Skip to main content

And on the 4th day...


Yesterday I woke up very early and very rested.

Early in the day, I learned of the loss of yet another close family friend to the bad ugly C.  A gentle mannered, soft spoken man, who always wore a kind smile and who left us way, way before his time.

In the early dark morning hours, with nothing much to do with a heavy heart, I decided that the day's Advent will be dedicated to a Mom and Daughter day.

When the Urban Little Girl, finally awoke and ran to check the box for December Fourth, she found a note from me.  Telling her how much I love her.  And how much I would love to spend the entire day doing only what she likes to do. 

I wasn't sure how a note, and one with a face value of time with mama would compare to little toy treasures that she had recovered from the Advent boxes the past three days.

But she was thrilled and gave me a hug so big, that it burst the lump in my throat a little bit.

And my girl, being a task master, didn't waste a second.  She climbed a counter stool and said "Let's make a list mama".  The list was of course over-ambitiously long for a day that only had at most 10 hours, but I had to bite back the "We can't do all this today" kind of talk, and just go with it...     

It had highlights like 1) Pick up my "real violin" (which she had been promised for a couple of months by her teacher and us once she mastered her box violin), 2) Come home and practice violin, 3) Have Sushi for lunch at Sushi Tomi, 4) Listen to all the Books on CD together (she had picked them up with Mr. Urban from the library),  5) Go to the park, 6) Go to Michael's to see what they have and buy lots of colorful beads and pebbles, etc., etc., 10) Make dinner together....

We could only accomplish items 1 through 4 and then rushed to do item 10.

We stayed completely on task, 100% of the time.  And we had fun.  I listened to a lot of violin.  A lot.  Violin played by a four year old who had just gotten her instrument (you can imagine what that sounds like).  But in all her seriousness, she produced lovely music and I actually enjoyed it and found it soothing.

And so we ended the 4th day of Advent.... A day just about you and me

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FORTY THREE YEARS, SEVEN MONTHS AND FORTY DAYS

My life and the life of every Iranian I know,  is bookended by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It doesn't matter that I was barely old enough to remember this historic event or that I spent the decades that followed it, far far away from Iran, the Revolution of 1979 is a heavy, tacky, cruel bookend that defines who we used to be, who we are and the recurring nightmares and dreams we’ve had for 43 years.  I can pinpoint with certainty the exact month after which a general feeling of displacement settled like sticky dust all over me, my family, my classroom, my teachers, our closest friends, our home, our city… In the years and decades that followed, I never experienced another event that brought such a magnitude of change to the nucleus of life.   Not in Iran, and definitely not after a whole life lived outside of Iran.  Perhaps only recently, the experience of the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic, the significant fear, change and frustration that both events brought to our col
Post a Comment
Read more

On Donald Trump, Crunchy Bananas and our Children... A "How To" on keeping up Spirits and Sanity

The other morning at breakfast, my four year old looked, yet again somberly, at the breakfast before her.  Despite having enthusiastically selected a hodgepodge of liberally salted hard boiled egg whites on the side of toasted hamburger buns, strawberries and vanilla yogurt and a cup of milk, she still could not bring herself to enjoy her breakfast.  Her face was wrinkled, as was mine with exasperation from yet another failed attempt at assembling a palatable breakfast for my picky eater. This one, she is quite the philosopher.  And before I could ask her why she wasn't eating, she said: "Two Things!"  Holding up two tiny fingers.  "The smells of these foods I picked, don't go with each other! And I wish Donald Trump would magically become Hillary Clinton, and the word (world) would be GREAT again".     Despite our best efforts to protect our children from the anxiety of these times, they are alert and picking up on the mood (and the lingo) in the wor
1 comment
Read more

Safa

I have always loved words.  The way some people love shiny new objects.  As soon as I heard a new word, a word that captured my imagination, my energy, my hundreds of unnamed inner thoughts and feelings, I would latch on to it with fearceness, joy and curiosity.  I have also always been intrigued by how regular old words can be used in an unexpected context and evoke bursts of unexpected feelings in the listener, such as laughter, anticipation or tears.  I would search for those words coming out of the mouths of everyone around me, and mentally catalog them like a dutiful librarian, and await the opportunity to say the words with my own mouth out loud to an audience, or better yet use it in an essay where the teacher could grade it, get a kick out of it, or read it to the whole class.      As a child I always loved the Persian word Safa .   For one thing the word sounds so simple, yet sophisticated and beautiful, and for another, each of my memories of hearing this word is stored in th
2 comments
Read more