A Childrens' Story / Christmas Day 11

This startling day begins unassumingly.

I’m trying to write a little. It’s 7 am, Marin’s orbiting out to work, Teo is caught up in her gravity, but will be in mine five minutes from now. Time to commit – bread baking! I get out the Kitchenaid mixer my brother Ronnie sent us for Christmas. Insert bread hook. I falter when I realize that my bread recipe uses 12 cups of dry, and this mixer only allows 8. Okay, time to reconfigure all ingredients.

Then next half hour is about getting all the ingredients ready, the yeast and honey into warm water (Teo loves to lick fingers with honey on them, his highlight of the process), the dry ingredients, the new machine. It all works as planned. When the machine is done, some hand kneading is still required. Which is what Teo has been saying the whole time: "Papa, don’t forget to knead the bread."

Then when it’s all put away for first rise, and I want to write about worship for the UU’s for Sunday, Teo begins to turn off all the lights in the house. He wants to sit and sing to the Christmas tree. He’s already sitting as I join him. "Further away," he commands – I’m sitting too close to the tree. All the details have to be correct. His template for this "liturgy" is all of two weeks old – we’ve done this half a dozen times evenings before supper.

Teo starts singing "O Tannenbaum" and I try to help him with the German (I don’t actually know and therefore can’t teach an English version "O Christmas Tree") but he cuts me off. "By myself!" he commands. And he manages to get through it, the whole thing, in sort of German, while exuberantly spinning himself in a circle beside me on his butt. Choreography!

Then I start "Away in a manger," followed by "Silent Night," which he lets me lead. His enthusiasm returns when he starts what to Marin’s chagrin may endure on his list of Christmas songs, a Christmas-invasive song from my guitar teaching, Bob Marley’s "I Shot the Sheriff."

As the morning picks up steam, and I’m dressing Teo downstairs, we stumble upon a new game. I hum out the melody of a song he knows, and Matteo explodes with delight when he figures out which one it is, charging forth with the words, and demanding another challenge. As with "Tannenbaum," I’m amazed at his feats of memory.

It’s another banner day at the pool. He takes off on his noodle, "walking" himself all over the pool, chasing balls, squirting me with water from his mouth, having fun. So different from just one week ago, when I was still "wearing" him around my neck. Now he’s expansive. He even tries getting off the noodle, and manages to stay up in the water, but panics. He’ll get this in another couple weeks, no question.

After swimming, we join three other families across the street at the library for the two-year-olds’ storytelling hour. It’s all about kitty cats, with three story books, a felt board, just good fun. On the road again to the Post Office, we are bathed in orange light. The sun is knifing through under the clouds, and there’s a sun-dog shining like the end of a rainbow toward the south. "Teo, a sun dog, over there, see it? See it? Like a rainbow. See it? Over there." I’m not sure he gets what I’m talking about but there’s no missing my enthusiasm.

All day long I’m trying to digest Barak Obama’s and Mike Huckabee’s remarkable victories in the Iowa caucuses. It seems so long since there’s been a sign of hope for our poor, earnest, abused, exhausted nation. Seems like voters in Iowa wanted to shake things up. What luck! In mid-afternoon, while Teo pretends to sleep, and the bread’s in the oven, I web-stream KCRW’s "Left Right and Center" in Santa Monica to hear what Matt Miller, Arianna Huffington, and Tony Blankley have to say about Iowa. They’re giddy that, after months of jawing over the so-called "inevitable" nominations of Clinton and Guiliani/Romney, there’s been an across-the-board upset, and cynicism is legitimately replaced by amazement.

Hearing a peep downstairs, I go looking for Teo. He’s not in our bed, where I read him to sleep an hour earlier. The peep is coming from his bedroom. I look for him to be playing in the dark on the floor. Instead, he’s managed to scale his crib from the outside in, and was curled up in his "nest" with blankies, stuffed critters, and a half dozen books. Not sleeping. Whoa.

I urge him to reconsider sleeping, and I have the sense that he’s ready. It’s part of what is happening between us, he’s growing up, there’s more relationship there than there used to be, more reciprocity, more trust.

Then, back to the computer: KCRW had put me on the trail of U Tube and Obama’s Iowa victory speech. I listen to three minutes of 15 before I have to leave. It was goosebump material. I am amazed at the Martin Luther King moral authority and confidence and gratitude he conveyed in just his opening. I walk down to the garage after Marin arrives home (and we tag-team off on both bread and child) greedy for more, but brimming with a sense that I could feel at home in my country again. Thank you Iowa.

Driving out to meet a friend for coffee, I was suddenly catapulted into another ecstasy. Sunset, that same sub-arctic sun of the morning, was prying the late afternoon clouds up with a molten hot blade of light. The omnipresent plume of smoke from Aurora Energy downtown was rising silently into the stratosphere, twisting in rose-colored slow-motion like an erupting volcano.

When I get back in an hour, Marin is meeting with two birth-assistants, the term is "Doulas," the Greek word means "helpers/ servants." We talk about Obama and hope. Remarkably, we all felt today the fear that the nearly impenetrable darkness at the heart of our nation the past 7 years could easily rear up, a cosmic Dick Cheny, to blow our hope away. This dreadful, cowering fear is often what characterizes abuse victims. But, concerning the birth, they are confident and have lots of supportive, thoughtful suggestions for making our birth a peaceful transition, rather than a harrowing, risky ordeal. Now that’s "good shepherding." After winter, new life.

Later, at supper, when Marin and I are discussing dog mushing, talking about dog positions – the lead dog, the team dog, the wheel dog – Teo pipes up, exuberantly, "Sun Dog!"

How serious and joyful is his play at making meaning. We all have much to learn from the children, who never cease to "worship" and who blithely amend our light-in-the-darkness rituals with just the right choreography, singing our song while spinning on their butts.