Queens

April 12, 2011 By

Image by Laura Favrow, and used under a Creative Commons license

 

I’ve written before about the interesting conversations Lucas, now age 5 1/2, and I have had in the car on the way to preschool.

I enjoy seeing how his neurons are firing on any given day, and since he can’t see my reaction to what he’s saying, he tends to prattle on.

Background

First, you should know that Fang has been absolutely maniacal about exposing Lucas to a variety of music. The boy regularly hears (mostly American) music recorded anytime from the 1940s through this year. His favorite song at the moment?

This one:

(I opted not to embed the “official” video because the imagery may be a bit disturbing to some folks. If you’re all about vaginas, skeletons, and decapitation, however, by all means click through.)

Meanwhile, Fang is also showing Lucas lots of music videos. The video for Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” appears to have really made an impression on Lucas. This image in particular resonates with Lucas as being emblematic of bad guys:

Conversation

We were listening to “Born This Way” on the way to preschool yesterday. I asked Lucas if he knew what the song was about; he said he didn’t know. So I explained it, touching on many of the themes of our previous conversation.

Lucas especially likes the line, “Don’t be a drag—just be a queen.” It’s repeated three times in a row, and it’s one of the only portions of the song he remembers. So he kind of fixates on it.

I ask him if he wants to be a queen, and he says yes, he would, and that he wants his (male) friends Dallas and Marcus* to be queens, too.** He told them they should pretend to be queens so that they would have the autonomy (my word, not his, I assure you) to leave school whenever they wanted.

“Why do you want to leave school?” I asked. “Isn’t it fun?”

“It’s fun,” Lucas said. “But we want to go home and turn our TVs into Ultrons.”

Alas, Dallas and Marcus didn’t want to be queens. So they tried to become Bobs instead. (Bob* is the preschool’s director, and if you knew him, you’d find this hilarious.) However, apparently that subterfuge also didn’t work, so they’re still hatching new plans. (I told Lucas to try the queen thing again. He’s drawn to glittery pink craft supplies and brightly colored feather boas, so he could probably pull off that look.)

Once we arrived at school, I chatted with Lucy*, my favorite teacher’s aide in his classroom. Lucy said Lucas had started walking slowly up to the other kids and saying, rather mysteriously, “capital H-I-M.”***

He also started enthusing about marching hammers and Nazis. And all the other kids were all excited, and began asking more and more insistently, “What are Nazis? What are Nazis?”

I think Lucas might have just slipped a bit on Lucy’s most-favored children list.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking Fang and I need to have some conversations about appropriate pop culture for five year olds.****


* Names have been changed.
** For so very many reasons, I would be delighted if Dallas indeed became a queen.
*** The phrase is from the beginning of “Born This Way.” And no, Lucas has no idea what it spells.
**** Fang assures me he’s never watched the Lady Gaga video, which means Lucas hasn’t either. Would give the boy nightmares, probably.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Mamablogging

Views from spring break, part III

March 29, 2011 By

He likes to pick apart the camellia buds that have fallen from the bush in my parents’ yard:

Grandma, at my sister’s baby shower:

Baby shower cupcakes:

Flowers in my mom’s garden:

Fang, actually relaxed even though he is not at home:

Filed Under: Mamablogging, Tall tales and true

Views from spring break, part II

March 29, 2011 By

I have a strange compulsion to photograph my dad when he’s using his camera.  It helps that Dad is photogenic.

Finally, I think this image nicely sums up my last month or so.  (Embiggen to read the sign.)

Filed Under: Mamablogging, What passes for science around here

Views from spring break, part I

March 29, 2011 By

I’m on spring break and carrying my camera everywhere, as I’ve found I’ve been lousy about documenting the boy’s life recently.

I call this one “Suburban boy taken hostage by mother and forced to pose listlessly in front of world’s largest ammonite”:

 

Filed Under: Mamablogging, What passes for science around here

The Lemon Trees

March 24, 2011 By

We received more news today about Grandma’s cancer.  She may have as little time as three months.

We’re all very sad.

This poem has comforted me this evening, as I have indeed seen Grandma’s lemon tree through the half-shut gate, among the leafage of a court.

I hope it comforts my family as well.  You, too, may find it heartening at the end of a long winter.

I’ve included a recording of me reading it, made on my laptop in my home office, so it’s a bit echo-ey–but if you prefer audio, there it is, below the text of the poem.

The Lemon Trees

Listen; the poets laureate
walk only among plants
of unfamiliar name: boxwood, acanthus;
I, for my part, prefer the streets that fade
to grassy ditches where a boy
hunting the half-dried puddles
sometimes scoops up a meagre eel;
the little paths that wind along the slopes,
plunge down among the cane-tufts,
and break into the orchards, among trunks of the lemon-trees.
Better if the jubilee of birds
is quenched, swallowed entirely in the blue:
more clear to the listener murmur of friendly boughs
in air that scarcely moves,
that fills the senses with this odor
inseparable from earth,
and rains an unquiet sweetness in the breast.
Here by a miracle is hushed
the war of the diverted passions,
here even to us poor falls our share of riches,
and it is the scent of the lemon-trees.

See, in these silences
in which things yield and seem
about to betray their ultimate secret,
sometimes one half expects
to discover a mistake of Nature,
the dead point of the world, the link which will not hold,
the thread to disentangle which might set us at last
in the midst of a truth.
The eyes cast round,
the mind seeks harmonizes disunites
in the perfume that expands
when day most languishes.
Silences in which one sees
in each departing human shadow
some dislodged Divinity.
But the illusion wanes and time returns us
to our clamorous cities where the blue appears
only in patches, high up, among the gables.
Then rain falls wearying the earth,
the winter tedium weighs on the roofs,
the light grows miserly, bitter the soul.
When one day through the half-shut gate,
among the leafage of a court
the yellows of the lemon blaze
and the heart’s ice melts
and songs
pour into the breast
from golden trumpets of solarity.

— Eugenio Montale, trans. Irma Brandeis

TheLemonTrees.mp3

Filed Under: Mamablogging, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst
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Header image credits

origami beetle by Emre Ayaroglu, mounted butterflies by Black Country Museums, First Lady Sarah Polk's dress and the Jefferson Bible source book by the National Museum of American History, and lionfish by Martyn Steiner, all used under Creative Commons licenses.

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