May 30 2013

In-Flight Etiquette

She side-stepped through the aisle with a young child in one hand, another child in her arms, both her shoulders burdened with multiple bags: a purse, a carry-on, a diaper pouch, a bag of toys and books. The standing child, maybe four years old, stared at me with round, brown eyes. The carried child was kicking wildly and had already started to fuss. The woman inched toward her designated seats just as these precariously perched bags fell to her elbow and the child in her arm began to cry.
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Like many people, I roll my eyes when a family with kids comes down the aisle, willing them to continue past my row and far beyond to the nether regions of the plane. A beat later I remind myself what it was like, when Short-pants and Buddy-roo were young babies and we toted them with us to the states to see family or to go on some wild adventure. Short-pants took her first consecutive steps – becoming an official toddler – in the Charles de Gaulle airport lounge while waiting to board a flight to Johannesburg. De-facto and I were determined that having small children wouldn’t hamper our travel habit, so we were those parents, the ones dragging their children on flights to far-flung places, the source of many eye-rolls by many other passengers, I’m sure.

That’s how our girls learned to be good travelers. But even the best-behaved children reach a threshold on an airplane. I survived many long flights because of the kindness of strangers who’d entertain one child while I took the other back to the bathroom, or who just played peek-a-boo for five minutes so I could manage a few bites of my dinner. This is why, after I permit myself the inward groan with the rest of the passengers, I swallow hard and offer up a big smile that’s meant to entertain the child and reassure the parent. Or, as I did on last week’s flight when I discovered the woman with the two children in tow was seated behind me, I stand up and offer to help stow bags or distract the kids while the parents, already visibly exasperated, settle in.

~ ~ ~

The man sitting directly in front of me pushed his seat back so abruptly that my papers and books fell to the floor and I am certain that had my laptop been open on the tray, it would have snapped in half. My belongings spilled beneath the seat and across the aisle. He was oblivious to the chaos he’d created. I stood up to gather my things and tapped him on the arm.

“Sir,” I said, “You have every right to put your seat back, but it would be nice if you’d turn around and check with me first, so I could be prepared.”
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His grunted apology was half-hearted. But I’d won the respect of the passengers around us and after this I noticed several lovely social exchanges occurring, brief but civilized acknowledgments and non-verbal negotiation of your-space-and-mine prior to seats pushing back to a reclining position.

If I ran an airline I would make etiquette part of the flight attendant’s on-the-runway security announcements. I’d include a segment on how to share space in the overhead luggage racks, and how to remove bags from those compartments in a non-hazardous manner. It would include where to put your elbows and how to share a row with other passengers. It would also include extremely specific instructions about make eye contact with the passenger in the seat behind you before pushing your seat into a reclining position. I might also add this: Be nice to parents traveling with children; they feel worse about their crying child than you do.

(I’d also tell the pilot and the purser to be short and sharp with their intercom interruptions, especially if it has to happen in two languages. I don’t need a rundown of the duty free boutique specials, nor do I care to hear a long-winded explanation of our flight path. Just shut up please so I can get back to my in-flight movie.)

~ ~ ~

An Australian friend used to make a yearly trip back and forth between Perth and Paris with her young children. Once she and her husband were assigned three seats together and one solo seat ten rows further back. She’d asked a passenger if he would switch seats so they might sit in two pairs, one adult with one child. Her offer was an aisle seat for an aisle seat, and still, the young man refused to move.
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“Look at me.” She spoke politely, but insisted he make eye contact with her. “I understand that you don’t want to move, and that’s okay. But someday, if you ever have children of your own, I just want you to remember me.”

Ten minutes later he came up and tapped her on the shoulder and agreed to change seats.

I relish the lengthy, quiet privacy my trans-Atlantic flights permit, and I am so glad I don’t have to travel with toddlers anymore. But I open my heart to parents enduring long flights with their young children, and do my best to support them, even if it’s only with a smile to convey that I am not annoyed, even if maybe I would prefer not to have screaming kids nearby. It occurred to me too late on the last flight – but it might come in handy next time – I could help one of these frenzied moms by offering to take her fussing child on my lap, and let him kick away to his heart’s delight, right against the seat back reclined just in front of me.


May 12 2013

Don’t Knock ‘Em

The two of them sat the table trading knock-knock jokes while I chopped vegetables, listening to them laugh uproariously at their so-called punch lines. I’ve heard them telling each other these corny jokes for years. Or as the recipient of the dreaded “knock-knock” command, I have always replied, as a dutiful mom, with a cheerful and curious, “who’s there?”

What surprises me most: that so many of these terrible knock-knock jokes are the very same ones that I used to hear and repeat when I was exactly their age:
chaplin
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Boo.
Boo who?
Why are you crying?

(I’m not saying it’s a good joke. I’m just saying it’s stood the test of time.)

Short-pants and Buddy-roo ran through at least a dozen knock-knock jokes – their full repertoire – and then they started making up their own. Like this one:

“Knock-Knock?”
“Who’s there?”
“Hog.”
“Hog who?”
“Hogwarts. Get it?”

Both girls doubled over in laughter.

I try my best to be encouraging to my children, especially when it has to do with cultivating a sense of humor, a necessity for surviving to and through adulthood. But this one crossed the line. The joke was lame. Somebody needed to explain this to them.

“Guys,” I said, in that I’m-about-to-tell-you-something-you-need-to-know voice, “I’ve always chuckled at your knock-knock jokes, because it’s charming, the way you deliver them. But you’re approaching the age right when you might want to refine them just a bit, to make sure they’re funny.” I went on to describe the nature of humor, how it’s based on a play on words with a surprise element, or in the case of a knock-knock joke, a clever dual meaning of a word or phrase with an unexpected outcome.
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I looked up from my cutting board to see both of them staring at me. I could see that my suggestion that their humor wasn’t up to par was a serious blow. The corner of Buddy-roo’s mouth started to quiver, just moments ahead of a grand wail and the rush of tears. Short-pants regarded me with disbelief. Another #fail for mom, like the Santa spoiler, I’ve managed to make a mess of things when all I thought was doing was offering a sound piece of counsel.

It brings to mind a story De-facto tells about one of his college friends, a woman who tells it like it is and also happens to be athletically adept. Driving her sons and their friends home from what had been a particularly pathetic soccer game, she overheard them congratulating each other on the fine plays they’d made. She endured their reciprocal adulation until she could take it no longer, at which point she railed into them, with specificity, about all the shortcomings that had resulted in their loss, a rant that started out with, “You guys are not that good.” I could picture her looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing their stunned faces, called out by their mother for their exaggerated pride.

I’m all for encouraging my children and developing their self-esteem. I try to be deliberate with my praise, pointing out the specific things I like about the pictures they draw, and the parts of the stories they tell that tickle or touch me. I try to praise the effort more than the result. I use as much appreciative inquiry as I can, and I try to pose concerns to them in the form of a question that might inspire them to to correct and improve. (Okay, sometimes I just plain yell at them to pick up their dirty clothes or hang up their wet towels, because the third try at “how might you put your clothes away?” approach didn’t achieve the desired results.) All this to say I try to take a positive route with my children, especially about sensitive errors. Example: to Short-pants when she’s practicing her viola, “You got the rhythm perfect that time, great. This time, listen to be sure you’re playing in tune as well.” All delivered with you-can-do-it assurance.
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Sometimes, though, you have to just say it like it is. I think we do a disservice to our children if we don’t give them direct feedback, or if we sugar-coat it so much that they don’t learn how to receive criticism that isn’t softened at the edges. I’m not suggesting a humiliating attack – though that might feel satisfying to deliver – but a straightforward appraisal is good practice for the real world. Not everyone gets a medal, and if you don’t get one, you need to be able to hear – and learn from – the reason why.

Short-pants’ expression of shock and surprise morphed into one of feigned consternation, a look she gives me when we’re teasing each other or she’s pretending to be mad at me.

“How about this one?” she taunted, “Knock-knock.”
I felt compelled to oblige. “Who’s there?”
“Leaf.”
“Leaf who?”
“Leaf me alone if you don’t like my jokes, will ya?”


May 5 2013

In our Nature

I stuck my head out the bathroom window to see the girls playing in front of the house. Buddy-roo was prancing in the grass as Short-pants paced in a circle with her hands up in the air. They talked to each other in exaggerated voices, though occasionally Buddy-roo would assume her normal tone to bark an order at her sister, directing the theater of their play. Or the other way around, as each took turns in and out of role, suggesting the next step of their game, pure improvisation as children do best.

I watched for several minutes, looking down on them from the second floor of our country house, observing the choreography of their make-believe, catching pieces of dialogue.

“…and now my wings are growing back.”

“Penelope’s mechant attempts to block your entry to the sacred circle have failed, thanks to my powers.”
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I could not contain a pollen-induced sneeze – spring in the country – and both their dirty blonde heads turned upwards toward the upstairs window in which I was perched.

“Mama!” This shout came in tandem, with glee. Even after just 45 minutes, it’s like they haven’t seen me in days.

“We’re playing fairies!”

“Look at my wings!”

I listened to the convoluted explanation of their play, which to be honest wasn’t that interesting but their animated exuberance deserved my attention. It was impressive, this lengthy and specific scenario, conjured up from nothing except the wildflowers bloomed in the tall wet grass on a partly sunny morning. That’s one of the reasons I love coming to the country house; there is no better stimulant for their imagination then a little bit of nature.

Not that they don’t tumble into their imagined skits and games at home in Paris, but here in the country it happens more often, for longer and with greater detail and depth. They disappear for hours in the fields and forest, running back into the house and throwing themselves against me, their clothes and hair cold and fresh from being out in the springtime air.

~ ~ ~

There are lilacs across the road, in full bloom this week. The bush is tall and unruly; we never quite get to pedicuring the trees and bushes on that part of our property. The dark lavender flowers look like a fireworks display gone awry. I stand at the kitchen sink, washing the breakfast dishes and smiling at the purple blooms. My mother had a lilac bush, pruned regularly and evenly, that tickled the posts of the front porch of her house. It was, along with a bed of daffodils near the road and row of peonies on the side yard,lilacs_up the announcer of spring. These early flowers preening in their finest glory on that first sunny May morning, when we’d step outside and see and smell that spring was fully upon us and the summer was at its heels.

Just looking at the sloppy lilac tree across the road puts me instantly on my mother’s porch and back into my own childhood, when I would run off beyond the farms and the woods behind our house, out of her sight, into my own world of fairies and forest friends, conjured up by the best playmate in the world, mother nature.

Many years ago, I took one of my elegant Parisian friends to visit my mother. She was charmed by the country surroundings and wanted to know what my childhood was like. Instead of telling her, I showed her the circuit that used to occupy me for hours: from the back porch, crossing the side yard, beyond the pond, through an apple orchard and a vineyard, into the forest and back out into a clearing around a large pillbox-shaped water reservoir, against which you could throw stones to simulate the sound effects from Star Trek. Then back into the woods and down a steep slope to cross the creek and climb up again to Wagon Wheel Springs, named so by my neighbors and I because of a wooden-spoked wheel they lay in the debris nearby, through a field of tall grain, arriving on the other side of our house and landing, happily, on the stoop of our front porch. Last month, after reading one of my posts about walking alone on the Camino, this same friend wrote me a message remembering that visit and our hike through my childhood.

“It must be in your nature,” she said.

~ ~ ~

“I’m not going to be back for a while,” Short-pants ran into the kitchen, breathless, spitting the words out quickly. “I heard a bird calling my name.”

She dashed out the door and disappeared. I had my hands in mozzerella and ricotta so I couldn’t move to the window to see which way she’d run to answer the call of her avian suitor. I realized I didn’t need to know. In Paris, I like knowing which direction she’s gone. In the city, she has destinations. She walks to school, she walks home. She walks to the boulangerie to get a baguette and back. There’s a start and a finish, and she’s still young enough that I need to monitor both points. Here in the country she has her own forest and several fields, a big lane to run down and baby sheep to visit and birds to answer to. I don’t need to know which direction she’s run because they’re all good.

~ ~ ~
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Yesterday friends visited for lunch. They came with a pack of kids. We were eleven around the tables set up out back, on the terrace of stones, in the sun. Four adults were outnumbered by kids of ages ranging from 5 to 12, the youngest among them a set of twins. In Paris this would be an uncomfortable guest list. At the country house, you just pull out another table, add another place and make an extra quiche. After the meal, the kids escaped from the table and disappeared into field and forest. The only time we had to involve ourselves in their play was to caution them, when all seven were at the same time swinging, climbing or perched on our rickety old swing-set. From the table where we lingered with a bottle of rosé – an announcer of summer here in France – we could see that the metal structure might topple at any moment. A word of warning and the children scattered themselves to other places in the yard and beyond, the swing-set only one of a dozen places for them to run and play.

Yet another reason why we have a country house: so I can take another wedge of cheese and refill my glass of wine, in the company of good friends, with my feet in the grass and the sun on my back, while my children occupy themselves, elsewhere. This, I guess, is in my nature, too.