Dalai Mama Dishes

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

When I look down, what I see, extending from the cuff of my sweater up to its elbow, is a thick and dripping smear of fabric glue. "Focaccia," I say, only I skip the second two syllables, and Ben says, "What is it, Mama?"

The kids have been watching me wrestle with a craft project for work -- trying to determine if gluing could work just as well as sewing to turn a pair of old corduroys into a doll. Right now, if I were a billboard, I would have one word on me, and that word would be, "No."...

It's funny that this site is called Wondertime, because just now as I was looking at my collection of notes for the week, I thought to myself -- with a sense neither of humor nor of irony -- "This really is a time of wonder." And then I slapped my forehead with my corny, embarrassed hand.

But it is. Birdy right now -- you can practically hear the tick-ticking of her brain as it works, swirling information around like wine in a glass. I always picture the inside of my own mind as a large, dim room filled floor to ceiling with dusty piles of bursting and disorganized file folders, lots of them held together with decaying rubber bands, maybe an old guy at a desk working by the light from a candle stump. I have, I confess, pictured the inside of...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

"Ben -- which picture do you like better?"

Ben has gotten a little Spirograph-style mandala-drawing kit as a gift, and now Birdy is using it to pencil out a wobbly arrangement of shapes and squiggles, some drawn happily free-form, some traced agonizingly through the stencils. Ben himself is making a little collage of drawn candies -- a piece of gum, a Tootsie roll, a starlight mint, each one outlined and colored with markers, then cut out and taped onto an index card....

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

"It's Bennie's joke," Birdy is explaining, but I'm only half listening. "It's, well, I think what it is is Who porks your pine? Get it, Mama?" "What?" I say. I'm only half listening because what I'm doing is packing dinner plates because what we're doing is moving. As in: changing houses. As in: upheaval so profound it takes your breath away.

"I think it's What do you call the animal that takes all your trees? And it's pork your pine. Like porcupine. Get it?" It's like the punch line of one of those dirty jokes I never got as a child. That's not my belly button either....

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

What happens is that a plague of locusts descends on our house, a blizzard ices over our very hearts, a tornado crashes through and whirls away all our earthly happiness because someone has been vaguely unkind! I know. Can you believe it? A human child acting human?

Michael and I have cozied up with Birdy in the children's bed to read Stuart Little, and when Ben skips into the room to join us, Birdy says gleefully, "Oh, I'm sorry, Bennie -- there's no room in the bed for you!" What you can't hear, reading that sentence on the page, is the way the word "sorry"...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Because I have work coming out of my ear holes, I set the kids up to watch The Jungle Book through dinnertime: the thing we call "Pizza Movie Night" even though tonight, technically, it's Trader Joe's Spanakopita Movie Night. What a wonderful idea, eating spanakopita in bed! Because phyllo pastry is just so tidy, the way it shatters into a fountain of flakes when you so much as look at it. By the end of the movie, we're covered in pastry like it's ashes and we're victims at Pompei. Later still, I will munch absently on the crumbs while reading in bed, until I put something in my mouth that turns out to be not actually spanakopita....