Bayboh can climb up onto the kitchen nook benches all by himself.
This makes him very happy.
He can see out the window, "Birdie!" He can grab things off the shelves that have hitherto been unreachable! He can climb onto the pedestal table that barely stays upright with his weight on the edge!
He can be repeatedly snatched off said table by a safety-conscious but unfeeling adult, and deposited, wailing, back on the boring old floor.
Time-poor as I am lately, I don't have a lot of words today. I do have, though, a small interesting thing I learned, which I would have shared with my father, were he still here. At first, I was thinking I would have shared it with him because it was exactly the kind of thing he would have loved.
And then I thought, that's ridiculous. He used to circle back on his route home so as to have to do the biggest hills more than once.
But now I'm thinking again and although he was a dedicated cyclist himself, he was also an environmentalist. And a person fascinated by human ingenuity. So I think maybe he would have loved it, afterall.
Realistically, were he still alive, I probably would have emailed him the link. Well, realistically, I probably would have SMSed it, but since he died before any of us got iPhones, SMSing wasn't really a thing we did then, certainly not for sharing links.
And, realistically, my comment with the link wouldn't have been "I thought this was cool and I thought you would think it was cool, too, so I'm sharing it because I love you." It probably would have been something more snarky, something more like, "I might actually use my bike to get around if they'd install these on the big hills between me and everything I want to get to."
We might have had a bit of a conversation, then. He might have told me that if I'd just try, I'd eventually be able to do hills, even relish them. He might have guilted me about climate change and how could I say I cared if I wasn't willing to go through a little inconvenience to cut down on my car use? And I might have defended myself, held myself up as an example of a "normal" person who wants to bike more but has a fear of traffic (he was all for dedicated bike lanes and off-street paths, so that wouldn't have been controversial) and a fear of hills.
Or I might have started with that, explained that I was thinking about what stopped me from biking for actual transportation and realized it was pretty much those things, fear of cars and fear of hills, and that I idly wondered whether a thing like a ski lift could work for bikes. And that Google and Wikipedia had led me to this video and I'd been so pleased to have had the idea and within minutes found that such a thing exists!
From there, we might have speculated on why there's only one of these bicycle lifts in the world. Or maybe we would have thought about how it worked and how it could be improved. Or which would be the best locations for such a thing in my hometown.
You can have a lot of conversations with someone after they've died, except they all turn out to be conversations with yourself.
The first movie I ever saw in the theater was Annie and I was enchanted. I have a dim memory of enormous shiny glass doors at the entrance and I know I sang Tomorrow at the top of my lungs and in very poor tune for a long time afterwards. I named my teddy bear Molly, after my favorite orphan (she was cute and maybe my very young self recognized a kinship in brown pigtails that I would never have with red curls, no matter how much I idolized the main character).
That year, I picked out the box with the Annie mask and red vinyl smock for Halloween and wore it with joy for the next two years.
(Those vinyl smock costumes have a story behind them! I never knew!)
Then came Star Wars, which I watched obsessively on VHS, always demanding that mom fast forward through the scary part with the Sand People before she could leave me alone. I wanted the Halloween box of Luke Skywalker that year, but they were sold out, so I took Darth Vader. And spent the next several years perfecting a Vader-worthy breathing style by pressing my tongue against the sharp edge of the tiny mouth hole. I felt it gave a very convincing slurpy rasping effect.
At some point, maybe when I decided I could handle the Sand People scene without fast forwarding or adult company, I got to watch the other two movies. But they were way too scary and I did not love them. I spent most of first grade terrified that the floor would open up below me and I'd come up a frozen block of carbonite.
I did love Ewoks, though, and the fake fur teddy bear costume my mother actually sewed for me (I think I helped fashion the head wrap, using a rag of a thin bathrobe in a surprisingly appropriate color) took me happily through most of the rest of my costumed Halloweens.
So I found myself on the first Sunday morning of this year, when we finally had tickets and a babysitter, briefly contemplating an attempt at Leia buns in honor of the occasion. Let's be honest, though. We're lucky we both got showers before handing off two excited kids and a cranky snotty baby (discovered that evening to have a double ear infection) and making our escape.
Hmm. That lead in was longer than I'd intended. This was supposed to be a quick post where I tell you what I thought of the new movie.
It was fun! I loved the casting. I can totally imagine little-kid me being even more excited to be Rey for Halloween (especially with how cool and not-vinyl Halloween costumes are these days) than I was to be Luke or Vader. (Except that little-kid me would have been way too terrified by this movie to even get past the third or fourth scene, much less fall in love with it. Even adult me kept wishing they’d just cut half the action sequences and let us have a little rest.) As an old fan of the original, the nods back to that one were fun (especially because the audience so obviously loved them; I slightly regret that we didn’t see it closer to the release, when I know the crowds were even more excited.)
Grown-up me loved even-more-grown-up Leia the best, though (and Carrie Fisher has definitely been the best thing in the little press I've read). How often in the movies do you see a woman her age (and a mother, even! and with some grey hair!) portrayed as commanding, beautiful, complex, and warm, all at the same time? I also totally want to be able to do my hair in that nice crown-braid thing she had going on.
For an interesting take on other aspects of the movie, both positive and negative, I’d definitely recommend the Feminist Frequency review.
A good Lego build is a beautiful thing. The cleverness and care of the design, the perfect clarity of the instructions, the satisfying smooth-but-secure connections... Mr. P was very generous and let me "help" on a few parts of his Christmas present.
The Airjitsu Temple
That night he told me, "It was really fun watching you do Lego for the first time ever, Mom. With practice, you could be really good!"
This thing is amazing. It even has a shadow puppet theater built into the basement that lights up and moves when you turn the crank! I believe that's what Mr. P refers to as a "play feature". (Thanks, YouTube.)
I'm really curious to see how long this one stays in essentially its current condition. It will be very tempting to cannibalize for parts!
