"Will you lose your powers?"

This was in response to my affirmative answer to her that I would produce a white rock.

When she was about 4, she had asked for a blue stone. I told her that I could make one for her.

How, she wanted to know. Magic, I said.

So I had gone down to Thinker Toys, where they have such things, and I had gotten a blue stone but also many others of different colors. I anticipated that she would ask for stones of other colors, and I wanted to be prepared.

Later that day, I produced the blue stone for her. She said she wanted a red one, too.

I said, Okay, but I have to think about it and concentrate. So I did, pushing my hands together as though I were creating a stone, and presto! There it was. A red stone.

"Mommy," Maia had blurted out, "Daddy made a stone!"

"How?" Mommy wanted to know.

"Magic!" came the confident reply.

Some years later, now, Maia had found her satchel of stones. She had wanted a green one.

"Okay," I had said. "I will try later on."

I had been working that day on a Complaint that I will need to file. But after Maia and Kristina had gone out to Costco, it occurred to me that I should go back down to "Thinker Toys" and get Maia her green stone.

I did, and while I was there, I picked up several others besides, just in case her desires expanded.

I got back home just ahead of Maia and Kristina. When they came in, I was at work on my laptop on the kitchen table, which is where they had left me.

Maia had forgotten about the stone. But when I produced it from her ear, she was taken once again.

"Can you make a silver one?" she wanted to know.

"Well, I can try," I said. I had two of them in my pocket, so I figured it was a pretty safe bet.

"Let me see," I said, squeezing my hands together.

When the two gray stones popped out, Maia was as excited as she had been when she was little.

"Mommy, Mommy, he did it!"

"What?" Kristina wanted to know.

"He made rocks!"

Kristina gave me a look.

"How do you do that?" Maia wanted to know.

"Love," I said. "That's what gives me the power."

We had watched TV for awhile.

Later she asked, "Can you make a black one?"

I knew for a certainty that I could.

"Yes, I think I can," I said.

That's when she asked me: "Will you lose your powers?" she wanted to know.

It turned out that she didn't want me to lose my powers and would withdraw her request if satisfying it would cause me to.

"No, Maia. I won't lose my powers."

And so I made a black rock for her.

Yesterday was my birthday.

John, Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Maia has a birthday

We took Maia to Buca's last night (her favorite restaurant) for her birthday. We had just gotten back from the mainland on the day before, and she was tired and weepy.

Early in the dinner, she said to Kristina, "You are the most important. Not your parents."

Kristina told me about this later. We both thought that "the parents" she was thinking about were her biological parents. I think she was put in mind of them by our trip to the mainland and her birthday.

This morning, she said to me, "I don't like my scar."

She's also less than 100% happy with the appearance of her ear. She told Kristina a few days ago that she didn't like her own ears, she liked Kristina's.

A lot for one little girl to process.

John, Friday, July 16, 2010

ps The mainland trip with my Mother and Aunt June to West Virginia was fun and interesting. I learned a lot about both of them. I will write about that soon.

The Barber's Daughters

Today, we drove from Independence, Ohio to Spotsylvania, Virginia, and on the way my Mother and my Aunt J. talked about how things were when they were growing up.

"The Barber's Daughters, they called us."

That was my Aunt J. My Mother prefers to remember my grandfather as a schoolteacher--and such, he may have been, but not for the most important years of his life. For those years, he was a barber, trying to make a living as best he could in the southernmost and poorest county of West Virginia, probably the poorest State in the union, then and now.

But regardless of whether they remembered him as a barber or a schoolteacher, my Mother and my Aunt J. were alike in remembering themselves and their family as superior to those around them.

"It was like we were some alien kind of flower," my Mother said. "We weren't anything like them."

I have a different sense of the matter, born from what they have told me about those years, and my understanding of that history.

They were downwardly mobile, as that euphemism of American sociology would have it.

My grandfather, who was educated, and my grandmother, who was also educated, were ambushed by the Great Depression. They were plunged deeper and deeper into poverty until 1933 saw them retreating up a hill near Newhall in McDowell County, which was then, as now, no more than a tiny hamlet. There was no road to where they were going, only the means of a sled drawn by a horse to get them and their belongings there. There was a house--a meager house, four rooms only, a kitchen, a parlor and two bedrooms, wallpapered with newspaper--but there were no neighbors, and there was no bathroom. There wasn't even an outhouse. "He always said he was going to build one, but he never got around to it," my Aunt J. explained. They had to use the woods.

They were there because land that they could till came with the house. The land gave them the means of surviving.

My grandfather put his family on that ridge outside Newhall, left my Uncle B. in charge of his brood, and went off in 1934 or 35 to a WPA project in Ohio. His remittances and my Uncle B's industry with that land kept the family alive. My Uncle B grew beans and potatoes and tomatoes on it, among other things, and my Grandfather's remittances bought them things they needed from the store--flour and sugar and lard.

My Uncle H., the youngest of my grandfather's children, knew my Grandfather mostly in his decline into alcoholism. But he remembers important and good times with him, too. "I remember exactly what we were doing on Dec. 7, 1941," he writes. That was Pearl Harbor day. "My dad and I were putting up a stove pipe from an old coal pot bellied stove when the bulletin come over the radio. My dad said that it meant war."

On what turned out to be the last day of his life, my Grandfather told my Grandmother that he had something he wanted to tell her. My Grandmother told him that she would do some laundry first. He died before he could tell her what was on his mind. My Mother and my Aunt June both recall that missed opportunity as a great regret of my Grandmother's life. "I think he wanted to tell her that he was sorry for all the hardship she had had to deal with," my Mother said.

I think he just wanted to tell her that he loved her and that he was glad that he had shared his life with her. Once, towards the end of her life, she reminsced about working at the post office her father had built in the town they lived in. She wasn't yet married. My Grandfather lived in the town, too, and used to get mail from a young woman who was my Grandmother's rival for my Grandfather's affection. Laughing, she said she would intercept letters from the rival to my Grandfather.

Today, I live in a very nice house, am well regarded in my profession, and make more than most people do. And I am far from the most sucessful of my Grandfather's grandchildren.

I can't help but think that that ridge in Newhall had something to do with where my brother, our cousins, and I are today. Whatever his failings may have been, my Grandfather didn't desert his family in those hard years of the Great Depression.

"There's a new moon over my shoulder and an old love in my heart," he used to sing to needle my Grandmother as borh my Mother and my Aunt J. recall. But he wasn't unfaithful to her. On that, my Aunts and Uncles are agreed. The Barber stood by his daughters, his sons, and his wife.

He was a great man, in my book.

John, Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Maia considers how life might have been different

We had Cassidy, Maia's friend, over to our house to spend the night last Saturday. She and her family moved here from Florida, but for a time, they sort of commuted betweeen here and Florida.
Cassidy's living in the two different places had gotten Maia to thinking.
"If my first mother didn't give me away, then I would be in Kazakhstan," Maia said.
"Yes," Kristina answered.
"I mean, now," Maia said.
"Yes," Kristina said.

John, Saturday, July 3, 2010

Mother tells a story about Grandpa Arington

[This conversation occurred on April 28th as I was driving to work. I am just adding it now.]

"Grandpa was funny. Mama was funny too, sometimes."
I had asked her about Grandpa Arington.
"Grandpa changed the spelling of his name," Mother continued. She was about to illustrate her point, though I didn't know it yet. "He changed it from "Arrington" to "Arington" with one "r"," she said. "He was a schoolteacher. Taught English. He said that words shouldn’t have extra letters." She laughed at his taking the second r out of his name. "Makes you wonder what kind of English he taught!"
We laughed.
"He made sure Mother got educated. He used to ride her and her sister to school on his horse when it snowed. Mother wanted us to get all of the education we could, too. That’s why she got so upset when June got married after 8th grade."
She thought for a while.
"James E. Arington," she said. "That was his name."

John, Saturday, July 3, 2010.