beyond the pale

It was New Year’s evening at my brother’s house. Pizza dinner was over, paper plates tossed, and The Banshee and I were just hanging out at the table.

“So, Banshee,” I said, “have you thought about your New Year’s resolutions?”

She furrowed her pale brow at me. “What’s a resolution?”

“Oh, well, it’s like a goal. Something you’d like to do or accomplish in the new year.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“So can you think of anything — anything you really want to do in 2009?”

“Uhhh ….. nooo.” Her eyes narrowed at me.

So, randomly, I began offering suggestions.

“Hm. I’ll bet you want to …… learn how to change Baby Banshee’s diaper?”

“Ew. No!”

“Maybe you want toooo ….. live inside a log?”

“Tee Tee! No!”

“Hm. I’ll bet you want to …. sleep on a bed of wet noodles?”

She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “TEE TEE!”

“I’m just trying to help,” I shrugged. “Can you think of something?”

Her little face screwed up in concentration.

“Well …. I wanna grow taller!”

“Grow taller? That’s good. Why don’t we get a pen and write these down?”

Her eyes lit up. Suddenly, she was all over that. She scurried into the kitchen, rummaging in a drawer until she found a pen and note pad. At first, she wanted to do the writing, which she can do, a little bit, but then decided I’d be faster at it. So I labeled the top of the paper Banshee’s 2009 Resolutions and wrote Grow Taller in the number one position with a flourish.

Something had clicked for her somehow. As I pointed and read it to her, her eyes glowed with delight, but when I asked her for another one, her face faltered, puckered. She couldn’t think of one. So I started again with my weird random suggestions. If I hit on something she didn’t like, she scrunched her nose and, pfffft, it was gone; if I mentioned something she did like, she crowed a huge “Yeaah!” and I wrote it down. We went on like this at great length until we had a list of ten goals.

So I present to you now …. The Banshee’s 2009 Resolutions:

(Well, um, as prompted by me, Tee Tee)

1. Grow taller

2. Learn to drive a car

3. Learn to ride an elephant

4. Make a TV from a cardboard box (she was very excited about this one, who knew?)

5. Be in a Broadway show

6. Run my own movie theater

7. Learn to make hats

8. Learn to make chocolate cake

9. Grow my own vegetables — tomatoes, carrots, and lettuce (she was quite adamant on the choice of those three, specifically)

10. Learn to make my own salad dressing

Once the list was done, I ahem-ed loudly to the rest of the room and helped her in a David Letterman-like reading of her 2009 goals. Once that was done, she grabbed her “phone” — an old non-working cell phone — and proceeded to call everyone she knew in the whole entire world to inform them of her list, like this:

fake rinng fake rinnng …..

“Oh, hi, Cal. This is The Banshee. May I speak to Sienna? (Hahaha. I loved how she had to ask for Sienna.) Hi, Sienna. I have a list of goals you need to hear. Umm …. I want to ….. uh, Tee Tee? What’s the first one?”

“Grow taller.”

“Yeah. Grow taller. And thenn ….. um, what’s the next one?”

“Learn to drive a car.”

“Oh! Yeah! Learn to drive a car!”

And on it went through the phone call, with me prompting her through the list, but by the time she “called” her cousin Piper, she could say them all, no problem.

“And Piper, I wanna grow my own vegetables, too! Tomatoes and carrots and lettuce! Okay. ‘Bye, Piper!”

I had to ask.

“So how did that go?”

“Good.”

“What did Piper think of your list?”

“She said it was great.”

“That’s awesome.”

“Yeaah!”

She beamed at me and scampered off to post her list on the fridge.

But, frankly, she’s on her own on that cardboard box TV.

My Beloved and I were up at my brother’s for New Year’s day, hanging out in our flannel jammie bottoms and Ugg boots. It’s basically de rigueur at my brother’s on New Year’s day: Flannel jammie bottoms and Ugg boots. Please do not attempt to wear actual street clothing. You will be overdressed and feel like a muttonhead.

In a stunning move, The Banshee crawled into my lap while I was sitting on the floor, turned to face me, and began describing in great detail her trip to Disneyland last week. She LOVED Pirates of the Carribean, was not the least bit scared by it — and she’s four. If you grew up in Southern California, as I did, you basically have that ride memorized. You know every single swashbuckling moment. So as she described it — um, inch by watery inch — I knew exactly what she was talking about. At one point, her little voice got all loud and quavery, like every Jacob Marley I have ever seen, and she said, grabbing my cheeks for emphasis:

“TEE~EE TEE~EE~E!! THE SKEL~E~T-O~N~N~N PIR~A~A~A~TE WAA~AS DR~I~I~IN~NK~I~I~N~NN~G I~NNT~O HIS SKKE~E~LE~TO~O~N~NNN!!!!”

Her eyes were bulging blue as she wailed this into my face. She may not have been terrified, but I was.

And you know who always gets blamed for these theatrics? Me. ME. Lil’ ol ME! What did I do??

Sheesh. People.

**************

Later at nap time, she begged me to come upstairs and read the book we had brought with us as her Christmas present, When the Sky is Like Lace, a recommendation I got from Sheila’s blog, oh, a few years ago now. The Banshee loves books. LOVES ’em. When she was even younger, I’d catch her on occasion dragging them around as if they were toys or babbling along, pretending to read them. Now I was a little concerned that some of this book may be over her head, but, again, she’s — empirically — very very bright. And I’m not just being biased, although I am boasting, which is empirically gross.

We began.

I said the name of the book.

“What does that mean, Tee Tee, ‘the sky is like lace'”?

I didn’t want to explain it, not to be withholding, but for her to experience it herself, so I said, “Let’s read the book and see.”

She snuggled up to me. As the book went on, I watched her face, her reaction. She was very still. Wide-eyed. On certain pages, she pointed to the things named in the text. Things I didn’t think she’d even know, like “chartreuse” or “clam-digging.” But she knew. It’s a brilliant book. A gorgeous book. On the very last page, there’s an illustration with this huge purple sky and silvery white clouds. The Banshee just stared at it for a moment, then whispered, “Look, Tee Tee. The sky is like lace.”

Yep, kid. I knew you’d get it.

Even later, when she woke up from her nap, she begged for the book again, climbing into my lap with it. At one point, the book talks about the grass being like “gooseberry jam” and soft like the velvet of an old violin case. I stroked the page as I read, the part of the page with the gooseberry lawn, and The Banshee said, “Tee Tee, I’d want to be barefoot so I could feel the velvet violin.”

And I can’t describe it exactly, that moment with The Banshee, but it’s like I felt something dawning, something sinking in. I blinked some sudden tears from my eyes.

Then I kept reading.