Santa and all that . . . heading into Rabbit Year

December 28, 2010

Like you, we’re in the midst of the holidays, which have always been a collision of cultures for me.  My father was a Russian Jew and my mother was Irish Catholic, so we were raised to be Confused; we were one of those families with a menorah and a Christmas tree, and the tree had a Star of David on top.  This year I dug a menorah out of a storage box (it apparently smuggled itself to Shanghai) and it’s on a cabinet with the Buddha, across from the tree and the Nativity scene.  We lit candles one night, and the boys blew them out as they sang “Happy Birthday, dear Jesus”, so the traditions continue to spin in the cusinart as the generations roll on. Christmas tends to dominate, since it's much more fun decorating the tree than trying to remember my Hebrew.  Of course Allison’s family is a big part of the blend now; that’s why we left carrots for the reindeer, and made all those terrific cookies.  We had to tell Kai three or four hundred times that he couldn't wait up for Santa Claus, though he claimed to hear the reindeer on the roof, and the usual subconiferous chaos ensued on the big morning.  If this Christmas had a theme, it was Thomas the Train -- Kai and Keegan now have a train table full of tracks, with Thomas, Percy, Cranky, Harold, and the whole gang, not forgetting Sodor’s patriarch Sir Toppam Hatt, a wise man if their ever was one.  Wiser than me, if he really runs that railroad -- I’ll have to spent the next five years figuring out how to put it all together.

For anyone wondering about the modeling job, Keegan did have a shoot, and I’m posting pics as promised, but the clothing company (which must remain nameless here) didn’t have outfits that quite fit our plus-sized American baby, so we think he looks like he busting out of everything, hysterically.  The outfits seem like they were designed by an anime fan on crank who just lost a bet and was way past deadline, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

Speaking of Keegan, he is now walking, so besides bursting out of bad pastel jumpsuits, he’s also bursting with pride.  This kid truly has a gift for happiness.  I love my son Kai like nobody’s business, but at this point in his young life he’s mercurial.  He can be ecstatic on minute, and the next he may sound like wolverines are eating his pancreas because we can’t find his chuppie. Keegan’s disposition is constantly set to Sunny.  Go into his room in the morning, say hello, and he flaps like a penguin ready for takeoff.  Yes, I realize penguins can’t fly, but Keegan doesn’t, so don’t tell him.

Keegan and Kai both enjoy hiding, although they’re spectacularly bad at it, since they think that if they cover their faces they become invisible.  In fairness I will say that Kai’s technique has gotten a little more refined lately; he goes behind a curtain or a couch to hide sometimes, but he always shouts out “I’m hiding back here!”, so it’s not like we have to release the hounds or anything.  My real favorite is when he brings me with him to hide.  We get under a blanket together and he whispers to me, “We’re hiding, Daddy!”  All conspiritorial-like.  Sometimes he says, “Keegan can’t find us.”  But sometimes he’ll bring Keegan with us to hide, too.  Then he’ll say, “Mommy can’t find us”, even if Mommy is in Phoenix or India or someplace.

Our friend Marija is visiting from SF, which has been a great excuse to do some of the touristy things in Shanghai like visiting Jing’an Temple.  It’s a golden shrine to the Buddha literally in the shadow of one of the most commercial strips of real estate  this side of Vegas, with Calvin Klein billboards in full view of the monks -- a great synechdoche of modern China.  We also just got back from a day in Suzhou, a beautiful excursion from Shanghai, where we strolled in the classical gardens and realized the profound value of an afternoon nap.

Of course I don't expect anyone but the true blog junkies to go through all the links to Kai and Keegan making cookies or opening gifts on Christmas morning.  Enjoy them, Grammy!  For the rest of you, I’ll be back in the new year.  2011, by the way, will be the year of the Rabbit (as of February 3rd, anyway). Kai's already got a head start.  He made friends with a bunny that a barber across the street from us keeps in a cage on the sidewalk in front of his shop, and we slip him (the rabbit, not the barber) a carrot every time we go past.  I think that means it'll be a good year for us.

Be well, and keep in touch!

Thankful

I’m a little behind with this entry because I have not yet received the time machine I was promised (along with 35 million dollars) by a promanant and hihgly placed reprisentative of the Nigerian gouvernment at the ministeriel level, in a resent and greatly urgent and personel important email communicacion.  But hey, as soon as that bad boy arrives in the mail, you can bet I’ll jump right in and straighten out this little chronological glitch.  In the meantime . . .

This morning at about 7 o’clock I brought Keegan downstairs, set him in a highchair, and went back up for Kai.  I knew Kai would be OK for a minute because he was absorbed in reading Kai’s Amazing Alphabet Adventures, which features his own likeness 26 times (google Shutterfly, moms and dads, Christmas is almost here), and even if he did go to the stairs he’s perfectly capable of walking down them, and I was only going down for a second so there was no need to close the gate, which has an annoying, sticky locking mechanism anyway.  All the inner dialogue occurred well beneath the level of conscious awareness, of course – it’s not like I made an excel spreadsheet of pros and cons.  Also beneath the level of my awareness, but a little closer to the surface, was the vaguely recognizable voice, the voice of a mouse as it turned out, that I could scarcely hear from the kitchen as I whisked the Keegan/highchair combination package to a spot close enough to the dishwasher to play with the magnets, but not so close that he could manipulate the buttons, an almost impossibly small niche.  What was that toy?  Oh, that Mickey Mouse fire-truck-ambulance thing, the one with Mickey and Donald and the crackling radio sound effects, I didn’t know that was upstairs, Keegan loves that thing, just yesterday he was riding it while Kai tried to pull him out of it . . . and then I was climbing the stairs and there was Kai in the Mickey Mouse ambulance at the top smiling down at me as he cleared the edge, still exuberant and not yet terrified, and I reached up and out as he flew over the steering wheel and I barely managed with a quarter-inch to spare to get my hand between his porcelain cheek and the hard wooden step and stop his fall as the ambulance tumbled past us both to the landing and crashed against the wall. He was shaken and racked with sobs but they were sobs of fright and surprise, not of pain, and they subsided as I held him and rocked him and stroked his hair, while my imagination treated me to a full visualization of what had not happened but almost had, almost, so close that any momentary further delay to tickle Keegan or pick up a magnet would have meant a smashed face and probably much worse, certainly a trip in a real ambulance with no Mickey or Donald to share the ride.

Ten minutes later we were all in the kitchen making oatmeal, and Kai wanted the blue spoon, no Daddy the blue one not the green the blue THE BLUE!  This is parenting.  It’s now 7:10 am, nobody cares how tired you are, and you cannot find the blue spoon.  But your children are alive, alive, and you did not screw up too badly.  This time.

This job is making me believe more firmly in God.  Yes, thank you very much, I know all about Richard Dawkins and his crowd, who say that God is an antiquated delusion, but they are attacking a straw man and they are as overly literal as the fundamentalists against whom they inveigh.  My God is not an old man sitting on a cloud directing traffic.  My God is not interested in helping the San Francisco Giants win the World Series (although they did win the World Series, by the way, and this cannot be mentioned often enough!).  Nor did my God lead me up the stairs in the nick of time to catch my son this morning, necessarily.  My God, glimpsed always indirectly, around corners, and called (usually in the privacy of my own mind) the spirit of the universe, is the God of Serendipity, the God of Jung and Einstein and Kant, the God of Buddha (who didn’t believe in God) and Baha’u’llah (who believed in all the religions, not one).  Sacred texts like the Bible and the Koran and The Art of French Cooking do not express the literal truth; they express a metaphorical truth, which is, for lack of a better word, far cooler – that nature bats last, that the universe tends toward the good, and that nothing is ever destroyed but only transformed (a highly scientific as well as a deeply spiritual idea).

Besides, no matter how crazy anyone’s belief in religion may be or seem – and I mean ANYONE’S belief, be it burning bushes that talk, or parting seas, or magical carpenters, or special God-glasses buried in upstate New York, or L. Ron Hubbard-as-God, or atheism, or you name it – nothing, nothing could possibly be more outlandish, more unlikely, than the idea that on a speck of dust flying through the limitless cosmos at speeds beyond thought, in the thinnest tissue of gas, creatures have somehow evolved who can make pizza and reflect on their own mortality – and yet this is the apparent reality we are dealing with, people.  So let us not be too hasty to dismiss wild speculation.

We put up our Christmas tree early because they had them next to the checkout at Ikea, and there’s a manger underneath that we got at a charity bazaar with a little stuffed camel and a sheep and a donkey, bearded Chinese wise men -- well, everyone’s Chinese in this one, including a little baby Jesus the size of your thumb, and the Angel of the Lord, the one who (in the STORY, which is a METAPHOR, yes, of course, I know, but it’s a NICE STORY) tells the shepherds about the birth of Jesus.  So our Angel of the Lord is hanging from a low branch of the tree to simulate flight, and Kai said to me, “Look Daddy, she’s flying over the house!”  I asked him if meant the Angel.  He said, “No, her!” and he pointed to a photograph of my mother, who died in 2006 (all of our ornaments are little, framed family photos).  Just a sweet coincidence, of course.  I took down the photo of my mother to fix the string and rehang it, as it was a bit low, but Keegan took it from my hands and started to kiss it, over and over.  I know, just a sweet coincidence, a good story.  Does it express a metaphorical truth?  Anyway, I thought so.  And the next morning, Kai didn’t fall down the stairs.  Because angels are watching over us?  That wouldn’t be very intellectually rigorous of me to suggest, would it?  But regardless, I would like to say right here online, in front of God and everybody as the saying goes -- thank you Mom, and Thank you God.

I was going to write about buying our Thanksgiving turkey from a man named Bubba, and about the arrival of our container of STUFF!! (Yay hooray!!  We have a BED, and balsamic vinegar and Cliff Bars and sweaters and and and . . .), but it’s now 9:55 pm and my coma is just five minutes away. Oh well, I’m sure that will all make fascinating fodder for my biographer at some point in the distant future, and I can visit him and tell him all about it, just as soon as my Nigerian friend’s time machine arrives in the mail!  Unfortunately the Chinese postal system is notoriously undependable . . .

Photo links! [No videos this installment due to technical difficulties.  Please stand by . . .]  Here's the rough cut from a Christmas card session, and, at no extra cost to you the blogee, a few shots of the boys helping Mommy pack, and attempting to stow away.