Why did you pick me?

This morning on the way to school, Maia had us account for ourselves.
How did you meet, Mommy? she wanted to know.
Well, Daddy was working at a school, I said, and I needed an assistant. And so I advertised, and Mommy applied for the job, and I hired her.
How did you get married?
Well, we were working together, and we liked each other, and we fell in love, I said. So I asked her to marry me. And she said she'd think about it, I added, laughing. She thought about it for three years, and then Auntie Kalei finally said it was time for us to get married. So she arranged it. And we got married in California.
Why aren't you pregnant, Mais asked. She meant, Why can't you get pregnant. ANd that's how Kristina answered the question.
Some women can't get pregnant, she said, and I was one of those women.
Why did you pick me, she wanted to know now.
Well, they gave you to us to hold, I said. Mommy held you first. And then I held you, and you fell asleep. And then when they came to take you back--they didn't let us stay with you very long--maybe just 10 minutes or so--you woke up and cried. You didn't want to go back. And we didn't want you to go back.
She stopped asking questions then.
We wondered later why she had asked those questions of us.
John, Tuesday, March 23rd (in the early morning of Wednesday, March 24th).

We go to the Aquarium

"You can't be a dog when we go out."
For several months, Maia has been pretending to be a dog.
"I love dogs," she said by way of explanation. "Pretend I'm a dog named Maxie, and I have a curly tail and white fur."
We had been to the Aquarium, and had stopped at a plate lunch place for something to eat. She was sitting on a bench with her legs hunched under her like a dog might sit on its haunches.
She really does love dogs. Cats, not so much. "Except big cats," she said.
Maia protested about not being able to sit like a dog.
"You just can't, Maia. You have to sit nicely."
She didn't understand, but she relented.
There's a lot going on in her head lately.
On the way to the Aquarium, Kristina repeated something Maia had said today.
"She said, 'I don't understand the difference between joking and lying.'"
"And pretending," Maia said. "I don't understnad the difference between joking and lying and pretending."
We talked about this--intent, situation, and whatnot--but I think these are things she's going to have to work through on her own.
John, Saturday, March 13, 2010

I get a tattoo

Sometime in January, I decided that I wanted a tattoo of Maia and Kristina. So we went to the Manoa Elementary School to play on Sunday at the end of January, I took my camera with me and took a bunch of pictures of Kristina and Maia. The last one came out the best, and I selected that one for the tattoo. That's the pic up there--the same one I used in a recent post.

I made an appointment in February. Tattoo shops (at least this one) are surprisingly busy, and the first available slot for Heather was in March--yesterday, Saturday, March 6th, in fact.

I had located Heather on the internet. She had included portraits among her specialties.

This is Heather.

The first thing she did was to make several photo copies of different sizes so she could figure out what size would work best on my chest. Then she transferred the image to a stencil,

and the stencil to my chest:




Six hours later,



it looked like this:



Maia liked it. She wanted to know how long it would last.
"Forever."
"Tomorrow?"
"Forever."
"What if you die?"
"Even then."
"What if somebody cut it all out so it was all bloody."
"Well, okay. Not then. But nobody is going to do that.

Kristina wanted to know why it had to be so big, how much I had paid for it, how I knew that I wasn't going to get sick from the needles Heather used, etc.

She liked it, too.

"You could have just gotten initials," she said.

Maia's verdict the next day: "Gross, but so awesome."

John, Sunday, March 7, 2010

Mother Tells a Story about Laura Hicks

On my way to pick up Maia today, I called my mother.
I had been thinking about the story she used to tell about the trainmen who would save a baked potato for her on her way back to school.
It occurred to me wonder why they hadn't baked one for Aunt June, too. So I began by asking her if June had gone to that school with her.
"Yes, for second grade, and maybe third grade. But then June had to go away because our school at Newhall didn't go up that far. To Bishop, maybe, or Coretta. I didn't like that, because I didn't like being at that school myself, and I didn't like walking home by myself."
"Did it snow there?"
"Oh, yes. We had big snows. And cold. I used to freeze, walking home from school. But the trainmen, and there were some prisoners, too, they used to work on the train in Newhall and they knew when I walked home. And they would make a fire and bake potatoes, and they would bake one for me, too." She laughed, remembering that.
I could see them wanting to take care of her. Maybe they had children of their own.
"That was before Daddy moved back to East War. I didn't like that school for nothing," she said, remembering.
"Our teacher was mean. Nobody liked her. Helen Handy was her name. One day Laura Hicks had enough and beat her up."
I had heard this story before, but I always enjoyed it.
"Laura was older than the rest of us. She had been held back three of four times. I was 8 then, and Laura was 12. A big girl, too. She lived on a farm, and when she came to school, you could see she was tired. Like she had been taking care of animals, or young'uns. And dirty sometimes, too. None of us had clothes because none of us had money. Or almost none of us did. But Laura was really poor. As bad as we were, Laura had it worse. And Miss Handy picked on her. She stuck out. One day, Laura had had as much as she could, and she just stood up and yanked on the front of Miss Handy's blouse. And it came off. Buttons flew everywhere, and there was Miss Handy, standing in her pink petticoat and her gray jacked. Laura knocked her around good. Beat her up, I guess. None of the rest of us did anything. I was glad she did it. Then they came in and took Laura out, and we never saw her again. I guess they wouldn't let her come to school anymore."
I had to go then--I had reached the school, and it was time to pick up Maia.
My mother was born in 1926. This was 1933 or 34--the height of the Great Depression.
John, Wednesday, March 3, 2010