I love this picture of Arielle at two, heading out all by herself across a snowy field to a distant playground—a photo that, to me, embodies better than words can express her adventurous spirit. From A Patchwork Memoir:

Arielle was away in Illinois for a month; then, as soon as the family got back, everybody came down with the flu in succession—and just about the time the last one recovered, Arielle got head lice. I did manage to see her once during this time, when we went to the Little Farm in Tilden Park, her very favorite thing to do. On the drive up Marin, I asked if she’d gotten to make a snowman in Illinois. “Her cousins made one for her,” said Leia. “It melt!” cried Arielle from her car seat in the back, still apparently wonder-struck by the fact. (She hasn’t mastered the past tense yet, but it occurs to me that at her age you wouldn’t need it much.) She went on jabbering happily in accents of her own, as incomprehensible to me as most of those in British movies. I realized I’d been foolishly hoping, considering how fast toddlers learn, that she’d come back from the Midwest with an accent like mine (Ella says I still don’t sound like a Californian), and at long last I’d be able to understand her completely.

As we always do, we brought a box of tattered lettuce leaves, discarded from the Berkeley Bowl, to feed Jenny and Tillie, the two donkeys, as well as an assortment of sheep and goats. There are chickens too, geese, two pigs, a cow, and the newest arrival—a calf that we’re not supposed to feed because it’s still nursing. Arielle has no trepidation about being bitten; she’s as liable to hand the donkeys a broken bit of stalk that puts her fingers at no distance from their teeth as a large frilly leaf which does. They take the greenery delicately with their lips—and all you feel is whiskers.

After we made the rounds of pens, she started off on her own up the muddy path along the upper field and into the eucalyptus woods, like Little Red Riding Hood. There aren’t any wolves, only coyotes, I’ve heard, but I hurried after her anyway, worried about her straying into poison oak.

On our previous visit to Tilden Park, she went on the pony ride, swaying in the saddle she was so tired—she hadn’t had her nap but was determined to ride, anyway. I walked alongside, in case she nodded off on the pony’s back. When the man in charge suddenly stopped us all for no apparent reason, I looked around bewildered. “Step back!” he shouted. I didn’t know what he was talking about until I felt pony pee splattering all over my white canvas sandals.

Now Leia is telling me over the telephone that she just shampooed Arielle’s hair with Rid to kill the lice, but she still has to comb her hair to get out the eggs. At the moment Arielle is in the living room, she adds, twirling to the tune of “Skid-a-ma-rink-a-dink, Skid-a-ma-rink-a-doo” on the tape of silly songs I bought her.

When Leia had told me they were going to visit relatives in Illinois for Christmas, I ran directly out to Mr. Mopps’ and spent the hour before closing time looking over every toy in the place; hard-pressed to top playdough, I hadn’t bought Arielle a Christmas present yet. I considered number and letter games and puppets and tea sets and doctor kits and Legos and musical instruments of all kinds… But once I saw a little “kid-tough” tape recorder with bright buttons and a microphone, it was no contest—the only question was whether she already had one or not.

The next morning I was at Toys ‘R Us (well, it’s cheaper than Mr. Mopps’) when the doors opened at 8:00 a.m., I was so eager to give Arielle her present. It occurred to me that since Manny is Peruvian and Leia Dutch, they wouldn’t know the songs American kids learn growing up, so I also bought a tape that had everything from “Old MacDonald” and “Michael Finnegan” to “Mares Eat Oats” and “Do Your Ears Hang Low?”

At home I picked up my guitar for the first time in years and made up a little song for her to play on her tape recorder. “If your smile feel saggy, and your feet feel draggy, and you don’t know what to do…”

“Our chief want in life,” said Emerson, “is someone who will make us do what we can.”

YOU CAN SING A SONG

When your heart feels happy and your fingers feel snappy

And you don’t know what to do,

You can sing a song or hum along,

Beat a drum or strum a strum,

Or play a buzzy kazoo.

 

Chorus

You can buzz and jingle and clap

Or tap on a tambourine.

You can sing a song or hum along,

beat a drum or strum a strum,

And have a jolly jamboree.

You can find the sheet music and second verse if you click on my Home Page, then choose the last the selection, “LISTEN to funny kids’ songs.”

And speaking of Lake Anza, in A Patchwork Memoir I wrote about another outing with Arielle, after Michael was born.

Leia and I are bundling Arielle, Michael, and all the lake gear into the car (which has got to be 150 degrees)—not a small production. There’s a large tote bag stuffed with diapers, swimsuits, towels, and food—things like rice cakes, sliced melon, and pistachios—a plastic hamper full of beach toys, plus the two inflated floats I bought. Of course, Arielle insists on bringing them both, and, as any parent knows, a two-year-old’s word is law.

But when it comes time to climb in the car herself, Leia can’t find her keys. “What did I do with them?” “I don’t know—I saw them in your hand a minute ago,” I say. We search fruitlessly between the car seats and among the bags until suddenly I spot them lying in the street near the curb. “Oh!” says Leia. “I forgot I dropped them.” Now at certain times of the month, I forget what I’m saying mid-sentence—again and again in the same paragraph—well, actually I don’t know if I’m in the same paragraph because I lose track of the subject I was discussing too, but anyway… I have an excuse—I’m peri-menopausal. Leia used to have one too; now she has two.

At the lake Arielle tries to put on her sunglasses upside down. We sit by a little inlet at the water’s edge that other kids have dug earlier. I bought Arielle some plastic fruit to put in her toy shopping cart, but, worse than a toddler when it comes to delayed gratification, I gave it to her even though I knew we were going to the lake. Now the miniature oranges and bananas and strawberries keep floating off, and one or the other of us has to chase after them.

The water is much clearer now than it was. It’s October and not many people are coming to the lake, though we’ve been having the hottest spell of the year. So it’s easy to see things lying on the lake bottom. It could be because the water isn’t so roiled up, but it could also be because the algae has died back. Yeah, come to think of it, my hair hasn’t been smelling so foul lately.

We go looking in the shallows for whatever we can find—leaves, stones, twigs, eucalyptus “acorns”… When I first plucked one of these out of the water last month, Arielle started to shriek. I think she thought it was some sort of big bug. Even now, I have to pick up each one first—she has to see that it doesn’t bite me, I suspect—before she’ll take it and throw it as far as she can, maybe three feet. This is the age kids start developing fears, Leia tells me.

When we took Arielle on the little steam train in Tilden Park last Sunday, she cried out “Mamia!” and shrank against Leia, keeping her face averted, her eyes as low as possible without actually closing them. Whenever the engine belched steam, she whispered, “Fire!” and refused to be reassured she was safe. Now I ask her, “Do you see any fish?” “No.” “Do you see any turtles?” “No.” “Do you see any crocodiles?” Serenely, “No.” There are fears and there are fears.

I ask her if she wants to build a castle. Again, “No.” She’s very definite about what she wants and what she doesn’t, her noes emphatic, her yeses as musical as birdsong. Bedeviled by indecision myself, I envy her her clarity.

“Hmmm…well… what else can we find?” I muse. “Hmmm…well…what ess can we find?” she mimics my intonation exactly, crouching down just like I do, my little shadow. If we all stayed as good at imitation as we were as toddlers, I think to myself, Robin Williams would be out of a job.

Leia snoozes for a while with Michael on a blanket in the shade, but when she brings him down to the water, a slender little blond girl comes near to peer at him. Possessively, Arielle rushes at her and pushes her away, then plants a kiss on Michael’s forehead like a flag, claiming him as her territory. “I’m not going to take him away,” the little stranger explains reasonably. Whereupon Arielle, mollified, lets her approach and watch Leia breast-feeding.

In Balinese culture, I’ve heard, they consider babies still so close to the divine that for the first six months they don’t even give them names; they don’t consider they belong to their parents or to the earth yet.

And that’s how Arielle appears to me—still brightly illumined by the divine.

Three more major players in my life are my godkids: Arielle, Michael, and Emma (for Emerald), as I mention in my long bio. From the beginning they’ve been a family of globetrotters. Maybe I should add that my friend Leia, their mom, is Dutch, and their dad, Manny, is Peruvian? Besides multiple trips to Hawaii, South America, and the usual European cities tourists visit, they’ve been to Sydney, Cairo, and Istanbul. And I’ve had the great good fortune to know all three kids from birth, since they live only three blocks away in a house Leia bought and renovated years ago. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote a vignette I called “Movie Star.”

Leia says this time she’s going to have a water birth, that she remembered what I’d said about the documentary I saw—how the babies delivered this way sometimes smile at birth. So she’s rented a tub and installed it in the master bedroom.

We’re sitting on towels at Lake Anza, eating bite-sized chunks of watermelon. Arielle, just turned two, is wearing psychedelic sunglasses, feather ponytail bands, and a neon Minnie Mouse swimsuit. “She’s a little movie star, isn’t she?” says the woman on the next blanket. Oh, she’s way beyond cute.

Leia says when they’re out walking and come to an intersection, she tells Arielle, “Stay close!” And Arielle takes her mother’s hand and presses her cheek against it as they cross the street together.

I tell her how my friend Marcia’s two-year-old, Wesley, makes his little plastic action figures kiss and made up after a skirmish. When he thinks he’s done something wrong, he announces he needs a time-out, then goes into his playhouse and whimpers to be let out.

“Callie, come!” Arielle calls back as she trots down to the water’s edge. I obey.

“You’ve made a cake!” I exclaim when she pours a little pile of sand out of a plastic cup. “But it needs in a candle.” So I stick in a twig I find.

She starts to rock from side to side. “Happy Birsday to you, Happy Birsday to you…” she lisps in a soft, sweet voice.

Marilyn would have eaten her heart out.