Unexpected Bliss

I am elbows deep in dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, lost in my own thoughts while keeping time with Collective Soul, a CD played for the first time in what must be ages—loud, or loud in comparison to the usual silence. Two small hands reach around my waist from behind, squeeze in a little-boy hug with muscle to it. A hug that hangs on. I hadn't even heard my son enter the kitchen. Then his six-year-old voice tells me, a mom who feels on the edge much of the time: "You rock!" I do? I don't recall using that expression around my son, so I figure it's something he's picked up at school or at camp. This cool-kid slang invading my son's speech makes me smile. It's so unexpected. Also, I am instantly high on this praise. How did I earn it? Was it the ice cream base we just made together and put in the refrigerator to cool? Was it the music I put on? Or was it the promise of going outside once clean-up was finished so that we could squirt each other with water, chase around in the summer heat? Maybe all of the above. The memory is just hours old. We've added others in the course of the evening, too: finishing the raspberry ice cream (the best I've ever tasted; my son says it's because of "teamwork" and I don't doubt it), dancing in the living room, making a homemade pizza and tossing the dough in the air, shouting "Pizza Italiano!" for no reason other than to be silly. I wanted to write this down tonight, because although they're the most recent of memories—they may well be among the very best. Life is still unfolding, memories being made every minute.

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Tap Root Manuscript

Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...

Black Kids Read, Too

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...

Touch Typing

Between seventh and eighth grades (or between eighth and ninth?) the deal was this: if I wanted to take an art class in summer school, I had to take typing. So said Mom. Although I didn't mind being in an art studio soldering bits of stained glass together, the thought of staying inside, seated in front of a typewriter when I could see the sun in its beautiful blue sky out the window, was torture. Still, I sat there. Such is the suffering one will endure for art! I typed the home keys in order, hundreds of times: a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;. I stretched my fingers up for T and Y and down for B. I did pages of the prototype sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Yes, it has every letter of the alphabet in it at least once. I learned to automatically put two spaces after each period. (I have had a hard time undoing this habit, but a copy editor's job these days is often to make sure there is only one space following a complete sentence!) It's fair to say...

365 Memories

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