a scrap of green t-shirt sleeve, followed by the brim of a floppy, khaki hat wobble out from near the front of the line of campers, the one glimpse i’ve caught of quinn on his very first sleepaway camp experience. the t.a. and videographer is bringing up the rear behind the six campers attending Paleontology Explorers: Oregon, and after they take a few steps, the camera pans over the white tufts of beargrass flocking a stark high elevation flatland studded with snags spearing the sapphire sky, an inverted green bunting of young conifer triangles painted across its mid-section.
he is up front behind the leader, hopefully too out of breath to be talking her ear off. the group is already cohesive, one entity moving with brisk purpose in an intentional direction toward a common goal. the sense of anticipation, ownership, and belonging seem palpable, even through the filtered lens of an instagram feed. the one other boy on the trip, D from L.A., is at quinn’s heels, the four young women comprising the rest of the group of six campers marching along in step. i think i spot the one he first introduced himself to, R from california, who, like quinn, has a dinosaur pillowcase. shedding her NASA sweatshirt as they team-carried gear to the van, she revealed her next layer of a harry potter t-shirt. As quinn and D carried either end of a duffel, i overheard a snippet of conversation about “ender pearls,” and i felt it all sinking in – these were quinn’s people. this was him finding a few more of his tribe. The other ones for whom dinosaurs were not something they grew out of, nor got over. the other ones who may possibly be more proud of achieving a grade point average of 3.14 than one of 4.0. the other ones who might see HGTV through the lens of house flipping to afford more expeditions and more plaster. the other ones whose bed stickers may have been classified at age 6 into jurassic and cretaceous species. The other ones whose parents stood around awkwardly at camp drop-off trying not to let on how relieved they were that our kids are finally finding one another.
somewhere in the eastern cascades, a boy is laying his head on his dinosaur pillowcase, among a pack of campers each with their own heads on their own dinosaur pillowcases, out in a big world doing his thing.
cue the soundtrack… the eleven by the grateful dead is the only song i know that has a time signature of eleven beats per measure! also, i liked that this version was recorded on 8-23-68, quinn’s half birthday, 50 years ago! if we add my age and his together right now, we get 50! oh the number fun to be had on birthdays….
eleven is such a delightfully large, odd, indivisible, palindromic, prime number! but i’ve had a thing for the number eleven for a while now. my young synesthete sees 1 and therefore also 11 in the color red, but for me it’s got a red violet hue.
the eleven
High green chilly winds and windy vines In loops around the twisted shafts of lavender, They’re crawling to the sun. Underfoot the ground is patched With arms of ivy wrapped around the manzanita, Stark and shiny in the breeze. Wonder who will water all the children of the garden When they sigh about the barren lack of rain and Droop so hungry neath the sky. William Tell has stretched his bow till it won’t stretch No furthermore and/or it may require a change that hasn’t come before. No more time to tell how, this is the season of what, Now is the time of returning with our thought Jewels polished and gleaming. Now is the time past believing the child has relinquished the rein, Now is the test of the boomerang tossed in the night of redeeming. Seven faced marble eyed transitory dream doll, Six proud walkers on the jingle bell rainbow, Five men writing with fingers of gold, Four men tracking down the great white sperm whale, Three girls waiting in a foreign dominion Riding in the whale belly, fade away in moonlight, Sink beneath the waters to the coral sands below.
Songwriters: Philip Lesh / Robert C. Hunter
now is the time of returning… back from another revolution around the sun… to our other homeland of new york… to seeing my child at an age of my own childhood that i remember more vividly than the ones he has been before… now is the time of returning with our thought jewels polished and gleaming!
the more i mull over these lyrics, the more appropriate for a birthday they seem… now is the time past believing the child has relinquished the rein… at first glance this line suggests passing beyond a point of no return, an ending to the innocence of childhood, but upon further reflection, it seems to get beyond assumptions that growing up means the child has gone away, and instead a realization of the child’s intactness in spite of added years. he’s still there galloping along, and we’re past believing he has relinquished the rein.
we might do another double take with the initially despairing thought of wonder(ing) who will water all the children of the garden, but bringing that thought back around to its beginning once more, we might realize it is wonder who will water all the children of the garden. simple yet profound in the layers of meaning. seeing quinn’s delight in the falling snow, hearing him gasp on the morning he awoke to see it falling, and watching his gleeful play assured me that wonder is still watering his garden.
arriving at this age that already seems pre-packaged with extra attitude and a side of, “mom, why do you have to be so embarrassing?” it is easy to feel like childhood may be approaching an ending, but there is so much childhood still inside this kid, and truly in all of us troubled grown ups as well, so much wonder and joy and spunk. yet, this season of what brings new levels of flexibility, awareness, and resilience (evidence of all of these i can already see, mere days into his time as an eleven year old) that shine like thought jewels polished and gleaming, ensuring this will be his best year yet. it may require a change that hasn’t come before, but already i see him rising to the challenges and responding with an ever-expanding consciousness.
i like the word indivisible, concerning eleven’s numerical properties. i think it’s resonating for me given how far quinn has come in his ability to roll with changes and handle emotions, and i think he’s well equipped with tools to keep his spirit whole and intact. indivisible.
for his birthday, i bundled up my stick figure in a hodge podge of hand-me-downs and rapidly serged old pieces of fleece, and stuck him on the cross country skis i used when i was his age. (now is the time of returning…) with olympics mania running rampant through the rew house, he was very excited to try, but he has yet to embrace the concept that falling down a lot is a required part of the skiing process. he did say, however, that if he wins an olympic medal for skiing one day, he’ll tell them to thank me.
it was special for the whole family to get to celebrate the birthday of this particular boy together, for the first time ever!
he is startlingly tall, standing with his grampy. this is all going according to his plan to avenge his mama by becoming taller than his uncles… 6’7″, here he comes.
he opened one birthday present early in the day, because i had an inkling the cousins would get a lot of fun out of using this gift together. there has been a simultaneous bi-coastal dive into origami among the cousins, between their reading origami yoda books and his learning octahedron folding in school. much of the rainy, windy birthday was spent inside, folding colored paper into dinosaurs, yodas, and more octahedra! the entire week produced several large bags full of paper airplanes, and many empty rolls of tape, so the grand finale of origami paper and books was a fitting culmination.
make-your-own-birthday-decorations. we kept it low key, and the kids provided all that was needed in the way of birthday decor.
snow – his birthday (eve) wish come true!
so much good quality time with family made his birthday all the more wonderful. homemade pizza for dinner, time with his aunts, uncles, grammy, and grampy, and playing with his cousins… the simple joys were all he needed.
given his arrival at the age at which harry potter first stepped aboard the hogwarts express, a harry potter theme ran throughout his birthday week, including a gift of some sheet music from the movie soundtrack to play on his bells, and a tournament of wizard chess games played against his uncle t. i love the way this boy makes connections in unique ways with each individual member of his extended family.
high green chilly winds and windy vines… now is the time of returning…
this past year it has finally occurred to me that his time of birth, 3:14, has numerical significance. yep, my baby was born at pi o’clock. and he is nerdy enough to find that quull. we also ate pie for his birthday, homemade peach pie to be exact, a gift of summer made by his grammy’s loving hands, and delivered across the kitchen with flaming candles by his uncle b, accompanied by a chorus of voices of cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents.
turn it up to eleven!
uncle b also showed him a thing or two on his drum set, much to quinn’s delight! he’s a proud walker on the jingle bell rainbow… (i hadn’t noticed the rainbow lyric in this song until this writing, but… of course!) not only has he progressed well with jingling his bells with mallets in the past several months, he has begun to learn drum rolls and paradiddles! again, watching him connect with my brother on this level made me so very happy.
a very happy, snowy, indivisible, jingle bell rainbow, eleventh birthday to my favorite boy!
life is full of good guys and bad guys lately, what with reaching the end of the harry potter series, and quinn’s passion for all things star wars. while reading a section revealing new information about a character, quinn stops me to ask pointed questions about their affiliations: “so, is snape on the dark side then, or the light side?”
when he was very young, i wanted to shy away from good guy/bad guy play, and have always been uncomfortable with his interest in weapons, though i have tried to let him explore unencumbered by my biases. yet i realize now that this play is where he is learning some profound life lessons about the complexity of human nature; this is obviously where he is spending his time and focusing his neurons. the paradox of the good/evil dichotomy is that we can almost never categorize someone as good or bad without a long list of caveats. more often than yes or no, the answer to questions in life is “it depends.” even darth vader, (i’m loosely trying to avoid harry potter spoilers in here but if you’re late to the star wars party, my apologies) is impossible to pin entirely on the dark side, though much of his career was spent there. his youth and then the moment of his death belie other lighter aspects of his character.
voldemort presents a very dark character indeed, however, harry does a great job of noticing all the similarities between himself and the dark lord, and throughout the story we learn of points in his life where a choice was made aligning him with darkness. sometimes our path depends very much on these choices, but while there is evil in the world, not one of us is inherently evil.
there is always a path back to the light, another choice to be made, no matter how far one has crossed over to the dark side. (i am a believer that people can change; whether they will change is up to them, and i don’t let my life hinge on someone else changing, say for example, a coparent, but can people change? i think yes.) this is one of the refrains in harry potter. the dark side may hold sway for some, with its sibilant siren’s song. and though it would have been difficult for voldemort to show remorse, as harry urges him to do, other characters did reach epiphanies and turn back towards the light in various parts of the story. sometimes, one who has turned dark comes back to be the most valiant of the good guys.
the initial appeal of the good guy/bad guy play, i think, lies in the straightforwardness, the ease with which one can identify with the “right” ones, can neatly place each character in one box or the other, hero or villain. and yet, as with everything in life, there is so much more gray than black and white. i am heartened to see quinn absorbing these subtle shades of gray in the stories he so enjoys.
one of the dangers of an oversimplified good guy/bad guy mentality, to my mind, is the righteous justification of acts of a darker nature. so much war and slavery and rape and slaughter is deemed justified as long as these acts are directed toward the “right” target, i.e. the bad guys. i think the worst part of watching my son want to take up a make believe weapon and kill a bad guy is just that; i want him to realize that you can never really know, you can never be sure, that who you are fighting is truly evil. and no amount of evil on someone else’s part makes it right for you to commit atrocities. two wrongs don’t make a right, right? it is why i oppose the death penalty.
is anyone ever truly evil through and through? isn’t there always a person behind the evil, an adult who was once a child, was once a baby, as innocent as any other baby? i’m not saying evil isn’t real and ever-present, or that people should not be held accountable for wrongdoing. it’s just that i don’t believe one can ever justify committing acts of evil in order to thwart evil. this message is woven through j.k. rowling’s writing, and is one reason i find her books so compelling. harry’s aim to disarm even when his opponents are dueling to kill illustrates his commitment to keeping his own soul intact and aligned with the light.
if quinn’s constant humming of star wars theme music, punctuated by sound effects of explosions and light sabres swooshing through the air, is any indication, this stuff is a big deal to him, a dominant theme of his thinking. even the squirrels in our yard seem to join in, making their laser gun sounds: “pew! pew! pew! ack-ack-ack-ack-ack!”
we might spend an entire morning out tidepooling, ogling anemones and urchins, but the ongoing subplot is one of “which angry birds star wars bird are you now, mama?” (i’m always leia.) and “which power do you have?” (why, the force, of course.)
“i’ll be the red luke bird, and i’ll have a blue light sabre.” no matter how many times we have both defaulted to these choices, he will still begin this game again and again, and continue to ask me who i want to be now, and announce his decision to be red luke with blue light sabre, and we jedis will strike out yet again to fight the storm troopers, the game never losing its appeal, his eyes still sparkling with anticipation at the prospect of fighting evil.
we might be romping along the beach, enjoying the sun-warmed sand between our bare toes, and quinn will find a perfectly smooth piece of driftwood for a wand. “want to know what’s inside the core of my wand? a phoenix feather!” the better to fight the dark lord with, my sweet son.
harry potter and luke skywalker are not the only heroes who capture quinn’s awe. he finds the good guys in any context and identifies with them the most strongly. on mother’s day, our little family went to my parents’ church together as a gift to my mom, and after singing the first chorus, quinn looked up at me, beaming, and remarked, “i like jesus.” as convoluted as my relationship to that particular good guy and his organized religion might be, i could only smile back and say truthfully, “me too, buddy.”
it is this unerring positive heliotropism i see in quinn, like a little sunflower forever orienting itself towards the sun, that comforts my unease with laser guns and light sabres, and is the precious gem i wish to preserve when i worry over his self-image and his moral compass. as surely as anything, his moral compass is properly calibrated, he identifies through and through with the most light-bringing and life-affirming of characters. the ones who have always been on the light side, and never wavered. he is and, i trust, will always remain steadfastly one of the good guys.
