Dining with Squirrels

I say this with all due respect to the humans who love and support me.  Books are among my dearest friends.  I love, love, love reading .  Reading is the pleasure that has sustained me since childhood, the gift that saw me through years with young children when my radio sat silent and the cd player gathered dust.  Such a lot of dust.  Reading has survived where no other avocation could.  I used to love to cook, but the endless catering of family meals met with ennui has deprived me of pleasure in meal-making.   My favorite cartoon from the New Yorker last year:

I’m really a book addict if you must know.  I take a book to bed with me at night and pick it up as I rise in the morning.  I carry books with me in my purse just in case.  I suffered through one horrific morning this fall when my car was unexpectedly deprived of a tire and I didn’t have a book.  I studied a wall map of Grand Rapids in that hell-hole of a garage until I could have taken a second job as a taxi driver.  When I’ve finished a book and haven’t yet picked up another, I feel adrift.  Books anchor me.

I’m not sure why I’m even trying to express it because Nora Ephron said it best in her fanstinkintabulous book of essays I Feel Bad About My Neck.  I could just read the title over and over, it pleases me so.  But here is what she wrote about reading:

“Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter.  Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”

So you may have noticed the sidebar on this blog-thingie.  I’m not posting my reading for you, although I’m glad to share.  I’m posting it for me as a sort of diary.  My human friends know that my memory is a frail and unreliable thing, and I hate to think of all the books that have spent a day or two with me only to be lost to the swiss cheese of my brain. I’m going to post all of them and suffer your disdain when you realize I am not a discerning reader.  Voracious, yes.  Discerning, no.  I made a decision after college that I would read whatever I wanted and only what I wanted. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever done for me.  Nora’s right:  reading IS bliss.

Mom, referring to a book title:  “It’s called The Cleanest People On Earth.”

Lucy, without missing a beat:  “That’s not us.”

Lucy turned six last week.  And we experienced the full range of emotion, let me tell you.

She woke up on her birthday with light streaming out of her face, smile so wide, face taut with happiness.  This lasted all day, from the pink rice krispies for special school snack to pancakes for dinner, as requested.  She has quite the following, this girl, cards and packages and phone calls flowing in all day.  I imagine it’s a little like Gwyneth Paltrow’s life everyday.

This Sunday was the long-planned birthday party.  The theme was fish and butterflies.  The advertising industry is going to have to try a little harder with this one.  Perhaps a computer chip implanted at her next doctor’s visit.  She’s the one who wanted to be the sun for Halloween, but ended up wearing a Swedish folk costume supplied by Farmor.  She now owns 4 Webkinz and don’t think it’s not driving her brother insane that she refused to register them online, but insists on cuddling them and wrapping them in blankets and re-naming them daily.

Anyhow, fish and butterflies.  We had four of her friends come over, kept it small, very homespun.  Craft, snacks, games, present, cake, playtime, bye-bye.  And she was fine until the first guest arrived.  But when she refrained from making the craft, I felt a slight shift in barometric pressure.  Really nothing visible to the naked eye, but I had an intuitive shiver, like a dog before the earthquake actually heaves the buildings.

I won’t do a play-by-play, but she left the room crying twice and actually shrank away from the birthday cake.  I have photographic proof of this, Lucy cowering as Mommy and Daddy cheerfully blow out the candles on her cake.  Her blue fish cake.  To be clear, I had put those trick candles on it, the ones that won’t go out no matter how much you blow.  And that apparently involves a good bit of sparking on the candles part.  I wouldn’t recommend them.

She did perk up a bit after the cake, her love of sugar deep and abiding and unwavering in the face of birthday party stress.  And her dear little friends partied on like little social soldiers, even playing “princess and maids” for the last half-hour of the party.  You can guess who was the princess.

But that night, as Lucy was falling asleep, in that moment when children’s defenses are down and the truth of the day comes out [sadly, the same moment that parents’ defenses come down as well and the truth of how badly they want this child to just GO TO SLEEP is thrumming loudly in the room], in that dim and quiet moment, Lucy informed me that she did not want a party next year. Maybe just a friend to come over and play.  Yeah, kid, my thoughts exactly.

I don’t really feel like figuring it all out.  Yeah, expectations run high.  Having your birthday at Christmas time is nutty.  Being a hostess does not come naturally to a six-year-old, especially one who would prefer to merely be the Center of Attention, the Grand Poobah of the Party.  Whatever.  I did her — and myself — the favor of letting it go.

Party aside, she is now six and we love her wildly.  Watching her grow up is painful and glorious.  Kind of like her birthday.