No that's not a hat...

Every time I spot the Eiffel Tower I feel slightly giddy.  Max's school is just on the other side of the Seine from the tower, about a 10 minute walk over a picturesque bridge.  When we emerge from the jam-packed Alma-Marceau metro each morning, there it is, a postcard sprung to life.  Maybe in a few weeks it'll blend into the visual white noise.  But so far, I still can't help but glancing up at it quickly, almost surreptitiously, hoping none of the natives catch me grinning.  It's like a celebrity sighting: you want to gape, but you feel a little cheap and silly gawking.

If the Eiffel Tower is the ultimate Paris cliche, then it's undoubtedly the ultimate American in Paris cliche to find it beautiful.  But it is.  I love the new(ish) light show they've put up in the years since I lived here last as a teenager, twinkling up and down its spine on the hour after dark.  No doubt everyone knows that when the Eiffel Tower first went up, there were a fair number of folks who thought that it was a blight on the Parisian landscape.  I've been doing a little research, and I like the description of it as, "a truly tragic street lamp."  I also like the idea that others defended it as "avant garde," because by now it has a vintage kitsch that's part of its romantic appeal.

Kids love the Eiffel Tower.  (That proclamation makes me think of Max's kindergarten teacher last year, who sent home a first letter to parents declaring, "Kindergarteners love baguettes," before asking for volunteers to bring baguettes and "sharp, but not too sharp cheese" to the first K potluck.  This same teacher also requested "Organic, 100% pure maple syrup" for the pancake buddy breakfast, which I brought, thinking it was a great way of getting rid of the large container I had in the fridge, only to discover that it had lily pads of mold floating in it.  She dispatched a parent to drive to the store then and there for more.  But our gourmet kindergarten teacher was right.  Kids do love baguettes.  Max has been living on them since we got here.  But I digress...)

When we first got here, our friends George and Elka came to visit with their kids, and the kids all wanted to waste no time before visiting the Eiffel Tower.  Unfortunately, the holiday lines looped endlessly (really--we couldn't find the end of the line) and even the children eventually agreed that we should call it a day when we learned that the wait would be more than four hours long.

But with the holidays finally behind us, I decided to try again with Max yesterday afternoon, launching the first of many "Adventure Wednesdays."

It turns out that all schools in France have Wednesday afternoons off.  That's right, if 2 weeks off every 6 weeks weren't enough vacances, kids here also get dismissed at noon chaque Mercredi.  I'd be lying if I said that this news initially filled me with excitement.  Max's school time is when we get our work done, and it's already a short school day (what with those crushing metro rides).  But with no alternative, I decided to try to see this as an opportunity to spend time with my kid (in Paris!) while he still wants the pleasure (that's debatable) of my company.  So: Adventure Wednesdays.  We also used the concept to help sell this whole living abroad thing to Max, when he was expressing some reluctance over leaving his familiar world, school and friends behind.  ("But you'll have Wednesday afternoons off!  We'll go on weekly adventures!")  

I've been thinking about the word "adventure" since we got here.  Not only was it the word we kept using to describe to Max what was about to shake up his little world, I also often used it when I was feeling daunted by the upheaval, telling myself that I needed an adventure, having been in the same apartment since the kid was born, in the same job, not having gone anywhere except to visit relatives.  But the true definition of "adventure" started sinking in on our 11 hour bus ride from Zurich on Christmas Eve.  Matt and I were increasingly incredulous (and sore necked) as the promised "five hour ride" stretched on and on, and all we could see were Pizza Huts and a chain restaurant named "Hippoppotame" on the European highway, which bears an eerie resemblance to the Jersey turnpike.  "We're having an adventure," Max reminded us.  And no, I don't think he was being sarcastic.

Indeed, an adventure means not being able to perfectly anticipate, plan for or control what's going to happen.  And that is what travel is about, or at least what ends up happening when you travel--for better and (sometimes) worse.  Trips put us at cross purposes with ourselves because we spend so much time trying to ensure that nothing goes wrong, doing research and making itineraries and booking tickets, but then we arrive and want to have experiences that we could not have anticipated, to meet people and do things previously unimagined.

Which a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower isn't...

That said, Max and I decided that "Adventure Wednesdays" means doing whatever seems interesting and fun.  So yesterday, after I picked him up from school, we started with a picnic of (baguette) sandwiches on the banks of the Seine.  We walked to a relatively quiet and industrial part of the river where the people who lived and worked on the tied up boats happened to take out their recycling as we were having our lunch.  Max enjoyed watching the large cans of trash get electronically carried up and robotically dumped.  I had stopped and bought 4 "macarons" at one of the recommended bakeries that we hadn't hit yet: Laduree on the Champs Elysees (a block from Max's school--hey, I had a couple of hours to kill that morning while waiting for Adventure Wednesday to begin).  I'm still trying to decide how I feel about macarons.  Everyone else seems to love them, but they remind me of raw cookie dough with a crispy shell, or a gob of frosting that's been seared on the outside.  I think I prefer a good pain au chocolat.  But duty called, and Max and I somehow managed to eat all four of them as we tried to make up our minds about whether we liked the chocolate, green apple or black licorice best.

The trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower was definitely enhanced by my six-year-old companion.  He loved the fact that the elevator was operated by some kind of enormous crank with a cable that you could watch spooling and unspooling, and also that the elevator had two tiers, one on top of the other, kind of like the Bay Bridge.  The view from the top interested him less.  We decided to come down by stairs--26 flights of them to be exact.  Then, we were going to make a trip to the Sewer Museum (ah, the fun never ceases) when we happened to pass a museum of anthropology that was having a mask making "atelier" or workshop for kids ages 6-8.  In the spirit of "Adventure Wednesday," I gave Max the choice and he picked masks over sewer pipes (though it was a toughie).

I was highly entertained by the French exchange between the woman running the workshop and one of the grandmothers who had brought 2 kids to it.  The instructor started by saying that she could see quite clearly that some of these children were not close to the minimum required 6 years of age, and as this wasn't developmentally appropriate for younger children, they were essentially being set up for failure.  Then the grandmother defended herself by saying, "I can't split myself in half, and I have to take care of both of them, so what do you propose?"  The teacher shrugged and responded, "I myself have a three year old and a six year old, and I make other arrangements sometimes, when one of them has a need that the other doesn't share."  This went on and on for a while, both sides admirably unbudging.  I don't think that this kind of exchange would have happened in the US, or it would have been much more nicey-nice, all smiles and subtext.  In any case, no one caved and the class happened and the younger child seemed to do fine.  I noticed that I was only one of two parents there on a Wednesday afternoon.  All the others were grandparents or "nounous."  That, I learned, is French for nanny.  I learned this when the instructor showed a slide of Africa and the know-it-all boy in the front (there's one in every room, regardless of culture) raised his hand to share that he once had a nounou from Madagascar, who couldn't be bothered to play with him.

I have to say that I was impressed by Max, who wanted to be part of this "atelier" and insisted on sitting on the floor with the other kids, even though he couldn't understand a word of the French presentation.  When I tried to sit beside him to translate, he told me (nicely, but unmistakably) that I could go back with the grandparents and nounous.  Have I already started to embarrass him? I wondered.  But he later told me that it wasn't that, but he wanted to try and listen and if I was translating then he didn't have a chance to guess at what the woman might be saying.  (I think I actually was embarrassing him a little, but he was trying to spare my feelings).

I knew, as we toured the museum and looked at all of these really cool wooden and ivory carvings from Africa, that Max was fantasizing about the mask he was going to carve out of wood (or possibly ivory).  And I knew, before the teacher got out the box of construction paper, that the reality wasn't going to be quite as exciting.  But he adjusted his expectations and rolled with it.  We carried his mask--the paint and glitter glue still dripping wet--on the crowded metro home, then proceeded to get lost (yet again--this city is built on circles instead of squares and I can barely manage a grid) in our own neighborhood.  The afternoon was an adventure, full of things we couldn't quite have imagined seeing or doing.  Even if we did go to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Happy "Three Kings Day"

Systems are not exactly up and running--still no cell phone--but I do have an ipad that allows me to take photographs.  This is one of Matt in front of a highly recommended bakery called Du Pain et Des Idees, where I have been wanting to go ever since we got here, but was thwarted by a) holiday closure, and b) the fact that it's only open Monday-Friday.

Poor Dana arrived in Paris with a list of bakeries and restaurants that she wanted to try, and most of them happened to be closed for a long holiday break.  We spend a lot of days walking around with David Lebovitz's "Paris Pastry App," which finds his favorite bakeries by arrondissement, and then locates your proximity to them, only to discover said patisseries shut down for two weeks.  They take their vacations as seriously as their pastries over here.

It was a little alarming, for instance, to get the schedule for Max's new school (he started today) and learn that he gets 2 weeks off every 6 weeks.  As our neighbor put it, "There is a very high rate of unemployment in France.  This gets them ready."

Both of our upstairs neighbors have children Max's age--there are two seven year old girls, and a five year old boy.  We met them all last night for the first time, and the kids immediately hit it off, already running between the apartments, to Max's great joy.

"Tomorrow the kids go back to school," one of the parents said wearily, once the kids had vanished into a bedroom.  "Tomorrow, our vacation begins."  Having just spent a rather intense and compressed (wonderful! exhausting!) 3 weeks with Max, we had to agree.

Here is a photo of Max in front of his new school, about to enter for the first time.  His question before bed last night, upon learning that French kids don't bring a lunch box to school?  "What's on the menu?"

Here is what was on our menu for lunch without Max (and Mimi's last day in Paris).  We debated heating up some soup  but decided it wasn't worth the bother.  The best of this bunch was the "snail" of pistachios and chocolate--back left corner.

We're still trying to decode "The French Paradox."  How do the natives eat so much butter and stay so lean?  Or do they not actually eat?  We've spent the past few weeks walking around the city and while here is a patisserie on every block, I don't think I've spotted a single gym.

But I have seen a fair amount of this:

Mimi was just noting the svelte legs on this French grandma when she pulled out her cigarette and lit up.  Dad quickly joined in.  We noted several others at the Luxemburg playground pushing swings and strollers with cigarettes conveniently tucked between their fingers.

Hey--you've got to do something to keep your metabolism going.

There is a playground not far from us, at Les Halles, where Matt has been fantasizing about bringing Max ever since he spent some time here this fall without us.  The playgrounds in Paris are much better than those in SF, if by better you mean more exciting, built with an eye toward adventure and not safety.  This is clearly not a country where righteous parents sue because their kids get scratched on the swingset.  The structures are high, the ground surfaces hard, and very often parents congregate in chairs strategically placed outside the playground fence.

How strategically, we only just learned.

Earlier this week, we stumbled upon a great playground at the Jardin de Luxembourg where there was a circular zip line of sorts.  Kids would line up and seize a long pole at the end of which was a padded seat.  They then hurled themselves onto it, either seated or (for the taller and braver) standing.  This contraption wouldn't fly in the US, and there certainly wouldn't be 3 such metal bars, with no spacing between them, meaning that kids can hurl themselves one after another and (quite often) collide in midair.  "Bouge toi!" kids yell.  Move!  More than occasional tears resulted in parents speaking up from the outskirts, "Ca va," or "Ce n'est pas grave."  It's not serious.  You're fine.  Get over it.  This attitude gets a lot of traction in Bringing Up Bebe.  It's also one I remember from having been a student at the Lycee as a kid, and I think it has inadvertently infected me and my parenting style, because I find myself sighing with relief.  Kids are not made of china, and it's not in my nature to hover.  (OK--I'm too lazy and I prefer to read while my kid plays).

So--back to the point--yesterday we discovered the apex of laissez faire parenting.  Matt had gone with Max three times to check out this cool playground near our house, and every time half of it was locked.  "It's only for ages seven and up," some playground attendant had said to Matt, who lacked the language skills to ask where the unlocked entrance was.  He brought me back with him and we circled the locked enclosure.  He was right that the playground within looked wonderful: tall, with curving metal enclosures, especially dangerous.  But every gate had a large padlock, even though we could see more than a dozen kids happily playing inside.  Matt concluded that they must have jumped the gate, even though it seemed too tall for some of them and so we imagined their parents foisting them over it.

The truth was almost as good.  At 5 pm, we happened to still be circling the fence when suddenly a bunch of parents with shopping bags showed up along with a zookeeper/guard who unlocked a padlock.  Children were summonsed, and after a few minutes they abandoned the precarious playground to huddle on the other side of the gate as it was being unlocked.  I mustered the shoddy French to ask a waiting woman/mother what was going on, and she explained to me that kids are allowed into the playground three times per day, at which point they are locked in for 3 hours.  Parents return at the end of a three hour chunk of time to collect their kids--having accomplished their shopping, taken a yoga class (unlikely), or done whatever else they feel like doing (smoke?) during this period of free babysitting, minus the sitting.  This is in downtown Paris, mind you, not some country hamlet.  But given how impossible we found it to penetrate the locked playground, it might be a deviously safe system.  Although even the lazy/laissez-faire parent in me wonders what would happen if I wasn't even there to say "get over it" when my kid falls down.  Now we understand why it's for 7 year olds and up.  Max says he wants to give it a try, but I think we will wait until he's "fluent" enough to tell other kids to "bouge" when they fall down in front of him on the zipline.

A week into this adventure, I don't yet have my systems in order, by which I mean that I haven't gotten a French cell phone number yet, so my iphone is just a pod (no "i"), and I can't jap photos to this site.  All of this is to explain the unimpressive visual side of this blog.  Things will improve!  But...  I must confess that I have passed a lot of cell phone kiosks (and apparently you can buy sim cards at any Tabac) and opted to wait, a little longer, before converting that benign pod back into a sleek machine that allows me to work anywhere, anytime.

One of the things I knew instinctually (intuitively? in any case, I was reluctant to fully admit it) before coming here was that I had a smartphone problem.  Smartphone is just part of it, really.  Like most of us, I had an internet and appliance-driven scattered attention span.  I have a job that requires me to be available always to colleagues and students--in exchange for the freedom of not having to be at a particular desk in a particular office.  In many--most--ways, this is a well worth it trade.  I communicate quickly in writing, and love the freedom of being able to do my work where I choose to do it, on my own time.  (Damn that woman who said that we should all be slaves to offices--many of us self-manage very well and thrive outside of pens!)  However, (and now maybe I'm proving her point) I had noticed that in the months leading up to departure, as the to-do list lengthened and my anxiety level rose, so did my habit of toggling between tabs online while ostensibly at work, of logging into Facebook from my phone even though I have a sort of love/hate thing about it, checking Twitter, Googling things I didn't really need to know the definition of.  I'd read a single piece by a student, write a paragraph response, and then "reward" myself with a book purchase online.  This lengthened my alleged work sessions ridiculously.  I'd started as a freelancer/"remote" worker in order to be able to write more--but I was having the kind of days that I used to have when I did work in an office, hunched, eyes buzzing, knowing that of the 8 or however many hours I was ostensibly "working," less than half of that time had been put to any real use.  But now it was my fault--I couldn't blame the clock.  It really started to bother me when I began reading on an ipad and would toggle between my novel and email inbox.  I did the same with videos, watching something while keeping a tab open to know if I had new messages.

Note that I'm using the past tense, as if this were all so very long ago.

I don't think I'm alone here.  In fact, I suspect that this is the norm and not the exception.  Sometimes I feel sad for Max because he won't have known a time before fractured attention spans and constantly accessible everything.  No wonder there is such a mania among SF, Brooklyn (and Paris) hipsters for all things analog.  Once I was talking to the librarian at Max's school, he was asking me if I'd wanted to be a writer when I was a kid, and I said without thinking, "Yes, I guess so.  I was horrible at math and science and never really interested in anything besides reading.  I guess I had the luxury of not having any choice."  He thought that was funny, but it seemed perfectly logical to me and it still does.  In many ways, I feel like choices make us paralyzed and miserable.  Or at least they can.

So all if this is to put in words not a resolution exactly, because I'm pretty sure that if you DON'T really want to do something, the surest way to make sure it doesn't happen is to turn it into a New Year's Resolution...  But a wish, I guess--that seems lighter and more possible to fulfill in some form.  I am not Amish, and I will be loading my cell phone with a sim card at some point this week.  But I am not going to get a big data plan for it.  I am not going to have email on it, or text messaging.  Even as I would tell people (see Paragraph 1) that my job "requires" me to be available all of the time, let it be known that I am not a brain surgeon, and there is in fact no message that couldn't wait a couple of hours for a response.  No, I'm not that important, and neither is 99% of the stuff I waste time with on my phone and computer.  Over the past week without these devices binging and buzzing all of the time, I've had a greater sense not only of restfulness but also the days have seemed--have been--longer. Louis CK has this routine about how he won't let his daughters amuse themselves on his cell phone on car rides or in restaurant waits because boredom is a crucial part of the human condition and he wants them to learn to tolerate those lulls.  I'm not quite there.  (God help me if I'd ever take Max to a restaurant without some kind of device--god help the restaurant).  That said, I have noticed over the past week that the "boring" periods are becoming less so, almost as if I could feel my fractured attention span knitting back together.

Or maybe it's being here.  Every time I go outside (even inside) I want to pinch myself.  Some people say that Paris is a museum and not a city, but it doesn't feel that way to me.  I love our neighborhood, with its endless corridors of African hair salons (Jesus Cosmetiques!  Gloire A Dieu Beauty), Indian restaurants, Hallal butchers, second rate boulangeries (and second rate is still pretty damn good), fur stores, and "hipster" bars, including the one right downstairs where Matt and I watched a French man dancing by himself for a good half hour the other night, white man's overbite and all.  I love lying in bed and looking up at the whipped cream moldings on the ceiling, which are cracking in places, and wondering who exactly specializes in repairing ceilings made in the 1800s and how they would even begin to go about that.  Same for the cracks on the building that faces us across the courtyard.  It's so picturesque in its decrepitude, with these peeling gray shutters and window boxes inside iron grilles on every floor.  Will those cracks ever be filled or will the building just eventually--in another 200 years?--crumble?  I'll take a picture when I get my phone working.  Eventually...  For today (with two days of vacances to go) I'm taking Max ice skating at the temporary rink in front of City Hall.

This feels like the perfect picture to start with, in spite of the fact (maybe because of it?) that Max is a tad blurry.  Who isn't a little blurry when the jet lag is fresh?  I love these stairs leading to our apartment's front door, even though I will say that I think twice before running back up them to grab something forgotten, and even though my legs are more than un peu sore a week into this adventure.  

It gives new meaning to "l'esprit de l'escalier," when you think of the perfect retort to a snarky remark once you're already on the staircase and it's too late for your comeback.

After walking 3 miles up to Sacre Coeur and back yesterday, Dana told me that her legs were so sore that she felt like a newborn colt.  The strange thing is that I swear I walked all the time in San Francisco, too, especially the past month when we didn't have a car and were walking Max to school every day.  Is it the cobblestones?  Or are these stairs to blame?  But they are beautiful, and I like imagining their installation, and the fact that they've endured since the apartment was built in 1820.  One of my favorite places is my friend Stephanie's family's vacation house on Blakely Island, an island that is only accessible by small plane or boat, where the house feels like a 60s time capsule as a result because it's so hard to get building materials and furniture on and off the island.  This 5th floor walkup reminds me of that in its 1800's way.  Need a new floorboard?  New bathroom fan?  But do you *really*?  

I can see why our landlord hasn't cleared out a lot of her family's things, and I'm grateful for her book collection.  One of my favorite things is having a limited and subjectively curated collection of books from which to choose.  When I lived in Japan, the selection in English at the local public library was: 1) The Bridges of Madison County, 2) Breakfast at Tiffany's, and 3) Alice in Wonderland.  Here at the apartment there are a lot more to choose from (thanks to the fact that we're renting from a couple of profs, one of whom is British) and it includes a few Harry Potters, PD James, Bleak House, Julian Barnes and Rentata Adler.   

Lest I seem too virtuous going on about reading and walking, let me add that Dana and I were on a "tour de pastry" as we walked, using a poorly functioning David Leibowitz "Paris Pastry" app that lets you find his favorite bakeries and read about his favorite pastries wherever in the city you are.  The lemon yuzu tart that we ate at Gontran Cherrier bakery was incredible.  In its uncloying tanginess, with a perfectly crisp yet eggshell thin butter crust, it put to shame the formerly delicious seeming lemon tart we'd bought at a nameless bakery.  We also got a pitch black squid ink baguette to take home and eat with a cheese so runny you could puncture it with your finger.  The bread was a novelty but I'll take a regular baguette next time.

I will say--I like a culture where every single time you pass a patisserie, no matter the hour of day, people are sitting in the window, eating the most beautiful pastries you've ever seen, and the bars are similarly full of people drinking wine and enjoying themselves at all hours.  My own puritan work ethic has not caught up with me yet, and I'm hoping that it doesn't find me for a while.

First night in Paris

The Watrous-Schumaker trio (we don't all actually have a hyphenated last name, but I'm so tired that it seems shorter somehow just to go with Max's) has arrived in Paris, France after a mere...35? (again, too tired to do the calculation, but that seems about right) hours.  I was about to write "35 hours in the air" but that would also be shorthand.  In fact we spent fewer than 10 of those hours in the air.  It would be tedious to type out all of the ways in which this trip went awry.  But since I started sharing this, I will impose some of the details upon you.  

1.  On time departure from SFO.  See excited photos of Max, Malena and Matt about to embark on adventure, repeatedly saying so to Max, who is duly in the spirit/mood after having been somewhat apprehensive a while back.  2.  Easy flight to Chicago.  So far so good.  3.  On time departure scheduled from Chicago to Paris.  Chicago is where winter weather can go so wrong, right?  Things look great.  4.  Three hour delay while sitting in seats in Chicago in a plane that would've seemed vintage back in the 70s.  Ashtrays at every seat, malfunctioning flushes on the toilets, teeny TV's every 10 rows or so.  They tell us that there are 2 malfunctioning oxygen masks.  No on is in those seats, but apparently the plane can't fly if 2 masks (that--let's face it--would never save anyone's life "in the unlikely event of a water landing") aren't working.  Mechanics come on board to "fix" the masks, which means taping them up under duct tape and plastic sheeting.  We are told that this isn't good enough.  (Really?)  Mechanics come on board again.  The plane is declared good to go, but then a light malfunctions.  At one point Max is invited into the cock pit (yes, the plane is THAT old-school) where we see about 10,000 lights.  It's hard to imagine how one malfunctioning would even be noticed.  After 3 hours on the runway we take off.  They have repeatedly told us, "Our flight time is only 7 hours, which is RIDICULOUSLY short, and so none of this matters!"  5.  After about 7.5 hours, they come on to announce that Paris is having a "tornado," and we are not allowed to land at Charles De Gaulle.  NO planes are landing!  This is what they say.  They tell us that no one will miss connections since the airport is essentially shut down.  6.  An hour later we are rerouted to Zurich and told that we will be put on a bus ("with sandwiches!") and taken to Paris that way.  We are told it will be a 5 hour bus ride.  7.  I'll spare some of the more boring (what?  More boring than what we've heard so far?  Can it be?) details.  It took over 10 hours to bus across the autobahn (or whatever) into Paris.  There were indeed a lot of sandwiches.  We arrived at CGG after midnight on Christmas Eve.  We got to our apartment at 2 am, at which point Matt (mostly) lugged 9 pieces of luggage up 5 flights in our 1820 apartment.

All this said, we are here!  

And all things considered, it could have been a lot worse.  For instance, Max really was a great kid from start to finish of the journey.  (My new mantra: It's about the destination, not the journey).  He made origami star wars figures.  Read about 150 pages of Harry Potter 4.  (OK, was read to).  Ate a LOT of chocolate (first American, then Swiss, then French).  Came to understand that the word "adventure" actually means not knowing what's going to happen at any given moment.  Managed to be contained in a seat for 1.5 days without exploding (I didn't realize it was possible).

The group of humans on the 10 hour bus ride from Zurich was amazingly uncomplaining and decent.  There was even a young woman whose birthday was yesterday.  Would I have been complaining nonstop?  Absolutely.  But she just curled up and napped and at one point one of the other ladies on the bus initiated a group sing of "Happy Birthday."  Would I have been mortified?  Yes.  But this young woman video filmed it on her phone and then said that she would keep this forever.  

Arriving in our actual apartment was definitely the highlight of this "adventure."  The 5 flights of curving stairs are beautiful, especially when you're not tasked with carrying all of the luggage.  (Really, someone had to hold that child's hand, right?)  It's old in the best way, with creaky wooden floors and clanking radiators (actually, I wish they'd clank a little more right now, because it's a cold Christmas morning) and the bed felt MIGHTY comfortable last night at least.  We'll see how it feels in a less dire state of fatigue.  Max was excited to drive through our new neighborhood (the 10th) and brimming with energy, only sorry we couldn't, at 2 am, "go on 2 walks and draw the gargoyles at Notre Dame."  We had no time to grocery shop for Christmas as planned, but we have a lot of chocolate.  Things could definitely be worse.

It is the destination, not the journey!

It scared me when the woman on the plane next to Max and me told me that she was a preschool teacher at a Friends School.  She was so clearly that kind of person who announces that they're Buddhist but is obviusly seething beneath the carefully constructed zen veneer, a brittle facade that could pop off at the slightest provocation.

In this case, the provocation was Max's humming.

"Is he an unusually musical child?" she asked me, flipping her long gray hair.

"Um, I don't really know," I said, vainly believing that she was picking up on something (she had already told me that she taught preschool).  "He might be."  I strove for modesty.  "His dad is a composer, but I mean he's only 5.  He hasn't taken lessons yet or anything."  But as I yammered on, something about the way she was eyeing me started to clue me in to the fact that she might not in fact be paying me, or him, a compliment.  "Oh wait," I said.  "Is his humming bothering you?"

"These aren't noise-canceling headphones," she said, without a whiff of apology.  "He hasn't stopped humming since we boarded this plane."  (It had been 10 minutes).  "If he keeps it up, I'll have to kill myself."

That seemed a little dramatic.  At the same time, I felt both horrified and flabbergasted.  I couldn't tell if I was the asshole or if she was.  Or if Max was.  Well, probably we all were.  The funny part is, I make it a habit of never talking to my seatmates on airplanes.  In fact, I recently talked to a friend about how even if I happened to be seated next to someone I might have a great deal in common with, someone I'd even be friends with in real life, I'd rather not figure it out.  All I want to do is sit there, get absorbed in my trash magazine and overpriced snack, and not talk.  And most of the time, when I have violated this rule of mine, I've greatly regretted it.  But for some reason--actually, because this woman was reading Olive Kittredge, and I thought that anyone reading that excellent book couldn't be bad--I'd violated this rule again, and opened up the portal of conversation that then allowed her to tell me that my child's humming was going to lead to her imminent suicide.

What she didn't know was that we'd spent the past 5 days in New Jersey eating an average of 5 quarts of frozen blueberries per day, popping them mindlessly while watching vast quantities of Netflix.  My grandmother stockpiles them in the early summer, and freezes them to last the year, although after our visit she will be lucky if they last the next 3 months, since every time Max asked for "one more container," I'd say, "Oh, we really shouldn't," even as I tiptoed back downstairs to raid the freezer again.  They were highly addictive, tart little popsicles that left us (well, Max in particular) with extremely foul smelling farts, when consumed in those quantities.  And being on the plane is already a fart-inducer.  The smells emanating from his body were truly not to be believed.  And true to form, our cranky Quaker friend had to comment.

"Does he have terrible indigestion?" she asked.

"I guess," I said.  "I'm so sorry."

"Well, there's nothing you can do about it."

"Still.  Max, try not to fart so much!"

By the way, I never got those people who claimed that their own kids' diapers smelled like "buttered popcorn."  Nothing kicked in in when I had a kid that suddenly made his shit (or farts) smell any better to me than to anyone else.  It was a toxic plane ride, for sure.  But I can't say that I didn't derive a tiny bit of (mortified) pleasure from it too.

Oh, and Max starts Quaker school this week.