A message written in road dust

What's above is what Maia wrote sometime today in the dust on the outside of the lower panel of glass in the hatchback of our Prius. I took this pic of it tonight, shining a flashlight on it in the garage.

I first saw the message as I was backing up on the shoulder of the road just outside the second gate to the porte cochere of our house. We were on our way to dinner, so it was still light outside. Because I was looking at the message in the rear view mirror of our Prius, I could just read it, right to left.

"I [heart] Mommy and Daddy. :)"

Seeing it brought me up short because I had just been butting heads with Maia.

Cocoa had gotten loose, just as we were getting ready to go to dinner. I understood that Cocoa's flight up the hill from our house as mostly my doing because I hadn't taken her for a walk that day. But I had made breakfast for the family in the morning, had then taken Maia to Pearl Ridge Shopping Center, and there hadn't been time when we got back to walk her. It had been about 5 and Kristina had called (she was shopping) to ask that I get Maia into a shower because we were going out for dinner.

Understandable though it was, Cocoa's escapte complicated everything. I took off up the road after her in the Prius, with Maia inside. Cocoa loves us and cars, and wants to please us, so when she saw us approaching her up the hill in the car, she turned around and came down to us. I told Maia to open the door, she did, and Cocoa jumped in. I then closed all of the windows so that Cocao wouldn't jump out.

So far, so good. By the time we had gotten back to the shoulder by the side of our house, however, Maia had let her window down. I parked by the second gate again and got out to guide Cocoa back in to the house.

Cocoa, naturally, took that opportunity to jump out of Maia's window.

"Are you frustrated?" Maia asked, after the initial protest from me about her having opened her window.

My response was less than enlightened. "Dammit, Maia," I said.

I sent Maia hack into the house to get the leash and Maia's collar. Maia had teken the collar off because she had given Cocoa a shower at the same time that she'd been showering herself.

After Maia had gotten those things for me, I took off down the hill after Cocoa.

Cocoa is a dog. She gets away with what she can get away with, and she's an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful animal. She needs to run. And so she did.

I finally caught up with her at a side street down the hill where two of her friends live. Both are Goldern Retrievers, and of the two, only one likes her back. Cocoa's special friend wasn't out, though, and so Cocoa let me put the collar on her when it was clear that the jig was up.

I told her she was a good girl, apologized to her for not having let her run that day, and took her home. I still didn't know how she had gotten out, so I put her on her lead for the time being.

"I'm sorry, Daddy," Maia said.

"It's okay, Sweetie," I said, surprising myself with my even temper. "It's not a big deal."

Krisina and her mother now made their appearance and the scene moved out to the car.

Now a scene developed between Maia and Popo--Kristina's mother. Maia and Popo have always had a rivalry. They compete for Kristina's attention, and they compete as peers, at least from Maia's perspective. The notion of children and their elders being peers is offensive to the age graded etiquette of Chinese culture.

The shape that was now being taken by the rivalry had to do with how the backseat was to be occupied. Maia got in first, and refused to move over, although she knew that Popo usually sat is that spot, couldn't climb over her, and shouldn't be forced to walk around to the other side of the car since she had a sprained knee and was walking with a cane.

"Maia, move over," I insisted. I was angry now. Maia, however, maintained her position in the closest seat to the gate and wanted Popo to climb over her.

This went for some period of time. Instead of sliding over, Maia finally got out of the car in order to get in from the opposite side.

"Maia," I said, "why do I take you to the shopping mall and things like that if you're going to behave like this?" At her request, we had spent the afternoon at the shopping mall, indulging her taste for stickers, mechanical pencils, and silly bands.

We finally all got into the car. It was when I was backing up that I saw her note to us.

On the way to the restaurant, I tried to make conversation with her. And she responded.

When we got there, she made an effort to offer Popo her arm, and Popo accepted. Inside, Maia did the things that kids do. Instead of drinking her water, she lapped at it as though she were a dog. And she put ice and other things into her hot tea to change it into a child's beverage.

"It's hard being a kid, isn't it, Sweetie?" I said.

"Shh, Daddy," she said. "I'm experimenting," she said. She was mixing ice and greene onion dressing into her tea.

I let it go. As I sat at dinner, the truth of what was bothering me surged within me. A consultant had represented to a client that we had no problem with the client's being represented by a competitor of ours with respect to a certain benefit project, and the client had fallen in line with the consultant's represerntation. Then, when the client had received an engagement letter from this other lawyer, the client had called to see whether it was, in fact, true that we cared so little about the client that we had no problem with its being represented by another lawyer.

My partner--who is the one who did work for this client--had told me about this on Friday. And, frankly, what the consultant had done enraged me. We have built our practice, client by client, by being responsice to each of our clients, and never taking any of them for granted. It infuriated me beyond words that this consultant had misrepresented to our client that we would have no problem with his working with some other lawyer on their matters.

Once I recognized the source of my anger, nothing Maia did bothered me anymore. Not her experimentation with her tea, not her lapping ice water out of her glass as though she were a dog, not her attempting to make fire with toothpicks. Just stuff kids do.

When we left the restaurant, Maia gave Popo her arm to learn on, and Popo was pleased with that. Later, Maia asked me what was bothering me, and I told her it had nothing to do with her, but with work, and she recognized and accepted that.

Later, Cocoa put her head in my lap. She understands things, too.

John, Saturday, July 2, 2011