Park Slope Reader

Nicole Kear

Dispatches from Babyville: It’s Never Too Cold

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville

Seventeen years ago, I had a baby. This fall, that baby — known in these parts as Primo — is headed off to college. This major life event has triggered plentiful reflection, and even more plentiful worrying. In fact, one of things I’ve realized in my reflecting is that I haven’t stopped worrying in seventeen years. 

When Primo was an infant, I worried about too many things to enumerate. But one of the top ten, maybe even the top five, was the cold. 

Primo was born in late November, on Thanksgiving night, so his infancy coincided with the coldest months of the year. This probably wouldn’t send most new mothers into a tailspin of neuroses but what you need to know is that my grandmother is from Italy, and people from Italy have a phobia of drafts. Once, while visiting my grandmother’s family in Riccione in mid-August, my great-aunt offered me a ride to a neighboring town. I stuffed myself into her over-crowded car, the interior of which was roughly the temperature required to roast a turkey. When I asked to open a window, there was a collective gasp. 

“You’ll catch a draft!” my great-aunt exclaimed. 

And so, for the remainder of the ride, I alternated between bouts of near-vomiting and near-fainting as I was slow-broiled. I tell you this to contextualize — and yes, justify — what, in hindsight, was clearly my deranged parenting when Primo was an infant. Having been inculated with a terror of the cold by my grandmother, I would only take him out in winter after bundling him up like he was about to enter the ice planet of Hoth.

At Mommy Group meet-ups, my new mother friends would watch me peel away Primo’s layers of winter garb like they had front-row seats to Cirque du Soleil, their eyes full of wonderment. It’s fascinating to watch something being unearthed, and the more layers there are to excavate, the more fascinating it is. I carried Primo in a Baby Bjorn, pressed right up to my 98.6 degree heating pad of a body and, for maximum body warmth retention, I buttoned my peacoat around him. Once I’d unbuckled the coat and the Bjorn, I’d remove his two hats, then the spearmint-colored wool sweater and pants my grandmother had knit for him. The underlying layers — his onesie and the long sleeved jumper — could stay on him. 

Generally, I’d finish the unwrapping with enough time to nurse the baby and guzzle a cup of coffee before I had to begin the process of wrapping him back up again, for the short walk home. It was a feat of endurance, or insanity, or both. 

I bundled Primo up with such zeal that I remember being on the B63 one day, checking to make sure all of Primo’s million layers were intact when a terrifying thought occurred to me: what if I’d bundled the baby up so much, I’d inadvertently made it hard for him to breathe? Fingers shaking, I unbuttoned my coat and adjusted his head so that maximum amounts of oxygen could flow into his impossibly tiny nostrils. It was the first time — but definitely not the last — that I remember feeling caught between a worry rock and an anxiety hard place. 

At some point within Primo’s first year, my worry about the cold was supplanted with new, more urgent fears, about choking and West Nile virus and dog attacks and falls from high places and RSV and kidnapping and climate change. But life is surprising. Recently, my worry about the cold has resurfaced. I’ll defend my sanity by pointing out that Primo is going to college in the Midwest. Subzero temperatures is what that region is known for, in the same way that New York is known for pizza rats and Wall Street. 

Any time I mention my son’s college destination to a New Yorker, they’ll invariably reply, “Is he ready for the cold?” The answer is yes, my son absolutely is. I, on the other hand, am not. But of course, the truth is, I’m not ready for any of it. And it wouldn’t take Freud to guess that my overzealous quest to prepare Primo for the infamous Midwestern cold is really just my attempt to prepare him for life outside of the nest. 

When we visited the college in May, we were greeted with snow. This was deeply concerning to me, an end-of-days kind of harbinger, but the locals were not perturbed. The airport shuttle driver was the first one to utter the phrase that, I now realize, is what everyone in the Midwest says every time someone makes reference to the cold. Which is constantly, by the way. Because it snows in May over there. 

“We have a saying here,” they invariably begin. “It’s never too cold. You’re only underdressed!”

This resonated with me. It’s the exact philosophy I adhered to, seventeen years ago when I wrapped Primo in more layers than you’ll find in a mille-feuille cake. 

It’s been said that clothes make the man. This is debatable. What’s definitive is that warm clothes will make the man frostbite-proof. So, at the start of the summer, as we began college preparations, I started a Quixotic quest to find the Warmest Coat On Earth. Late at night, when my work was done and my younger kids were asleep, I listened to the sound of 1920 jazz emanate from Primo’s bedroom and was overcome with affection, worry and premature missing. And fueled by that high-octane combination, I scoured the internet to find the piece of apparel that would protect him from the perils of the Midwest. I dove deep — scuba-level-deep — into down fill indexes, rain-shedding abilities, baffling details, warmth-to-weight ratios. I updated my husband, David, as I went. 

“Now what you need to understand is that a 600 fill down coat might be enough for New York winter,” I said. “But that’s not going to keep you warm in the Great Plains.”

“It really doesn’t have to be this complicated,” David said. 

“Oh, I’m not the one making it complicated,” I protested. “I didn’t invent the Midwest weather patterns.” 

Finally, after much research, I found The Warmest Coat On Earth. I was dismayed to discover it was also The Most Expensive Coat on Earth. 

“This is half of our mortgage payment,” David pointed out. 

“But look,” I pointed to my laptop screen, where I’d pulled up a review of the jacket on my preferred outdoor gear blog. “This guy says he went snow-camping in Minnesota in January and he was almost too hot in this coat.” 

“You know Primo will be sleeping indoors, in a dorm, right?” he asked. “He doesn’t need this jacket.”

I tried to explain in a language he might understand. 

“Remember, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke Skywalker is about to freeze to death on Hoth,” I said. “But he climbs inside the dead tauntaun and it keeps him alive?” 

“Sure,” he answered. 

“This jacket is the tauntaun,” I said. 

“You,” David said. “Are losing it.” 

“You can’t put a price on saving your son from hypothermia!” I shouted.

“Apparently, you can,” David said. “And we can’t afford it.” 

In the end, reason reigned supreme. That, or my credit card limit did. Either way, I did not buy the tauntaun of jackets. We settled on a highly-rated, but not superpowered, jacket that was a fraction of the price. We got him long underwear and wool socks. For the cold, at least, he will be prepared. 

For the rest, who knows? For seventeen years, unceasingly, I have worried. In between bouts of worrying, I’ve tried to teach him things, equip him with a moral compass and good judgment, support the development of skills he would need when he was on his own one day. That day is here. I’m pretty sure he’ll be prepared in all sorts of ways I didn’t expect, and unprepared in surprising ways. I’m pretty sure I will be too. 

The one thing I know for sure sure is that when the cold comes, he won’t be underdressed. 

Dispatches from Babyville: Dog Days

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville

I am not a “dog person.” I take about as much interest in a dog on the street as I would in a mailbox, or a bus. Depending on its appearance and comportment, I might admire or disdain it, but I would not take any particular pleasure in seeing it and would definitely not feel the urge to touch it. I have nothing in particular against dogs, just as I have nothing against mailboxes or buses. I’ve always been glad they exist, and I’ve also been glad they exist outside of my place of residence. 

Like so many things, this would not be a problem were I not a mother – more specifically, a mother of “dog people.” My eldest, known in these parts as Primo, inherited my neutral position on dogs but my daughter, Seconda, has displayed a magnetic pull to any and all quadropeds since she was ambulatory, an obsession which is proof positive of the power of nature over nurture. When her little sister Terza was born, the Pro-Puppy Lobby Seconda had been running solo doubled in size. 

For years, my husband David – also not a “dog person” – and I united forces to successfully fight back the dog-lovers, whose commitment to the cause intensified with each passing year. Diversionary tactics worked best. 

“You know what’s even better than a dog?” David and I would say, on our way to the pet store near our apartment. At which point, we’d attempt to convince our daughters that the pet we were acquiring would satisfy their primal longing for a canine sidekick. We adopted a hermit crab, a goldfish, a replacement goldfish (because Seconda loved the first one so much she took it out of the fishbowl to cuddle it), a beta fish, a replacement beta fish (because who knew there was more than one kind of fish food?), an acquatic frog, an additional aquatic frog (because the first one was “lonely”), a hamster, a replacmeent hamster (because, even when they live to be 100 that’s only 2.5 human years),amd a replacement hamster again (see previous note about rodent lifespan).

For thirteen long years, I waged a war of attrition (while maintaining a zoo of diminuitive animals). That I lost this war will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever met a child, much less a teenager. There is no winning a war of attrition with them. They have the vigor of youth on their side. They are indefatigable – especially when the prize they are battling for is one they regard as utterly indispensable to existence, as basic a necessity as food, water and shelter, and one you regard as an inconvenience. 

Then, too, there was the pandemic, which offered the Pro-Puppy side an unfair advantage. The sadness I felt at watching my children’s worlds get dismantled within a matter of days – everything cancelled, every friend shrinking into digital form – was so intense, I would have figured out a way to keep a pony in our tiny Park Slope apartment if they’d have asked in the spring of 2020. 

There was an afternoon I’ll never forget, within the first month of quarantine, when Terza, who was eight, sat at the kitchen counter and asked me the question she’d been asking for weeks, “When is this going to be over, Mommy?” But, after weeks of telling her some version of “soon,” which was what I’d believed, I could only say, “I don’t know.” She asked again, “When? When is it going to end?” And, again, I replied, “I don’t know.” We went on in this way, back and forth, for what felt like hours but was probably only ten minutes. My daughter sobbed and yelled and begged me to tell her when life would go back to normal, and I came up brutally empty-handed. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.

That night, after she’d finally succumbed to sleep, I said to David, “We need to get a dog.” 

“I know,” he replied, resigned. Without even discussing it, it had already been decided. 

I know this is a phenomenon that happened in homes all across New York City, and beyond in 2020 and 2021. What I don’t know is whether other “not dog people” encountered the same surprise I did when they finally caved and acquired that canine sidekick their kid had been begging for. 

What took me aback was the fact that something I dreaded has brought me untold happiness – joy, even – and a kind of easy companionship that I have never known. I am fully aware that I am the last person on the planet of Earth to get this memo. That dogs are companionable is about as well-keot a secret as the fact that New York bagels are the nonpareil of boiled breadstuffs, and babies never sleep. Still, for me, this has been a discovery. I was so busy worrying about who would walk the dog and feed the dog and pick up after the dog and train the dog and how would we pay for the dog and what if the dog barked too much and bothered our neighbors, that I never stopped to consider that in addition to making my kids happy, the dog might make me happy too. It never occurred to me that when I came home from work or an errand or even from throwing out the garbage, the dog would lose his ever-loving mind with jubilation over the fact that I continued to exist. I never thought about how ceaselessly hilarious it would be to watch the dog tilt his head in response to a high-pitched sound, as if he’s utterly perplexed, like someone just asked what he’d do to stop climate change and he is carefully considering his reply. I never stopped to consider that a person is far from a codified and immutable thing, like a statue or a tattoo, but, instead, something ever-changing.

“Remember how you used to hate dogs?” Seconda likes to ask me when we are curled up on the couch at night, with our pup snuggled right in between us, calm and cozy. 

“I never hated dogs,” I reply. “I just wasn’t a dog person.”

“And now you are.” She shoots me a “told-you-so” look. 

“Who knows?” I reply. “All I know is life is surprising. And that’s part of the fun.” 

“All I know is you are lucky you have me,” she replies as she kisses the top of our snoozing dog’s head. “Aren’t you glad I kept pestering you?”

“Oh yes,” I tell her. “I often think of how grateful I am that you are a stubborn, professional-grade pest.”

But the truth is, I am glad.

She was right.

The Sweet Life

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville

Like half the people you know, my family and I got Covid at Christmas. It was a mild case for all of us, and we’ve made a full recovery. So this isn’t a story about Covid. 

This is a story about hope, peace and a rebirth of the soul. This is a story about The Great British Baking Show.

For years, friends have been waxing rhapsodic about the show, extolling its calming virtues, encouraging me to tune in. I didn’t even entertain the idea. The show seemed stiff and dull. As a person with three kids in three different schools, I spend a lot of time at Zoom PTA meetings and I meet my yearly quota for stiff, dull content by February. Though I was a veritable reality TV junky in my twenties, today, most reality TV makes my gorge rise. My fourteen-year-old, known in these parts as Seconda, made me watch an episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” a few months ago and afterwards, I was more nihilistic than Nietzche on a bad day. 

Then came Covid. On the first day of isolation, only Seconda and I had tested positive, so we hunkered down in our convalescence room and fired up Netflix. She suggested watching the new season of The Great British Baking Show, recommended by some of her friends. Or was it called The Great British Bakeoff, she wondered? She couldn’t be sure.

“Okay,” I agreed. If there was ever a time to watch a dumb TV show, I figured it was while you had Covid. I was feeling far too crummy to focus on plotlines, appreciate stylistic flourishes, or feel resonance with engaging characters. Odds were good I’d be asleep within ten minutes. What I needed was an innocuous image to flicker before my eyes and a soundscape to massage my ears, alleviating the endless tedium of illness. 

The opening credits assured me I’d made the right decision. As chipper piano chords played, fingers placed raspberries on an inviting bed of silky chocolate icing. Unseen hands sprinkled confectioner’s sugar onto neat rows of cookies, calling to mind a soft, sweet snowstorm. A random redheaded child, looking adorably British, glanced over her shoulder, eagerly anticipating the confection baking in the oven. Life is sweet, the opening credits seemed to say. You may feel like garbage now but you will feel better soon. Everything’s going to be okay. 

I did doze off within a half hour, but both Seconda and I were pleasantly surprised by the charm of the show, which I’m making the executive decision to call “Bakeoff” as the Brits do. We were tickled by the wide array of British accents, and delighted by the use of words and phrases we’d never heard before: “stodgy,” “neat as a pin,” and of course, the irresistible “soggy bottoms.” The next day, we cracked each other up by assuming our best British accents (Seconda, quite posh, Queenly even; me, Liverpool all the way) and hurling insults intended for cakes and breads at each other: “You’re under-baked!” and “A bit rough and ready, you are!”

Later that afternoon, my husband David tested positive and joined the Sick Room. 

“What’s going on in here?” he asked when he heard the accents. 

“We’ve discovered The Great British Bakeoff,” I told him, “Today, they’re making brandysnaps! Who has any earthly idea what those are? But don’t they sound delightful? Brandysnaps!”

“Brandysnaps!” Seconda parroted. It’s just a really fun word to say. 

David, an avowed shortbread lover, was smitten immediately, though he did not succumb to our accent mania. He has some British in him, and way too much decorum for that. 

Days passed, though to call them days overstates our conception of time. The hours bled together as we slept and sniffled, swallowed Tylenol, drank tea, slept some more. In between our bouts of sleeping, we’d watch Bakeoff, and after a few days, we understood the rhythm of the show, and became more deeply invested. Now, in addition to our accents, passerbys could hear our exclamations, “There’s no way that meringue’s going to set! There’s just not enough time!” and “She has outdone herself! Are you seeing this mirror glaze?” 

My youngest daughter, Terza, age nine, had the good fortune not to catch Covid, but the bad fortune to be left to her own devices in the other room for days on end. Her only possible Covid-free playmate, seventeen-year-old brother Primo, was up to his eyeballs in college applications, due on New Years. So it was that one night, a few days into our isolation, Terza Facetimed us. 

“You’re all together,” she moaned. “And I have no one to play with.” 

“All we’re doing is sleeping and watching Bakeoff,” I consoled her. “And you can watch it too – on your Ipad.” 

And so it was that another fan joined our ranks. 

Eventually, our isolation ended and the endless parade of hours took the shape of mornings, afternoons and evenings again. Soon after the kids returned to school, I was having lunch with David, reflecting on what a crazy, un-vacation-y vacation it had been.

“At least we had Bakeoff,” I pointed out. 

“Since we were sick the whole time, part of me feels like maybe Bakeoff is a Covid fever-dream we invented collectively,” David said. “Maybe we hallucinated the whole thing.” 

“Only one way to find out,” I said, grabbing the remote. 

And there it was, same jangly piano tune, same perfect raspberries, same random redheaded girl – and really, what is that child doing there? Who does she belong to? There are no children in Bakeoff! – all of it, just the same.

Since our recovery, we’ve moved from binge-waiting Bakeoff to savoring it, one small morsel at a time. Terza can safely join our ranks now, and the four of us pile onto the couch, burrowing under blankets, as comfortable physically as we are mentally, soothed instantly by the close-ups of butter being whipped and eggs being cracked (Primo has not succumbed to the Bakeoff charm, but we have hope for him yet).

The fatigue of Covid has mostly worn off but I’ll still be asleep by the time the credits roll, because Bakeoff, as David says, is Video Valium. When I sleep, my dreams are sweet, or at least of the sort I won’t remember. And that’s because on Bakeoff, nothing can harm you, or your feelings. When Paul tells someone their bread dough is under-proven, well, that’s because it is, and it’s okay, because, come on, everyone under-proves their dough sometimes. If Prue regretfully informs someone their cake is dry and over-baked, it’s not a judgment on their character, just constructive feedback, and they can always try again next time – until they can’t, which is ultimately okay too. The absolute worst thing we’ve ever seen happen on Bakeoff is the time the baker named Ruby, put a double-layer cake on top of another double-layer cake, and it was too tall and too wobbly, and the top cake leeeeeeeeeaned over, in excruciating slow motion, until the whole thing toppled onto the counter. It was ghastly, yes, and we gasped and grabbed each others’ hands as we watched Ruby notice what had happened. She began to cry, cupping her mouth, and then something incredible happened – and it’s the same incredible thing that always happens when a bake goes wrong on the show. 

The fellow bakers – her rivals – stopped what they were doing, and rushed over to hug her, and whisper encouragement as they rubbed her back. They said, “How can I help?” They picked up the colossal mess of cake – smashed, crushed, just utterly ruined – and they helped her figure out how to make it better.

This is the magic of Bakeoff, what keeps us coming back for more. For an hour, we get to escape to a version of the world where people, as a rule, are kind, and the joy of creation is rivaled only by the pleasure of sharing it. We get to escape to a world where nothing bad will happen, because nothing bad can happen, a world where everyone’s a winner by virtue of having had a chance to play. For an hour, we get to feel safe and together. And it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.  e

Nicole C. Kear is the author of ten books for children and the memoir, Now I See You, for adults. You can learn more about her work at nicolekear.com.

LEARNED BY HEART

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: ,

When my son was in second grade, his teacher told him about Poem in Your Pocket day. 

“Everyone brings a poem in their pocket,” he explained to me later. “And then we read them to the class.”

I loved this. It was very nearly the greatest thing ever. But if there’s one thing better than having a poem in your pocket, it’s having a poem in your brain — a poem learned by heart.

Recently, I woke in the middle of the night and discovered that I could recite Romeo’s balcony scene soliliquy in its entirety. You know the one. 

“But soft!” it begins, “What light through yonder window breaks! It is the East and Juliet is the sun.” 

I’m not sure what caused me to think of this line around 3am on a Wednesday, except that I think of many things at 3am on Wednesdays. Sometimes it feels like I do as much thinking in the middle of the night as I do in the middle of the day. I definitely do the lion’s share of my worrying in the wee hours. But on this occasion, instead of my mind conjuring an apocalyptic scenario, it made a lovely line of Shakespeare materialize. What shocked me wasn’t that some trigger had knocked loose a long-forgotten line of poetry, but that that it had knocked loose the whole speech, which played out, each word following the next fluidly, as if I’d only committed it to memory that morning, as opposed to twenty years before. 

It was a wondrous, triumphant feeling to discover the jewels of poetry still there inside my brain. It was like uncovering a secret room full of treasure, whose door had been soldered shut. I witness this feeling every time my ninety-year-old grandmother closes her eyes in rapture and lets a flood of Pasolini poetry pour out in her native Italian, straight from her annals of her youth into today. 

What’s so spectacular about committing a poem to memory is not that you can feel self-congratulory at 3am on a Wednesday (though that never hurts) but that you carry the poetry with you, so that it’s always at your fingertips when you are in need of it. And the reason it’s useful to have an internal storage device for poetry is that you may not know you are in dire need of it until that need is about to swallow you whole. 

The first time I learned a poem by heart was in sixth grade, when everyone in my class was required to do so. A poetry novice, I asked my father for a suggestion and he was quick to direct me to Edgar Allan Poe. 

“Annabel Lee,” he said, handing me a heavy tome of Poe’s Collected Works. 

You’d be hard-pressed to find an easier poem to commit to memory. The rhymes leap off the page, hooking right into you like like those sticky burrs that fall off trees. With almost no effort, they adhere, apparently for good. Decades later, I can tell you Annabel Lee’s story from start: “It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea” to end, “The wind came out of the cloud by night, chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.”

There was a lot of the poem I didn’t understand at the age of ten. What was a seraph? Or a highborn kinsman? But the wonderful thing about poetry is you don’t have to understand all of it — or even most of it. Particularly in the case of poems that rhyme, so much of the pleasure you feel in reciting them is letting the rhythms of the words roll over you. If you don’t believe me, stop what you are doing and say these words out loud:

“For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams/ Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes/ Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”

It’s like a massage for your brain, from the inside out. 

So I was delighted when my son graduated from pocket in his pocket to poem in his brain in fifth grade. His teacher said he could pick any poem he liked, and I advised him to choose one which rhymed, assuring him it would be permanently imprinted on his psyche for eternity. 

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” I said, laying before him a selection of poems, Annabel Lee included. He made his choice wisely. Over the next few weeks, in the process of helping him learn the poem, I ended up memorizing it too. 

“Whose woods these are,” he recited, standing in front of the classroom. “I think I know.”

I was in the back of the room, with the other parents, watching him recite it. He took his time, and it seemed to me that he was savoring the words as his lips formed them. 

Fast forward six years, to the winter of 2021. It was in the middle of the second wave of Covid, before anyone was vaccinated, when my kids had been in online school for over a year with no end in sight. The Covid map tracking the spread of the disease across the nation had to invent a new shade of red, to distinguish “Very High” risk from “Severe.” For the first time in my life, we didn’t spend Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family, or my husband’s. Things were grim. 

Desperate to escape the confines of our tiny apartment, we consulted that same Covid map to see where the virus appeared to be the most contained. Vermont, the map said. So that’s where we drove, after booking a few nights in a rustic AirBnB. 

We’d been prepared for snow. Or, rather, we’d sought out the snow – it was part of the Vermont appeal. That didn’t mean we were prepared for it. It didn’t just cover everything, it buried everything. Who knew what was even hiding under the thick blanket of white? 

It was a lovely sojourn, and restorative in more ways than one. Part of what felt so difficult about that winter was the lack of new-ness, how every day was always the same, looking at the same people, confined to the same rooms, the same sense of dread and tedium and frustration. But in this brave, new world, a land that more closely resembled Narnia than New York City, there were new sights and smells and feelings. There was wonderment. 

One late afternoon, the day after a fresh snow, I was charged with walking the dog. I put a leash on him for fear he’d sink into a mountain of snow and never be found.We descended the icy stairs and walked down the utterly deserted road. To the left of me were trees. To the right of me were trees. Always everywhere, above, below, and on all sides, was snow. 

I stopped walking and the dog stopped walking too. And what I heard then was something that was entirely new to me — total and complete silence. The wind wasn’t blowing. No creatures stirred in the trees. Nothing moved anywhere. The silence was immense. The stillness was staggering. 

My pup, perplexed, or perhaps impatient, made the huffing puffing sound he does when he’s ready to move on. And the door that had been locked inside my brain blew open and out flew these words: 

“He gives his harness bells a shake/ To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep/ Of easy wind and downy flake.” 

The dog and I walked slowly down the road, marveling at the icicle-laden tree branches. Or, at least, I marveled. I can’t speak for the dog. 

Out of my hidden poetry chamber, the words poured:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,/ And I have promises to keep. 

And miles to go before I sleep./ Miles to go before I sleep.” 

Who can say by what magic words renew us? I only know that they do — for me, at least. I know that when I learn the words by heart, they become a part of that organ, a part of the thing that beats in me, and keeps me walking, even in the darkest days of winter. 

Dispatches from Babyville: Finding Space

By Filed Under: Community, Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: ,

My grandmother used to keep her pasta in the dishwasher. Her dishwasher hadn’t worked in decades, and it wasn’t necessary, anyway – she prefers to wash the dishes by hand. But it did take up precious space in her small Bensonhurst apartment. So she decided it would function perfectly as a storage unit for non-perishable goods, like lasagne, tagliatelle, rotini, farfalle, bucatini, penne and orecchiette. 

“Getta me a boxa pasta!” she’d call, and I’d walk over to her defunct dishwasher to select one. 

When you live in a city where one square foot of living space costs hundreds of dollars, you don’t let a broken dishwasher sit empty. You maximize every last inch of usable space, re-purposing and multi-purposing incessantly. Never has that been more true than during the past year and a half, when we were all in and out of shutdowns and quarantines, stuck at home. 

Last August, as our first Covid summer came to a close and my three kids faced a new year of school which we knew would be at least partially remote, I decided we needed to free up space in our apartment. If I made space, we could set up three schoolwork areas, and if I set up three schoolwork areas, we could have an orderly, productive remote school experience.

Let’s set aside the fact that I was delusional in believing any remote school could be productive or orderly. After all, hindsight’s 20/20. 

I started with an innovative brainwave: I’d make my youngest daughter’s bed into a loft, so we could put her dressers underneath it, thus liberating valuable square feet in the shared bedroom. This loft-bed project brought me to Ikea. Me and everyone else in the tri-state area. 

I selected a large quantity of home accessories I did not need, immediately undoing the de-cluttering I had undertaken the week prior. I loaded up on cinnamon rolls and Swedish meatballs and lingonberry soda. Then I headed to the warehouse shelves which were supposed to hold the dresser I’d selected to go in the loft area. When I found the shelves bare, I waited on a serpentine line to ask a women in customer service where I could find them. 

“You can’t,” she said. “We’re sold out.”


“What about in another color? Or at another Ikea?” I asked. 

That’s when she explained that it wasn’t just the Brooklyn Ikea that was sold out but every Ikea in the Eastern Seaboard. 

“The whole Eastern Seaboard?” I repeated. It was a strange expression to use at Ikea’s customer service desk. 

“Yep,” she replied. “Everybody’s fixing up their houses before school starts.”

Looks like I was not alone in my quest to make everything that was wrong in the world right with some light redecorating. 

The loft-bed was only the first of my home improvement projects. Freeing up those precious few square feet whetted my appetite for “finding” more space. This is a misleading term. It’s not as if extra space was hiding somewhere, like there was a trick wall that, when pushed on at the exact right spot, revealed a secret room. Still, I believed that if I planned thoughtfully enough, arranged furniture carefully enough, I’d make the little space we had go much farther. 

The challenge — a challenge shared by everyone — was that my apartment, which used to be just a home, now had to serve so many other functions. It was an elementary school, and also a middle school and a high school, too. It was an office for my husband and I, and a conference room. It was a gym. A music studio where my 14-year-old took piano lessons. A dance studio where my 9-year-old took ballet. An art studio where my 16-year-old learned how to use pastels and acrylics. It was an exam room for practice SATs. A vocal rehearsal space for high school audition tapes. It was a therapy office. 

No home can serve that many functions, and definitely not one that covers less than 1300 square feet. 

Still, I tried, the way we all did. What choice did we have? 

I maximized the use of our tiny balcony which Pre-Covid had never been used, because it overlooks Fourth Avenue and is loud, polluted and generally grimy. Now, the balcony functioned as a gym, housing the budget stationary bike my husband bought in the early days of Covid, when even bike riding seemed too dangerous. By happenstance one day, my 9-year-old discovered zoom school was much more tolerable when she did it while pedaling. Then the balcony because a gym/ classroom. Multi-purposing at its finest. 

The bathroom became an animal sanctuary, with two hamster cages stashed in the bathtub. 

“I need to take a bath,” my daughter whined one night. 

“Forget it,” I told her. “That’s the hamsters’ real estate.”

Another night, my teenage daughter complained there was no room quiet enough to record the original song she’d written on guitar. 

“Go play in my closet,” I told her, as if it was obvious. “The clothing will be a good buffer.”

And she did. Thus began the “Closet Concert” series.

Coordinating remote school was more difficult. When not riding the bike on the balcony, my little one preferred to do zoom school from the living room, which was where my older daughter liked to work too, So much for the special work stations I’d taken pains to establish in August. Most mornings, they’d get set up in the living room, which is also the kitchen, which is also my office, and so, while working, I’d be treated to a lecture on mitosis while simultaneously learning about the establishment of New Amsterdam while listening to my husband grind coffee. 

“Dad, stop!” the girls shouted in stereo. “We’re at SCHOOL!” 

“Where am I supposed to grind coffee?” he asked. 

“The balcony!” I replied, exasperated. “That’s where all grinding, blending and hair drying happens during school hours. When it’s not being used as a gym.” 

One night in late autumn, I was sitting on the couch surveying my living room, which had become impassable. The keyboard and chair blocked egress to the balcony. The exercise bike, dragged inside to avoid rain, blocked egress to the bathroom. You couldn’t sit at the dining room table because there wasn’t space enough to pull the chairs out, what with the desk I’d wedged in there for my husband and the lamp. 

“I wish we could put furniture on the ceiling,” I said wistfully to David. “Is that — are we sure that’s impossible?” 

“You are getting carried away,” he said. It’s not the first time he’s said this to me.

“The problem is there’s not enough space in this house!” I exclaimed. 

“The problem is a deadly pandemic is ravaging our world,” he said. 

He was, of course, right. 

There was nothing I could do about the complex, maddening, terrifying problem of Covid, so I focused with a deranged zeal on a problem that could be fixed. Except that solving one did not solve the other.

“No matter how inventive I was with my storage, or how many functions I could eek out of one toilet bowl (desk chair! salon chair! toilet!), it didn’t change the despair I felt every day over what my kids were missing, and I was missing, which was nothing compared to what so many had lost, and continued to lose. “

Then, in November, just after I’d maximized every nook and cranny of the apartment, I decided to add something entirely different to the house. The puppy who is now a member of our family is small but takes up plenty of square footage, racing around our small home at a breakneck pace, strewing his toys and chewys everywhere, dragging garbage across the floor, wreaking havoc. His crate and beds and gates and food bowls have made me admit defeat in the battle against clutter. Our house is absolutely overbrimming with stuff. But it is also overbrimming with delight. We can’t look at the pup without cracking a smile, or dissolving into coos, or squealing with laughter. He makes the house messy, and immeasurably happy. 

I couldn’t find any more space within the confines of the apartment, but I found plenty of breathing room in the expansive joy the puppy brought with him. 

Dispatches from Babyville: Stop and Smell the Flowers

By Filed Under: Community, Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , ,

Artwork by Heather Heckel

I have never been the kind of person who knows the names of flowers. I couldn’t tell a hydrangea from a hyacinth if my life depended on it. My main interest in flowers has been in their utility as metaphors. Until the pandemic.

Now, very much to my surprise, I find that I am interested in things that bloom. When I spot a flower, I have the urge to identify it, learn its name, admire its colors and contours. More than anything, I like to stop and smell the flowers. Literally. Incessantly. I have trespassed in people’s front yards to get a sniff. I have stopped sidewalk traffic. 

When, I ask you, did the flowers of Brooklyn get so resplendent?

Have you smelled a lilac lately? I mean, deeply drank in its aroma? I can’t recommend it enough. It will renew you.”

I’m not the only one who’s noticed. At the start of spring, my Facebook feed was flooded with flower posts. In lieu of their children’s faces, my friends marveled at the loveliness of lilies, daffodils and, most notably, tulips. 

Oh, the tulips. 

We — hardened, jaded, New-York-tough city dwellers — lost our minds over the tulips this year.

I lack the poet’s tongue to wax sufficiently rhapsodic over flowers. I’m no Longfellow. But back in March, I was walking my 9-year-old to school in the morning, down the same street we always walk down, past the grays and browns and blacks that make up a sidewalk landscape, and suddenly, there was a burst of yellow. Bold. Brillant. Defiant. Three or four sunshine tulips, in a tree bed, their petals beginning to flare. 

The tulips were impossible to ignore. You simply could not walk past them. 

“Good morning!” they greeted us. 

“Have a wonderful day at school!” they cried.

“If the last few months of this apocalyptic winter of our discontent have left you despairing and contemplating the possibility that all joy and beauty and hope have been extinguished,” they said. “Despair no longer! For we, tulips, have nevertheless persisted! Joy and hope and beauty have persisted! You, too, have persisted! So, crack a smile!” 

They were loquacious suckers.

At first, it was just a few tulips here and there, peppering the neighborhood. But every day, they proliferated. Soon, their lovely, vibrant heads – orange, yellow, red– were popping out of the earth in every front yard, every tree bed, every planter. 

My favorite were the two-toned tulips, with stunning magenta petals, edged in yellow. They looked like sunsets. I defy you to walk down a quiet Park Slope side street on a sunny afternoon, encounter a sunset tulip and not be suffused with the exquisite glory of living.

I have become a flower lover. It is an unlikely turn of events. What can I say? Life is surprising. 

To celebrate my anniversary in April, my husband and I spent an afternoon at the Met, which marked our joyful return to museum-going. Crossing Park Avenue on our way home, I found myself approaching a congregation of tulips the likes of which I’d never known. In fact, this is untrue. I’d seen these tulips every year, because they are always there, on the island separating the northbound traffic of Park from the southbound. But this year, they stopped me in my tracks. 

An unimaginable abundance of tulips — hundreds of them — lined up in neat rows, like little soldiers of good cheer, waving in the breeze. 

“Oh my God,” I said to my husband. “They’re magnificent.” 

“I know,” he agreed. 

I turned to him and snorted. “And people said New York was dead.” Only I didn’t use the word “people.” I used a noun not suitable for print, an expletive almost as colorful as the tulips. 

It takes a dark, cold winter to appreciate the spring. And the winter that just passed – it was a doozie. It was so unremitting in its bleakness that more than once, strangers confessed to me their inability to bear it all while waiting for elevators and for the light to change and on line in bodegas. After all of that fear and despair and the barren, terrible cold, finally there was light and new life and color and hope. Finally there were tulips. 

As spring blooms to summer, the tulips have cast their petals to the ground, but there are other flowers appearing. Already, the lilacs are blooming. 

Have you smelled a lilac lately? I mean, deeply drank in its aroma? I can’t recommend it enough. It will renew you. 

But you don’t have to take it from me. Listen to Walt Whitman, father of free verse, the quintessential Brooklyn poet. This is from “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” a poem which is about loss and beauty and continuing on:

“In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,

Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,

With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

A sprig with its flower I break.”

Every leaf a miracle. 

Indeed.

Dispatches from Babyville: The Dream of After

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville, Feature Tagged With: ,

Art by Heather Heckle

My grandmother, an almost 90-year-old immigrant from Italy, spent the first few months of the pandemic quarantining with us. We were holed up in my mother’s house in the wilds of suburban New Jersey, and it reminded my grandmother of when she fled Rome as a child, to hide from the fascists in an abandoned barn in the country.

As my grandmother and I sat around the house, cooking pasta, breaking up squabbling kids and watching the death toll tick up and up and up on the news, my grandmother kept asking, “Ma quando finisce questa guerra?” 

“When is this war going to end?” 

She spent countless hours (we had hours, plenty of them) hearkening back to her experience as a child in Italy during World War II, and pondering the similarities between that war and what she’d come to think of as the Covid war. 

One distinct difference, she pointed out, was that in our current situation, we were lucky enough to have plenty of food. Toilet paper, not so much, but who needed toilet paper? They didn’t have toilet paper back in that abandoned barn she lived in during the war with her parents, four siblings, the local priest, and his two sisters. And back then, they didn’t have food either. 

“My fadder would walka hours to get a loafa bread.” She clucked her teeth. “If he found uno pomodoro for us to share, we woulda cry wit happiness.” 

Meanwhile, in our Covid quarantine, where the only novelty or pleasure could be found in what we ingested, we prepared lavish feasts, the likes of which we never enjoyed in pre-Covid days.

“We eata like kings!” My grandmother laughed, as she regarded her loaded plate — barbequed ribs, fluffy mashed potatoes, garlicky string beans, and a pie cooling on the counter. “What kinda war is dis?”

But as the pandemic wore on, her opinion of the Covid war changed. The isolation, she said, wasn’t something she had to deal with as a child in Italy. In the war of her youth, there was an enemy you could see. But, during Covid, the enemy of contagion turned even the people you loved, people you trusted – friends, family, neighbors –  into a threat. As spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall and fall turned to winter, the loneliness of isolation grew and she decided, for certain. This really was a war – cruel, terrible, merciless.

“Ma quando finisce questa guerra?” she’d ask – more plaintively, it seemed all the time. “When will this war be over?”

Just a few days ago, my grandmother, a Park Sloper, had the tremendous good fortune to receive her second Covid vaccine dose. This has filled her with optimism for the future. She sees the light at the end of this dark, dark tunnel. Instead of asking when the war will be over, she’s started to talk about what she’s going to do when it is. She imagines the “End of Covid” the way she remembers the end of World War II – the Americans driving into Rome in tanks to liberate the Italians from fascism. One day, the war was raging. The next day, it was over. 

I do not tell her what I am thinking, which is that this may not be “over” for a long, long time. Maybe it won’t ever be over. Certainly it won’t be for the half a million families that lost loved ones. But even in the most literal sense, it seems likely that Covid, in some form, will persist. We’ll have to find a way to live with it, around it. That’s not helpful for my grandmother to think about. It’s probably not even helpful for me to think about. We have to be forward-looking. We have to delude ourselves a little bit. As my eighth-grade-daughter recently wrote in her essay on Of Mice and Men, “There is no guarantee that dreams will come true, but they fill your life with purpose and meaning.”  

As true in our time as in Steinbeck’s. We need our post-Covid dreams, and we need to talk about them. We need George to tell us about the rabbits. And we definitely need to forget how that book ends. 

As far as my grandmother’s concerned, her dream is simple but vividly-imagined. “When dis is over, I’mma gonna go shopping. I’mma gonna buy all de fruits and vegetables. I’mma gonna load my shopping cart full. Then I’mma gonna make a big dinner, and you come over to eat, all of you.”

That’s what freedom means to her. 

For my eight-year-old daughter, the after-Covid dream is to go to Harry Potter World in Orlando, Florida. Browse wands in Dragon Alley. Eat Bertie Bots. Geek out about quidditch. 

My 16-year-old son wants to ride the rails again with his friends. Hop on a Metro North out of Grand Central with no particular destination in mind, get off at some sleepy Hudson town, walk, explore, eat a burger in a gazebo, come home when he feels like it. Wander free. 

My 14-year-old wants to see her grandmother in Tennessee. Curl up on her couch with those big, slobbery Southern dogs piled on top of her, while eating Little Debbie cakes and looking at the Smokies out the window. 

My husband dreams of live music, concert halls pulsating with sound.

I have a list of after-Covid dreams as long as the Christmas list my daughter sends to Santa. But the main one is: I want to see new things. Radically new things. Unimaginable sights and sounds and tastes. I want to marvel. I want to ride an elephant. I want to climb a mountain. I want to float in the Dead Sea. My appetite for adventure has been whetted like never before. I could devour the Earth and still be hungry for more New Things. To sate my hunger, I’d probably have to get intergalactic. 

People are speculating that when we reach herd immunity, it could be like the Roaring Twenties all over again. Life in Technicolor. Famished people let loose in an all-you-can-eat buffet of celebration. So much time to make up for. 

Who knows if that’ll come to pass. What I do know is that soon, very soon, my grandmother will dust off her handy shopping cart, secure a mask on her face and head out to the grocery store for the first time in a year. I know that it’ll be the Roaring 20s in that shopping cart. You can bet your bottom dollar that it’ll be piled high with eggplants and tomatoes, three kinds of meat for bolognese sauce, prosciutto and melon for an antipasto, and probably those rocket ship popsicles the kids love. I’ll accompany her on that first trip, just to see her face. Her mouth will be masked but her eyes will be grinning. I’m sure of it. 

Dispatches from Babyville: Dear Subway

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , , ,

Dear Subway, 

It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other, I know. Nine months, to be exact. In the period of time since my last ride, I could have gestated a human life. I’ve gestated human lives on three different occasions so I know how long of a span that is. It’s an eternity.

I know you’re still there, just like you used to be. I can feel the vibrations of your rumbling, four stories below me when I sleep. And I know you’re pretty safe to ride. I’ve heard the positive reports of mask compliance. It’s not that I’m intentionally trying to avoid you. It’s just that I have no place to go. Where would you even take me? 

My life has become hyper-local. I barely even leave my zip code anymore. Park Slope has everything one might need, though not everything one might want. But, these days, no one’s getting what they want, and plenty aren’t getting what they need either. So, I’ve relied on my feet to take me where I have to go. It’s worked well enough. Except . . . 

I miss you, subway. 

I miss your velocity. I miss your density, even. I miss your rattling, your thundering, your lurching. I miss indecipherable announcements. I miss “Stand Clear of the Closing Doors.” I miss darting through those closing doors with my kids, and telling them the story of my friend Carli, from high school. How, on our afterschool commute one day, she did not stand clear of the closing doors, so they slammed shut on the straps of her backpack and her super-long banana-colored hair. The train zoomed out of the station, with her hair and her backpack on the outside of the car. Carli thought it was hilarious. She did high kicks like a Rockette. 

“Mom, you’ve told us that story a hundred times,” my kids would 

 say. 

“I know, “ I’d always reply. “But it’s a good story.” 

Subway, I miss your chance encounters, your platform churros, your candy purveyors. I miss your potentiality, the assurance that absolutely anything could happen. 

I do not miss your track rats. I hate rats. 

I also do not miss the mysterious piles of feces on your platforms, which I always tell myself are animal turds, even though I suspect they are of human origin – and what’s the difference really, right? Except, well, there is a difference. 

Still, even with your rats and mystery feces, subway, I can’t wait until I see you again. 

I’m sitting here, trying to think of my favorite moment we’ve shared. The most memorable moment by far, was when my son, known in these parts as Primo, my daughter, Seconda and I were leaping onto a G train, coming home from Cobble Hill. Just as we were jumping on, a passenger scrambled to get off. At the time, I wasn’t sure why he was rushing out of his seat with such urgency but a moment later, it became clear, when he vomited directly onto 7-year-old Primo’s T-shirt. The passenger made it off, the train doors closed, and Primo, looking down at his chest, let forth a bloodcurdling, horror-movie scream. We still think twice before getting on the G train. 

I also don’t miss the subway vomit. 

Our relationship has spanned four decades and it’s hard to pick a favorite moment. In my childhood, I had eye-opening moments of discovery. In my adolescence, I had up-to-no-good moments. In my twenties, I had cinematic rom com moments. But my favorite . . . 

Do you remember the afternoon in early spring, four years ago, when I got on the R train to take Seconda to get her very first pet? She was nine, had been begging for a hamster for months, and finally, I’d relented. We were en route to the Union Square Petco and she was in high spirits, bouncing up and down in the orange plastic seat, chatting a mile a minute. When a subway performer got on somewhere around City Hall, she was delighted. As we rumbled into the Prince Street station in Soho, he played “Raspberry Beret” and the passengers came to life, clapping and whooping; Prince had died only weeks before. 

One of the things I love most about you, subway, is that there is nothing more intoxicating than sharing a collective moment shared in the tight, dense, no-exit space of your train car. Most often, it’s a collective annoyance we feel – when the train car slows to a stop in a tunnel and the conductor assures us we will be moving shortly, but we know that shortly is a relative term if ever there was one. Passengers sigh, grumble, exchange exasperated glances. The irritation is shared by all. We are together in this. 

Occasionally, that collective moment can be upsetting. I’ll never forget the homeless woman who walked into my train car a few years ago, asking for money, only to be ignored by all. 

“Look at me!” she yelled, her voice raw and urgent. 

No one looked. 

“I’m a human being!” she yelled. “And you’re animals! Animals! All of you!”

It was a heavy moment, weighted with guilt, shame, fear, complicity — and we were together in that moment too. 

But that spring afternoon on the train to Union Square, the collective moment was anything but heavy. We were floating – my daughter on the wings of anticipation and me, on the satisfaction of making her happy. 

“She wore a raspberry beret,” the busker crooned, leaning on a pole. “The kind you find in a secondhand store.”

We clapped, we laughed and in doing so, we memorialized the musical giant who was gone, but not all the way gone because here was his music, very much alive, providing a Prince Street soundtrack. 

As we pulled out of Astor Place, the performer, having finished the song, collected tips from passengers, including my daughter. He saw her bright smile and he returned it with a massive grin of his own — the kind we never get to see anymore because of masks, 

“This one’s for you,” he told her, as he started strumming a set of familiar chords.  

“I’ve got sunshine,” he sang, looking straight at her. “On a cloudy day.” 

My daughter glanced up at me, her electric blue eyes twinkling. “Are you getting this?” they said. 

I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed. I was getting it. 

“When it’s cold outside,” he crooned. “I’ve got the month of May.” 

Maybe people were still riding the wave of good feeling from “Raspberry Beret” or maybe it was the huge gap-toothed smile that took over Seconda’s face, or maybe it was just that the singer was singing the hell out of the song, pouring himself into it, all of him. Either way, people clapped along. 

“I guess you’d say,” he sang, “What can make me feel this way?” 

He stopped strumming, pointed at Second and sang a cappella. “My girl, my girl, my girl” 

My girl — our girl — giggled, a giggle so effervescent it could’ve powered a hot air balloon. 

I have never been more in love with this city, my always and ever city. I’ve never been more in love with you, subway, 

I was with my girl, and I was with my fellow New Yorkers, too. Despite the many, incessant forces that keep us apart, we were all together in this moment, a perfect, magical moment that could never happen anywhere else. It couldn’t happen in a Walmart, or a strip mall. It couldn’t happen in an elevator, or on a street corner, or in a bodega. It could only happen on a New York City subway. 

One day soon, we will meet again. I’ll swipe my Metrocard, descend a dingy staircase, avoid mysterious fecal matter, steer clear of the rats. I’ll wait for the train, with my indomitable, impatient New Yorkers and when it comes, I’ll think of Carli and I’ll stand clear of the closing doors. 

I can’t wait for that velocity again. That freedom. 

Until then, 

Fondly,

Nicole 

Artwork by Heather Heckel

Dispatches from Babyville: The Persistence of Delight

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: ,

I wanted to write a funny essay about parenting during the pandemic. 

I discovered that I can’t write a funny essay about parenting during the pandemic. 

None of this is funny.  The loss, the suffering, the fear, the isolation, the rage – there is no small part of any of that that’s funny. 

But it’s more than that. 

It’s that the ubiquitous bleakness the pandemic has wrought has seemed to rob other things of their humor, too. I can’t help feeling sometimes like a prisoner in Azkaban, with the dementor of Covid sucking all the humor out of the world. 

It’s not to say that I haven’t laughed in months. I have. There have been things I’ve recognized as entertaining – but those laughing-so-hard-you’re-crying guffaws, the laughter that leaves you breathless and sighing and shaking your head. the kind of laughs that restore you – those have gone missing for me. 

I know that funny’s not gone. Funny’s just on a long vacation somewhere. Maybe Iceland. I hear they’ve got their virus numbers under control. 

For better or worse, I’m an optimist. I know funny will be back. 

In the meantime, I’ve found delight. 

I am not a philosopher. I am not a poet. Hell, I don’t even meditate. I am not qualified to wax rhapsodic on the relationship between pain and delight. So I won’t. 

I’ll just say that accidentally stumbling across small, unexpected moments of delight has sustained me during these months. It’s gotten me through. When Humor couldn’t cope, Delight stepped up to take her place. 

A year ago, I read an excerpt of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, in which he masterfully chronicles a delight every day for a year. The part I read was about him taking a tiny tomato plant on an airplane with him. He describes the way other passengers and flight attendants are disarmed and charmed to see someone carefully carrying a seedling like a baby, through the airport and onto the plane. The plant brought other people delight and their delight brought Gay some, too. 

For a long time, I’ve tried to make gratitude a habit, and to develop this practice in my kids. I have largely failed. All the “Gratitude Journals” I bought remain blank, and while my children go through the motions naming something they are grateful for at meals, one gets the feeling their heart isn’t in it. If I’m being honest, the concept of gratitude, while appealing to me, has never been accessible. I never feel like I’m doing it right.

Delight, on the other hand, is easy. It’s so small. It’s everywhere. 

And – here’s the key part – I don’t have to go looking for it. It finds me. Even during times of relentless darkness. Especially during those times.

Delight is when you’re taking a walk in nature because everyone agrees that’s restorative, despite the fact that you find nature pretty boring and a little scary — and all of a sudden, you see a baby bunny in the wild. It’s a little brown baby bunny hopping around like they do on TV, and he lets you get so close you could practically touch him. 

Delight is a teenager riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, one-handed because the other hand is clutching an old-school boom box, and on his head, perfectly balanced, is a basketball. 

Delight is the shockingly, stunningly yellow patch of Black Eyed Susans on 9th Street. 

Delight is the look on your eight-year-old’s face when, from all the way down the street, she sees a mini goldendoodle puppy approaching, and she knows that even though everything else ever invented has been cancelled, there is about to be some serious puppy petting, and it is imminent and it is everything. 

Delight is thinking you are out of string cheese when you  are particularly hungry one night at 1am, which is the new 11pm. You go to the fridge in a Hail Mary pass, because while 2020 has nearly killed the optimist in you, there’s a weak pulse of positivity still beating, and it doesn’t hurt to check. Lo and behold, hidden under the American Cheese slices and the moldy goat cheese, there is one string cheese left. And it is all for you. 

Delight is sitting on someone else’s stoop with your 13-year-old daughter, six feet away from passers-by, drinking cold bubble tea on a scorching day. You are sitting near the corner, and a car stops at the light, directly in front of you. “Shake Senora” is blasting from the car, which comes as a surprise because that’s not a song you can imagine anyone listening to of their own volition, but somehow, you and your daughter find you cannot help but bop your head along to the music. The driver of the car, head also bopping, notices you, and calls out a greeting and then the three of you head-dance together as you wait for the light to change.

Delight is when you are standing in the middle of your kitchen, first thing in the morning, already exhausted, and all three of your children are complaining because they want opposite things which seems like it’s impossible because a thing can only have one pair of opposites and yet, somehow, here you are. You are trying to drink a cup of coffee and not think about how you will be stuck in the house with three disgruntled children for who-knows-how-long, no end in sight, and you shout to no one in particular, “I am going to have a nervous breakdown.” And your teenage son stops complaining for a moment, considers this, and inquires, “Well, can it be prevented?” and you put your coffee cup down and laugh, because even though it’s not funny, it’s a thing to laugh at, and probably what it can best be described as is a delight. 

For so many reasons, for so many people, it’s a hard, hard time. And, too, there are these tiny moments of delight. I hope some flutter past you. I hope some alight on your window. 

Dispatches from Babyville: Foreverland

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , ,

Happy spring! This particular dispatch goes straight out to the kids. Here’s a sneak peek of my middle grade novel, Foreverland, in bookstores this April, from Macmillan Kids’ Imprint.

Fun fact: I am running away. To live in an amusement park. 

Related fact: I am not a runaway kind of person. Unless you’re talking about running away from a fight, or from awkward eye contact or something. Then, yes, totally, I’m your girl.

But if you made everyone in my sixth-grade class vote for “Least Likely to Run Away to Live in an Amusement Park,” they’d definitely pick me. If they could remember my name.

So it’s kind of unbelievable that I am here, standing directly in front of the Foreverland gates, in the middle of a Wednesday in the middle of the summer, when everyone thinks I’m at computer camp back in the city.

Life is full of surprises.

People say that like it’s a good thing, but honestly, the surprises are usually bad ones. At best, it’s 50/50. Of course, I’m a glass-half-empty kind of person—at least that’s what my mom tells me. So I might be wrong. But, just as an example, the suitcase I found this morning by the door—that was a surprise. And not the party-hat kind, that’s for sure.

This, here, my running away—I haven’t decided yet if it’s a good surprise or a bad one. Because I haven’t decided yet whether I’m really doing this. Yes, I took the Metro-North from Grand Central for an hour and a half, then the Foreverland shuttle bus to get here, but I haven’t really done anything wrong yet. I haven’t done anything I can’t undo.

I crane my neck up to look at the foreverland sign hanging in the middle of the gate. Underneath, in smaller letters, it says: where magic never ends! I look past the gate and see the sweep of coasters curving like mysterious symbols in the sky. I breathe in the tangy, plasticky smell of cotton candy from a nearby stand. If the color pink had a scent, this would be it. I hear the joyful shrieks of people riding high, cutting through clouds. It looks and smells and sounds like freedom and fun and, yes, maybe even magic. And it can all be mine . . . if I step inside.

Chances are, I’ll get caught right away. I mean, there are definitely people who could pull this thing off—fast-thinking, slick-talking criminal masterminds—but I am not one of those people. I panic when I order from the “12 and under” menu, even though I am twelve, because it feels like I’m just cutting it a little too close. This will never, never work.

I could just spin around, retrace my steps, take the train to the city, and be back before my parents get home.

Home.

Home.

I can think of about a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t take another step forward.

But I do.

I take another step. I walk through the gates. Right into Foreverland.

. . .

I head to the ticket booth, weaving around a swarm of little kids in mustard-yellow Camp Barrie T-shirts. The ticket line is really long. I knew the park would be busy, since it’s the middle of the day, but the park is even more packed than I’d expected. Which is great. Perfect, actually.

The bigger the crowd, the easier it is to get lost in.

And since getting lost in the crowd is one of my specialties, I’m all set.

Fun fact: I’m a wallflower.

Actually, I’m more like wall paint. I’m pretty sure flowered wallpaper gets more attention than I do.

I guess it’s because I’m quiet or maybe I have one of those faces that looks like a lot of other faces. Either way, lots of people forget they’ve met me. It’s hard not to be insulted. Nobody wants to be invisible.

Except for superheroes, as my ex-best friend Priya would point out when I complained about this. Spies, too.

“You’re looking at this all wrong,” she’d say. “Think of all the perks of blending in.”

This, right here, is one of those perks. When you’re running away to live in an amusement park, it comes in handy to have the kind of face people instantly forget.

The longer I wait in line, the more nervous I get. My heart’s racing and my stomach gets that familiar churning feeling.

I do the one thing that I know will definitely calm me down.

I write an acrostic poem.

I take my brand-new notebook out of my backpack, uncap a Flair pen, and scribble:

A

C

R

O

S

T

I

C

Then I fill it in:

A kind of weird way to

Calm down, but weird is

Relative. It’s not nearly as

Odd as that

Sixteen-year-old I read about who

Turns her fingernail clippings

Into sculptures, as a way to

Chill.

Acrostics are my superpower. I can turn any word into an acrostic in under ten seconds.

I inch forward in the line. The closer I get to the ticket window, the more my heart speeds up. 

Then it’s my turn. I slip my notebook into my backpack, take out my money, and walk up to a ticket window. A grandma-type lady with short gray hair is asking me, “How many tickets?”

“One,” I croak. “Youth. Ummm, ticket?”

Ticket Lady is peering at me over the tops of these glasses.

“How old are you?” Ticket Lady asks.

My heart is thundering in my chest and my palms are so clammy, my money’s getting damp. 

“Twelve?”

Here’s the thing: I’m not even lying. But I’m short for my age, so I know Ticket Lady will think I’m lying. And that’s enough to make me short-circuit.

Now Ticket Lady has taken her fingers off her keyboard, and she’s leaning over her counter to look at me, which is definitely a bad, bad sign.

Please don’t ask where my parents are, I think. Please don’t ask—

“Where are your parents?” Ticket Lady asks.

Fun fact: I am a terrible liar. The worst. Pinocchio is smoother than I am.

“My parents? They’re, um, coming?” I say. “In a few minutes?” All my answers come out like questions.

This happens to me all the time, and it drives my mom nuts. She’s always lecturing me: “When you make your voice go up, like this? It doesn’t command respect? You see what I’m saying?”

I do now. I see exactly what she’s saying because Ticket Lady, who is officially suspicious, is asking me, “So you’re unaccompanied?”

“No!” I say, way too loudly. “My parents are here, it’s just—I, um, I couldn’t wait to come in, and my toddler—I mean, my sister, who is a toddler—she had an accident . . . a, uh, urination accident? So they went back to the—to our car? Which is in the lot. The parking lot.”

It’s like my mouth has been hijacked. I have zero control over the words coming out of it. 

I put $47 in sweaty, crumpled bills on the counter and push them through the slot in the window.

Ticket Lady frowns, then looks behind me at the long line, which I am holding up. After a few seconds, she pulls my money through the window and stabs at a few keys on her keyboard, and then a tiny printer starts sputtering. My ticket.

I’m not the beaming type, but I beam.

“Have a magical day,” she says. Her lips are pursed tight, like she is still really skeptical, so I don’t think she genuinely wants me to have a magical day, but that’s okay. I’ll take it.

“Thanks!” I say. “You, too!”

I walk over to the turnstiles, where a bored-looking teenager with hair down to his shoulders takes my ticket. He inserts it into the ticket-eating machine, which gobbles it up, and then the light on the turnstile turns green.

“Have a magical day,” he mumbles, in a monotone.

And just like that, I’m in. I am in Foreverland. And it’s exactly how I remember it.

Support Park Slope Reader’s Go Fund Me to keep us providing FREE local content throughout this time.