  You know I have a reader in Finland--I'd love to know who that is. Google lets me see not who the readers are, but where the readers are, which would be a great name for a blog.You can have it--you're welcome.  Anyhow, I think it's mystical and magical, and even though you rarely say much in return, it feels very much like a conversation I'm having. As I've said elsewhere, my life feels like a poem now, and I don't truly know it until I've written it.  The light is flickering in the late afternoon here on Curve Street, dappling the desk and making the windows out onto the trees a curtain of leafy green.  How is it where you are, dear readers?