Maternal Dementia

An unusual cold spell and snowfall in France have not deterred us from our weekend social calendar. “Party on!” is the holiday mantra. We even ventured out of our arrondissement to attend a brunch hosted by friends who live just outside Paris. When the suburban-line RER train emerged from the tunnel we were surprised with a white cover of snow blanketing the ground. Our bravery – going beyond the city limits – was rewarded with this classic Christmas vista.

Our hostess, a friend, colleague and maman créative, also blogs about mothering. Her forte is inspiring creativity in her children. She practices what she preaches; just behind the Christmas tree was a mind-map she made with her children, a group exercise in deferring judgment as they brainstormed on their decorations for Noël. She and her partner have a family recomposée with four children, so adding Short-pants and Buddy-roo made for six kids. It was a big crew. Talk about bravery.

Except they all got on marvelously. It helps that their new apartment as a “kids wing” so there were two rooms down a long hall where they could tumble into private play. When the first course was served, they all came when called and seated themselves around the “kids table.” After devouring their servings of foie gras in oven-baked brioche (oui, ahem) they scrambled back into the bedrooms and picked up where they’d left off. We took our time finishing the sauterne.

While the second course was being dished up, one of the children was made envoy to the main room, touring our table and placing a ticket in front of each adult, pronouncing proudly the upcoming event, “Un spectacle!”

Un spectacle. Words that every parent receives with pride and horror. Great! There’s going to be a show. Shit! There’s going to be a show.

Even the most creative mothers (and fathers) harbor a deep hidden dread of the never-ending spectacle. My parents once sat through a laborious production of Christmas Around The World, a two-plus hour exposé of holiday customs in something like 56 countries. This must be a parental rite of passage.

Somebody taller than five feet suggested that the show should start after dessert. That gave us the main course, the cheese and the tarte tartin – and all accompanying beverages – to fortify us for the performance.

I tried to be discreet. When the kids joined us for the next course, I called Short-pants over to the table to remind her of something we’ve learned to practice in our spectacles at home. “Don’t forget,” I told her, “A good spectacle has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” De-facto agreed, “And you want it to be short. Always leave people wanting more.”

“And don’t forget the Salut!” Wisdom from the maman créative, “that’s the most important part.” Of course. Play up the taking of bows at the end. That is why she’s a creative mother.

The production, we could tell from the title, was the story of a discouraged caterpillar and a mocking butterfly. At least there would be some tension, necessary in good theater. The challenge was it had to be performed in the dark, which meant being staged in the only room in the apartment that had no window, the bathroom. After dessert, we four adults were squeezed in the shower and beside the washing machine, hoping that our advice about theatrical structure and brevity had been taken into consideration.

The spectacle involved puppets and flashlights and softly spoken snippets of French I could neither hear nor understand. But when the final lines were pronounced and bows were taken, I applauded wildly. As one does.

That was yesterday. Today Ricky’s in our kitchen cooking the Christmas goose (you have to say it with a British accent). In a rare Martha-Stewart moment, Lucy made knife-rests out of cinnamon sticks for the table. The girls are holed-up upstairs, cooking up something of their own; perhaps there’s a spectacle is in the making? No sign – yet – of that big doll, but I’m sure she’s gonna show.

One last Cuba moment that seems worth the telling:

On the last night of the conference in Havana, there was a gala reception featuring the Tropicana Cabaret dancers on a stage constructed in the courtyard of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Everyone got all dolled up. Papaya-champagne cocktails we placed in our hands as we entered the museum. A swarm of servers in black-vested uniforms hounded us with trays of hors d’oeuvres.

The music was live and loud, the spotlights were hot and blinding, the dancers were costumed in wild colored giant plumes (and that’s about it). I’m glad I got to see a few numbers; it seemed appropriate to sample this part of Havana’s decadent history. But my colleagues and I all agreed, we’d rather go to a club where we could dance, too. And we were hungry, because the hors d’oeuvres, though annoyingly abundant, left us wanting, um, something else.

We left the museum and walked down the street hoping to make our way to a restaurant, a paladar that I’d been to earlier in the week. We happened by the entrance to the Bacardi Building, an historic art-deco skyscraper. I remembered my mother telling me that her father’s office had been in this building, so I stopped to take a photograph. The door was open and it was light in the lobby, so I crossed the street to peek inside. A guard stood beside the curved reception desk, which was marked with an ornate capital letter B. He gave his permission for me to take pictures, and beckoned me inside.

While I was framing shots of the elegant old post box and the decorated elevator doors, he asked if I’d like to go up to the top of the tower of the building. By now my three colleagues had found me in the lobby and they, too, were admiring the marble interior. Of course we wanted to see the tower. Another guard went to fetch a key, and motioned us toward the elevator. We rode all the way to the top floor and then climbed four more flights of narrow, jangling, metal, spiral staircases until we got the uppermost balcony of the building.

There it was, the view: the nightscape of Havana. The wind was a warm blanket on my bare shoulders, and the rows of dull streetlamps blurred as they webbed out to the edge of the city, beyond my view. It was one of those moments, where you stop to consider where you are and why. I knew I was privileged to be able to visit Havana, but I was also aware of the privilege my mother’s family enjoyed when they lived there. They were expatriates, I suppose much like we are expatriates here in France, borrowing someone else’s culture to live out a dream.

Returning to the street level, I thought about Grandpa, and how he must have stood in that elevator hundreds of times. Of course the building has been renovated since he worked there six decades ago, yet it appears as though nothing significant had been changed, just a fresh coat of paint. It probably looks much the same as it did then. He must have come through that lobby every morning and every night. He walked on these floors, long ago, ages before he even knew me as the little impish grandchild who begged him always to “itch my back.”

It made me think of going to my father’s office when I was a little. It was such an other world place. I felt important when I was there, even if I was just sitting on the polished wooden chairs in his waiting room looking at the rows of leather law books lining the shelves. It smelled like cigarettes and serious business.

Later I wrote to my mother, to tell her about my impromptu visit to her father’s office building. She emailed back:

When I was little and my father worked sometimes on a weekend, I would go to the office with him. I loved having so many pencils at my disposal and a pad of paper that said Old Time Molasses Company on it. I felt so important, like a secretary! And also when I went to the dentist on another floor of the building, I would always go up to his office and say hello.

What is it about being little and going to your father’s or mother’s office that makes you feel important? Short-pants and Buddy-roo don’t know that pleasure. The only office De-facto and I go to is a virtual one, meeting our colleagues around a digital conference table, video-shots of our heads bobbing up and down on bright-colored avatars. But that’s another post.

It reminds me how many memories that we keep are associated with where they took place. When I’m in my childhood home – and I’m lucky enough to still go home to that house – I’m haunted by the stories of my past. But even if you can’t go in to the house or dorm or school or office that used to be
yours, just being in close proximity can conjure up a cascade of feelings and facts that are otherwise forgotten. But what if you can’t go back to touch those places again? My mother’s family left Cuba in 1948, not unaware of the political unrest in the country, but still, a decade before the revolution. They never expected that they wouldn’t be able to easily return to see the touchstones of their life there. How many memories, I wonder, are locked up in all those unvisited places?

His name was Javier. His business card had a picture of a taxi on it – a shiny new cab that looked nothing at all like the one he actually drove. I suppose I could have taken any cab, but I wanted him, the grumpy cab driver who’d slowly been drawn into my little pilgrimage. By the time he’d returned me to the hotel after visiting my mother’s old school, we were chatting away about her life in Cuba in the 1930s and 40s. He’d volunteered to drive me again, if I wanted to go back to the school, or anywhere else.

On my first day in Havana I spent hours walking around my mother’s old neighborhood. She’d given me the coordinates of two houses her family had lived in, both within blocks of each other. One of them, a house that looked out over the ocean on la primera avenida, had been torn down and replaced. I took several pictures of the view from the corner where the house would have been, imagining a younger version of my mother, standing there herself, watching the wild waves and the windy palm trees.

The other house they’d lived in was a few blocks inland and a few blocks over, just south of Avenida Quinta, the main avenue for traffic into the center of Havana. It must have been a posh address way back when – maybe it still is. Some houses are in various states of disrepair, but many of the homes are truly grand. Among them, embassies or residences belonging to consulates of the countries that have diplomatic ties with Cuba. This was something I saw all over Havana, the contrast of things abandoned and things restored, out of step but strangely at ease with each other, side by side.

She’d described this house as “the second one in from the southwest corner, with a patio and an iron gate.” I found what was technically the second house from the corner; it was mammoth, almost Soviet in construction. But it had what might have once been a patio (now filled with shrubbery) and an old iron gate.

Connected to it was a one-story, modern structure that seemed to be well trafficked, with a café and a small boutique. I walked in and found a friendly-looking black-vested waiter. I explained, in my faltering Spanish, that I was looking for the house my mother had lived in more than 60 years ago and how she’d told me it was the second house in from the big avenue. “Es aqui?”

He took me by the hand and walked out to the street. (This happened often, if I asked a local for directions, they’d drop what they were doing and offer sincere assistance; I encountered many acts of kindness in Cuba.) He explained that the parcel of land on which this cluster of buildings was constructed was once a garden. He escorted me down the street, pointing out three older, more traditional houses. One of those, he said, was probably the house I was looking for.

Well of course this made sense. It didn’t seem right that my mother’s old house would have been such a fortress, a cold cement building that now housed the offices of a government agency. As I walked down the block, it occurred to me that any one of the refurbished, newer-looking homes might have been raised on what had once been someone else’s garden, so that that my mother’s house could be further down the street than I’d expected.

Which is why I’d taken pictures of every house on that side of the street and sent them to my mother, via a Picasa link. The Internet was surprisingly accessible from my hotel, with a only a few exceptions: the emails I sent to a some select people, including her, mysteriously disappeared into the ether. My sister somehow could receive my messages without hindrance, so she acted as the go-between, forwarding the link. After studying the pictures, my mother wasn’t completely certain, but she thought one of them might be the house: an old dirtyish brown one with a balcony across the front.

Armed with that information, I called my taxi driver on the morning of my last day in Havana, and asked him if he’d be willing to do some driving and waiting while I went to explore what might have been my mothers childhood home.

By now the street where she’d lived was familiar to me, I’d passed by it dozens of times going to and from the center of Havana during the last week. Javier drove up in front of the brown house and stopped the car. “Buena suerte,” he said, out the window, as I was crossing the street. He was wishing me luck.

I started by taking more photographs, which attracted a bit of attention. When people came out of the house to see what I was up to; I asked their permission to continue. Nobody objected. One man with a friendly, round face introduced himself to me, his name was Miguel, and offered to take me inside the house. Three small children stood on the porch stoop. I knelt down and asked if it was okay to take their picture. They were unafraid, and very polite. I told them that I thought my mother may have grown up in this house, in their house, many years ago. “¿Se duerme en mi cama?” No, I don’t think she slept in your bed, I answered. We all giggled.

The house had surely been the home of one family many years ago, but now it was partitioned into many tiny apartments. I was moved by the poverty of one apartment; then another beside it was comfortably appointed. The common walls in the hallway were chipped and aged, the paint had come off unevenly, leaving a mosaic of colors. Miguel ushered me up the stairs and into an apartment that smelled of onions cooking. An older man, caramel skinned with gray hair, was hunched over on a single burner on the front balcony. He invited me to stay for lunch. I declined by pointing down to the street and waving at Javier, who was waiting for me in the car. He waved back.

Miguel told me the name of a family who had lived in the house, long ago, but it didn’t match my mother’s first or maiden names. I still couldn’t be certain that she’d lived here. But just in case, I snapped as many pictures as I could. I moved around to the side of the house, where a long driveway led to a screened-in porch with two dogs inside. I walked down the driveway to see what the back yard might have looked like, and a young woman came out and greeted me. Again, I was invited inside. Her mother sat on a couch and patted the chair beside her, motioning for me to sit. She’d known someone who lived in the house before, but the names she rattled off were nothing like my mother’s. I wasn’t getting a confirmation from anyone; I couldn’t be sure that this was the house.

When I explained that my mother was one of three daughters, and I named the three girls, the older woman got very animated. “¡Sí, sí, sí!” Yes, she remembered hearing about a family with three sisters. They lived two doors down the street, in the house that was now painted blue. I felt like a detective! At last, the clues were coming together. This house wasn’t my mother’s, but now I knew which one she had lived in.

I chatted with the women a while longer. They tried to tell me stories, I did my best to understand their clipped, Cuban accents. I took more photos. I said gracias no less than one hundred times. When I left, we embraced.

I nearly ran down the street to the blue house, which is now an office-storefront for a cellular phone company. This would have been the second house on the street. The big cement fortress had probably replaced what had once been the first house on the street, with its ample garden extending all the way to Avenida Quinta.

I had a picture of the house from an earlier visit, but it had been taken at sunset. It was hard to see. I wanted to at least get a shot of the outside with full daylight. A uniformed security guard eyed me as I raised my camera. He put his hands up to block me from taking a picture. Javier got out of the taxi and came over to help me, to explain. The guard was adamant. No photos.

But it didn’t matter, really. At least I knew which house was hers; now I had a visual bookmark for all the stories my mother has told me about her childhood.

“¿Y ahora?” Javier wanted to know where to go next. I told him the address of the other house she’d live in, the one on la primera avenida. I wanted to go back one more time.

We pulled up to the corner and parked. Instead of staying in the car, as was his custom, Javier got out and followed me across the street. We stood on the sidewalk, looking out at the water. I took out my camera. He asked if I wanted him to take a picture of me.

“No, gracias,“ I said.

I’d just wanted to take one more photograph, one last shot of that short stretch of beachfront, looking out at the ocean, so I could show Short-pants and Buddy-roo a view that their grandmother might have had while growing up on the beautiful, haunting, island of Cuba.

Whoever said “it’s the journey and not the destination” wasn’t in the car with me yesterday.

We were slow out of the gate. The ritualized closing of the country house takes more time in the fall (heading into winter) than in the warmer months of summer. The refrigerator, as usual, is emptied, defrosted, wiped and left unplugged, open to the air. The floor is swept. The dishes and glassware are washed, stowed and covered. The water is not only turned off, but in anticipation of the cold it is siphoned from the toilets and the hot water tank, to avoid the catastrophe of frozen, bursting pipes. Electricity shut off. Doors and shudders latched. It’s a frenzy of cleansing and storing activity. Then finally, en route.

The back roads from our little village to the highway are bucolic and picturesque, but their meandering makes for uncomfortable stomachs. Buddy-roo lost her breakfast about fifteen minutes into the ride. I am smart enough to bring a few plastic bags – her car sickness is also a ritual event – but not smart enough to check those bags for holes before tucking them into the pocket of the car door. The little pink plastic sac I shoved under her precious, ashen face just before she puked had a teeny tiny hole in the bottom, which became big very quickly, dumping most of the contents of the bag into her lap. Who knew how fast I am out of the seat-belt? Or that I could be a contortionist, reaching around the front seat, wiping up the mess with the four paper towels left on the roll? Oh, happy drive.

De-facto had the idea to stop at a giant Decathalon store just before the on-ramp to the highway, for what was promoted as a quick errand. When I finally found him, he had set up house in roller blade aisle. Short-pants and Buddy-roo had each been fitted with a pair, and they were shuffling around, finding their legs like baby foals, while he examined roller-blades in his own size. Of course, each pair that he tried on required a test drive. He’d skate circles around the girls, their giggling filled the store despite the height of its hyper-sized ceiling. (He didn’t intend to buy them for the girls, by the way, he was just giving them a quick lesson, gearing up for the winter skating season, and keeping them occupied while he contemplated his selection.)

How hard is it to select a pair of roller-blades? Apparently not so easy when you’re deciding whether or not to splurge for the super-geared-up sexy pair or just go for the solid they’ll-work-anywhere ones. While he weighed his options, I explored the store and got sucked into the vortex of early Christmas shopping. Which meant the additional game of get-through-the-checkout-without-anyone-seeing-what’s-in-your-cart, which I managed to win, but without any help whatsoever from the very un-elf like cashier.

I should have known we were in trouble when De-facto whispered the forbidden word: “McDonalds.” It’s not at all in his nature, stopping to eat at a rest stop. He’s more of what-can-we-scrap-together-from-the-fridge-and-eat-in-the-car kind of road tripper. So while the peanut-butter-and-Nutella sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and sliced cucumbers aged in another bag (no holes in this one) at the foot of the passenger’s seat of the car, he ordered up a few super-size-me meals and we even sat in the restaurant to eat our fries. (It is absolutely in my nature, to eat fries.)

Our little pause would have been an exotic change of pace if the rest of the drive had been business-as-usual. But it wasn’t. On three different stretches of the A20, we inched along in the cruelest of single-lane traffic, passing through miles of orange-coned construction zones without the sight of even a single hammer. That meant three distinct opportunities to spend 45 minutes traveling the distance that normally takes about five minutes. And
then, when we were so close to home, with what should have been less than ½-hour to go, we found ourselves nose to tail-light with thousands of other idiots like us, stuck in rush-hour traffic during a (seasonal) train strike. The journey from our country house to Paris should have taken just over four hours. We were in the car for nearly eight hours.

The girls, it must be said, were marvelous. Napping. Reading. Coloring. Singing. The computer came out and movies were cued up. They are professional travelers. No whining, “Are we there yet?” Not a single complaint from the peanut gallery in the back of the car.

Just a few grumbles from yours truly in the front seat. Regretting that McChicken sandwich, or something like that.

A good thing about being Americans living abroad is that we can take advantage of the holidays celebrated in both the United States and in France. We bring our own national traditions with us: Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Halloween. But then we also get to appreciate the local celebrations such as Bastille Day, the Beaujoulais Nouveau and, like, every other Tuesday and Friday in May.

Another good thing is that many of the traditional holidays, so unfortunately over-commercialized in the United States, are less amplified here in France. Here we celebrate more modestly, in a spirit that reminds me of when I was a little girl. I’m not saying that France hasn’t succumbed to the consumerism of Christmas, or that there aren’t some materialistic aspects to this culture, but holidays are not over-marketed to the same degree as in my homeland.

Halloween, in France, is especially understated. There happens to be a school holiday the week prior and following, but this is an excuse for a mid-trimester break that coincides with Toussaints, or All Saints Day, on November 1st. But there is no serious trick-or-treating and bobbing-for-apples is unheard of. The French simply don’t do l’Alowine.

It’s still my favorite holiday, Halloween. I love the idea of being costumed and masked and taking on another persona. I love telling scary stories. I love carving innocent pumpkins into mischievous jack-o-lanterns.

Because Halloween is not part of the French national consciousness, I realized, when the girls were finally old enough to go trick-or-treating, that I’d have to choreograph the entire event. I wrote up a French set of instructions and distributed them to neighbors in our building, and to some of our favorite stops in the quartier: our tailor, a favorite café, the bakery. I realized that without knowing the custom, it might seem odd that we’d ask them to provide free candy for our children, so I even made little gift-bags of bonbons and handed them out along with my instructions. Basically, if you agreed to participate, all you had to do was open the door when we rang the bell. It was a ready-made system: Halloween-to-go.

We’ve left those urban Halloweens behind. We spend much of the two-week Toussaints school vacation at the country house, a place far more suitable for celebrating a spooky holiday. The ground is layered with moist brown and orange leaves. The trees are nearly bare, dancing like skeletal silhouettes along the long road we must walk, in the dark, to visit the five houses that are near enough for trick-or-treating. The British neighbors know the drill, so no additional preparation is required. Even the French neighbors caught on quickly, and seem to look forward to viewing the odd creatures who show up at their door, begging for goodies. There is one household, a strange trio of three elderly peasants who live today much like they did fifty years ago, without running water or electricity. It occurred to me, after leaving them the note and the candy, that they might not know how to read. I think they thought the candy was a gift they could keep. When we came knocking on their door, nobody answered. It was pretty scary, standing outside their dark house, knocking, listening, wondering if they’d answer. Now that’s Halloween.

This year Short-pants and Buddy-roo have opted out of any witch, ghost or goblin costumes, and even turned up their nose at the idea of being princesses. (Can I mention how much that pleases me?) Inspired by some ukuleles that came home from a workshop I led last spring and a costume idea from a depression-era story that accompanied one of their American Girl dolls, they’ve both decided to be hula dancers. So, grass skirts, check. Leis, check. Candy, check. Boo!

It’s not that I want to be the back-stage mom, nor am I so certain that my girls have special musical talent. It’s not even that I’m trying to establish a strong extra-curricular record so that they can get into an Ivy League school (I get a head-ache thinking about that). It’s that I want the sound of music in my house. I want my girls to be introduced to the world of performing arts. Whether they pursue any of these arts with passion or professional intent, that’s up to them. I’m just trying to orchestrate a little artistic exposure. Easier said than done.

At least I’m getting practiced at the art of the inscription. Regular readers of this blog may recall the debacle of last June, where I showed up early – but not early enough – for the registration at the conservatoire de musique. Given a placement of #53 on the list, my low expectations were realized when, at the end of the summer, I went to check the posting on the window to find that Buddy-roo had not been assigned to any of the initiation classes. Not for the solfège. Not for dance. Rien.

This is not a show stopper; there are other such schools in Paris, and ultimately I have managed to enroll Buddy-roo in a dance class at a nearby studio, but that’s another story.

For an established student like Short-pants – she’s been in the conservatory system for two years so she’s guaranteed a place – the music track is a triad: theory, chorale + a musical instrument. The problem was her three classes were scheduled on three different days of the week, including a slot on Wednesday morning, which I’d indicated on all the forms I’d dutifully filled out that she had school and would not be available.

During the month of September, then, I made no less than four visits to the conservatory, each time to talk to someone in the bureau de scolarité about reorganizing the schedule. They weren’t terribly empathetic about why I wouldn’t want to schlep my daughter to the conservatoire on three separate occasions each week. I had to use my haute politesse to make a change putting two of the classes back-to-back on one day, easing our after-school travels. Once it was agreed upon, I still had to put it in writing, and then wait for the head administrator to phone me back to confirm the change.

The good news is I knew about the loophole that could get Buddy-roo started in the conservatory even if she wasn’t accepted for any of the traditional initiation classes. Last week, I had an aside with the chorale director who agreed to accept her, giving the registrar no choice but to enroll her. Once she’s in the system, it’s automatic to offer her a full-fledged space next year.

But yesterday the clincher: Short-pants’ first viola lesson. She’s chosen this lesser-known stringed instrument not because she’s so willing to play third fiddle, but because it happens to be what I played in my youth. I remember distinctly the day I asked her, very open-endedly, if she wanted to play an instrument. When she told me yes, the viola, I pressed her, “are you sure?” She beamed. So the viola it is.

The teacher produced two half-sized instruments for her to try. My eyes welled up, with mushy parental pride and, admittedly, some nostalgia, when Short-pants held the shiny wooden instrument beneath her chin, and started plucking away at the strings.

“Do you have the certificate of insurance?” the teacher asked me as we packed up Short-pants’ new viola at the end of her lesson. Up until now nobody had mentioned anything about insurance. I was directed to the office of the director, who told me that I needed only to procure an insurance rider for renting a musical instrument, and then they’d hand it over.

Here’s where carrying an iPhone really comes in handy: I stepped outside, used my index finger, and quickly found my insurance agent on the phone. Not a problem, she said, I needed only to supply the make and the value. With that information, she could even have it ready for me in ten minutes. I walked back in and asked to see the director, again.

“But I do not have this information,” he said, meeting me in the lobby, refusing to invite me back into his office. He was starting to get mildly hysterical. I’d interrupted him and this is not something he could easily provide, how these rental instruments are nothing fancy, the insurance company shouldn’t need this kind of specific information.

I should mention that while all this was going on, I could hear Buddy-roo wailing in the hallway, “I changed my mind, I don’t want to go to chorale.” De-facto, who was accompanying her to her first class, attempted to calm her. Short-pants’ soothing voice was audible, too, “Don’t worry, “I’ll be in there with you.”

I noticed one of the guys at reception desk smirking into his lap, and took this is a cue to give up on the director. I knew I could call the viola teacher later, she’d get me the details I needed. Or I knew of other luthiers I could call to rent a viola on my own. I politely extracted myself from the discourse. When I turned around, the lobby was full of parents, staring at me. Could they feel my pain? I nodded around the circle of chairs, and walked outside.

Just last week, I remember thinking – rather smugly – that I’d finally organized all the school and extra-curricular details. After all the parent-teacher meetings, the trips to the conservatory, the dance studio, the doctor (health certificates needed), the messages back and forth to the teachers about schedules, acquiring the necessary books and notebooks and leotards and ballet slippers, figuring out with De-facto who picks up who and takes them where – it’d been a lot of work, sure, but I’d finally nailed it. Well, apparently not.

Who knew that being a mother meant being a personal assistant to two busy and sometimes temperamental executives?

An hour later, after a bit of fresh air and a restorative bière a la pression at a nearby café, I returned to retrieve my singing cherubs. The two of them skipped into the lobby, hand-in-hand, humming the remnants of a song they must have been singing together in the chorale.

When she saw me, Buddy-roo rushed into my arms. “I loved it!” she said, jubilant, “Can I come back next week?”

“Where’s my viola?” asked Short-pants.

Yeah, I’m working on it.

Words count for a lot in our house; me being the aspiring writer, Short-pants, a voracious reader, De-facto, an enthusiastic speaker (goes to Toastmasters) and Buddy-roo, the consummate chatterbox. Not to mention that in our household we speak two languages, so we have double the number of words to navigate. Words matter.

Hang around with us and you’ll occasionally hear one of the adults suggesting calmly (and not to each other), “use your words.” Pointing and grunting are frowned upon. Our children have been indoctrinated to speak in full sentences and even the magic words are pretty well embedded. Not that an occasional reminder isn’t necessary, but frequently enough to impress me, the girls make good use of please and thank you – and do so with real feeling.

Every household has its “words,” part of the family folklore that is generated by the cute or clever mistakes made by children as they learn about life and language. Often these words relate to scatological subject matter; a topic which I deliberately avoid in this blog because a) I find it unattractive, b) nobody cares about my children’s potty habits, and 3) it would be a nightmare if a Google search on my name produced something so distasteful and yet memorable. But it’s a subject we all talk about – at least privately – and it is often the cornerstone of a family vocabulary. My brother and sister and I made a blood pact never to divulge the words to another living person, a vow we all have kept. Even De-facto doesn’t know the words from my childhood, and never will.

Having said that, there is a word that De-facto and I introduced to our lil’ nuclear family that I will share – because my friends love it so much – the word we use for one’s “private parts.” It’s not that we have such a hang-up about the technical terms; we’ll get to them when the girls start posing probing questions about the birds and the bees. But honestly, I never wanted my 3-year old over-employing the word vagina in a loud voice at the supermarket, so we came up with a gender-neutral signifier instead: the business. Typical use at bath time: “Did you wash the business?” Another common usage: “If your business doesn’t hurt, why are you holding it?”

It’s a bit easier on the ear than the v-word or the p-word, and can be used discreetly in public, like a code. It only backfired on me once, when Buddy-roo, at the age of about 4, bounded into my office despite the closed-tight door, to announce something important. I shushed her in a panicked whisper: “Shhhh! Mama’s on a business call!”

“Business?!” she shrieked as De-facto apologetically pulled her out of the office and shut the door behind them. I could hear her laughing in the hall, “Mama’s making a call from her business? Ha!”

Yes, well it seemed like a good word when we first came up with it.

Some of these invented family words come into common use because of an adorable mispronunciation or mal-interpretation that turns out to be quite astute. Buddy-roo is the originator of some of our best terminology. She of course utters the typical breafquist, an oft-mispronounced word. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cute when every child says it, but it’s not that original. Part of Buddy-roo’s linguistic charm is her strange non-rhotic accent which amuses us to no end because even De-Facto, who hails from Boston, doesn’t share her aversion for the letter ‘R.’ But accent and odd pronunciation habits aside, Buddy-roo excels at inventing words. And they make more sense than you’d expect. A few examples:

Rainbrella: the round, collapsible device one uses as protection from the rain. This makes so much more sense to us than umbrella, which, um, has nothing to do with the element against which it’s designed to offer protection. (I guess it makes sense if you speak Latin, which we don’t.) She also suggested the word Sunbrella, similarly styled and found at the beach. No doubt Buddy-roo’s French has informed the invention of these two words, as parapluie and parasol are both used for the rain or the sun.

Unlistener. This is a person, initially a child in the first grade – but you can imagine this applying to any segment of the population – who, despite being within auditory range, prefers to remain in the state of “not having heard it.” An unlistener can be quite selective, but ultimately, this is someone that you can’t really count on to receive or re-transmit information of any importance. Common usage: “You can’t ask him anything, he’s the biggest unlistener in the class.”

Smashed potatoes. So much more descriptive than mashed ones, don’t you think?

Short-pants, on the other hand, takes very seriously the correct acquisition of new words for her vocabulary. Last week, she got the idea to sleep with her dictionaries, reasoning that the words might seep into her brain by osmosis, a word she then had to look up. It makes for an uncomfortable night’s rest, as she feels compelled to stack under her pillow three dictionaries – English, French and French/English – to accommodate her hunger for words. Hard to say if it’s working, but we must admire her commitment to learning.

Short-pants is a stickler for correctness, and this kicks in when she overhears me speaking French. My French is operable, but I don’t have the linguistic muscle that she’s acquired by starting it at such a young age. Since she feels compelled to correct my pronunciation and grammar, we’ve made a deal: I will receive her corrections enthusiastically, as long as she delivers them gently with the intention of helping rather than humiliating me. It’s a beautiful thing. She’ll wait until nobody is around and leaning toward me, in a conspiratorial tone, she’ll suggest something like, “Mama, you might want to say le instead of la with the word pain.”

Buddy-roo, I can already tell you, won’t treat me so kindly. Her corrections, when they start coming at me, will be marked with eye rolling and heavy sighs of disgust, which I will tolerate for only a short while before I tell her to mind her own business.

We couldn’t get enough of our country house this summer, and even though the September back-to-school routine is a welcome one, we snuck out of town on Friday with hopes for an Indian Summer weekend à la campagne.

The weather cooperated with the gift of flawless blue skies and unhindered sunlight. A constant if somewhat reckless breeze raced through and around the stone house – slamming doors and flapping curtains – announcing the arrival of autumn. The sun was a bit lower as it arced across the sky, but still warm enough to dry our laundry and nourish our garden from which we harvested the last of the carrots and lettuce, and even a few last treats offered from a lone tomato plant.

But the news – the real news – is about the vendange. There were grapes to be harvested! After three years of attending to those stubborn stalks without any reward, this year the vines have produced plentiful bunches of succulent grapes.

“Who’s going to help with the vendange?” I shouted boastfully to the girls.

“We will!” they both shouted back in tandem.

And then, a few moments later, Short-pants asked, “What’s a vendange?”

How to explain the romance of the vendange? I’ve seen grape harvests in Western New York state, when I was a teenager, and in Switzerland where I lived for a year in my early thirties. Driving out to the vineyards in the back of a truck, jumping off with a crate in hand, gliding down each row of vines, filling the crates, bunch by bunch with round, ripe grapes. It’s backbreaking work, but harvesting bushels of fresh grapes for eating and for wine making is somehow so very satisfying. Something about the completion of a seasonal cycle, or else the anticipation of the (finally) well-deserved sampling of the end product.

“Do we have to be barefoot?” Buddy-roo asked.

“No,” I laughed, “that’s for making wine. We’re just picking the grapes.” I racked my brain to figure out where she would have learned about grape stomping. It has to have been a movie, maybe the DVD of Brigadoon has a scene like that? Or has she seen that famous episode of I Love Lucy?

The grape vines – left for us by the previous owner of the house – grow in four different spots on our property; the green grapes on patches of land that get more sun, the purple ones in more shaded areas. After rummaging through the junk in the barn – also left for us by the previous owner – I found a dirty crate and hosed it off and set out to collect my bounty.

“To the harvest!” I called out. Short-pants ran along beside me. She watched, and then followed suit, reaching to grab the stems and pull off the grapes in full bunches. Buddy-roo appeared a few moments later in her pink plastic high-heeled slippers. (I did not buy her
these come-hither shoes. They are hand-me-downs from the girls who live down the road.) She folded her arms and watched us as we carefully set each bunch of grapes into the crate.

“Dressed for the harvest?” I asked.

She nodded. “In case we need to stomp on them.”

Isn’t it romantic to think that I might make my own wine someday? De-facto keeps asking, and I keep telling him – and everyone else who asks – that I harbor no fantasies of producing a fine wine, or even a modest or mediocre one. I am proud of my little harvest, but I am no oenologist. Besides, the yield of my crop isn’t enough to make but a few bottles, hardly worth the investment or effort. The idea of making wine is a lot more romantic than the actual activity. But if I ever change my mind, I know who will help me stomp on the grapes.