Photographic memories

There is nothing more depressing than looking through old photographs. Ours are jumbled helter-skelter in two really cheap plastic drawers that gape from their shoddy housings and shed their contents as you move them about. And those contents could serve as evidence for any theory of bad parenting you might harbor (like, if you were one of my kids). There are too many pictures of one child, too few of the other, too many forced smiles with lips pulled painfully back, too many averted looks. And there are all the stories that you know lurk behind the pictures: the hurt feelings, the parental lapses, the unassuaged fear and loneliness. And all the beaming strangers who look vaguely familiar. I must have known them once. They may have been close friends. Who the hell are they?

Kids say the darnedest things redux

She was a precocious 3-year-old:

* [To me] “I love you very much—and I will not bite you anymore!”

* [To me] “I don’t need you anymore, but I’m letting you stay here because I love you.”

And then she became a teenager …

* [When I came home with bring pink sneakers] “Does Daddy know about those?”

* [To me] “If you dropped dead right now, Mom, I would think, Thank god the nagging has stopped!”

* [Looking contemptuously at my sturdy shoes] “Where do you think you are—the Midwest?”

Kids say the darnedest things

My son J was, of course, brilliant. But my daughter C was no slouch in the wise-child department. Witness the following from when she was 2:

* "I'm a woman. [Later.] I'm a person."

* M: You're so special.
   C: I'm so short.

* M: What are you drawing?
   C: A young mom.

* "When I grow up I'm going to be a boy."

* "When I grow up I'm going to have a penis."

* "You're a mommy craphead, and I'm a baby craphead."

* "Water goes away."

* [Out of the blue] "We have mayonnaise."

* [Holding out a raisin] "Want a bite?"

* "Hold me—for God's sake!"

* "Mommy,  go away. Daddy, go away. Bobo, go away. And I will do the laundry."

* "Now don't say anything. I am the doctor."

* [To M] "You are pretty bossy!"

* [To brother J] "Go to your room and do your homework!"

* "When I'm a daddy, I will not wear underpants at night."

* [To Other] "You have a beautiful penis!"

* "I love you, Mommy. And I even love myself!"

No heroes

So I finally finished The Boys' Crusade, by Paul Fussell, which is a pretty devastating argument against war—of any kind, ever, for any reason. My father has made a thorough study of the book and written a detailed chart pointing out where his World War II experience and Fussell's overlapped and where they differed, and he's given copies of the book and his analysis as gifts to people who have helped him out over the past couple of years, particularly members of the Unitarian church who have driven him to his medical appointments at the VA. Seems like a not very cheerful gift, but relevant on such journeys I suppose. It's dispiriting reading, and I don't recommend it if you're already depressed.

But I was charmed by an addendum sent by my dad when he heard I was finally getting around to reading the book. It was a Wikipedia article on Fussell, with a description of his ex-wife's allegations of adultery highlighted in yellow, and in my dad's creaky, wound-blasted handwriting the words "This you must remember: There are no heroes."

Happy birthday, B

Today my friend B turns ... well, I won't say. I don't have a friend that I "grew up with" in the ordinary sense, no one who matched me step for step over the long haul of childhood. But B is the person I "grew up with" as an adult. I met her when I was in my 20s, and we have been fellow travelers—literally sometimes—ever since. She doted on my first-born, saved my second-born from abortion, walked me through the valley of cancer, flew from New York to visit me in San Francisco when my mother had a stroke and my father was hit by a bus. Mostly she's provided a moral compass for me whenever the dial on my own has gone into a spin. She's been my personal Emily Post and Abigail Van Buren and my rabbi too (since she's actually Jewish and I'm merely Jew-ish). It's not just pain we've shared but pleasures too: parties and trips and movies and books. Happy birthday, B—and lucky me!

Wakeup surprise!

In the dim dawn I accidentally emptied a pepper packet instead of a salt packet into my oatmeal. And you know what? It's not that bad.

The proof is in the error

In Paul Fussell's Boys' Crusade, which I'm still slogging through like a good soldier (when I can bear it), there's an account of a typo that turned out to be a test of bona fides when German spies tried to pass as Americans:

"Every American officer carried, in addition to the metal identity tags around his neck, a laminated card with his photo. These cards had one curious feature: an uncorrected typographical error. The top of the card read NOT A PASS. FOR INDENTIFICATION ONLY. Someone preparing the disguises of the Skorzeny spies couldn't resist—some will say 'in a German manner'—pedantically correcting the spelling on the false cards issued to those masquerading as American officers."

An error that becomes proof of authenticity: It calls to mind the value placed on a knitting mistake as evidence of the genuineness of a sweater advertised as handmade. Or the mole that highlights a beauty's otherwise flawlessness. Or, more in keeping with Fussell's context, the scars that allow identification of a mangled body.