What will we tell the children
I remember growing up and standing on the stoop outside my aunt’s house in Brooklyn when the first astronaut landed on the moon. I remember being in our house on Louisiana Avenue when JFK was shot. When MLK was shot. I remember when Bobby Kennedy was shot. I remember living through all of these mile marker events and I also remember sitting in the grass driveway forcing crepe myrtle blooms to decorate my mudpie.
Yesterday evening, Tin was so hungry for dinner that he had his whine on big time and we were both trying to ignore it. Finally Tatjana snapped and said, “We don’t hear whining in this house!” To which our two and a half year old son responded, “We don’t hear yelling in this house.” She had to walk away to keep from cracking up. When he went on to whine and went on to ignore him, he finally asked, “Could you come talk to me?” inviting us to join him at the dinner table.
Houston, we have a problem is all that ran through my mind.
Waldorf is in the seasonal mode of fall and Tin came home singing the Farmer in the Dell and sang all through the morning his version of this song, and I tried to correct his lyrics but he told me, “Don’t sing Mommy,” and sadly Steve Jobs died yesterday, and curiously I got caught up in Archbishop Hannan’s funeral procession and thought it was a parade, and it’s Tatjana’s birthday today and Tin sang her happy birthday and sretan rodendan and then asked if he could have cake and ice cream.
When Tin is older what will he remember about these early times of non-memory – he will hear about his adoption, he will hear about my mother and how she guided us to him after she became an angel, he will know the Saints won their first Superbowl against his birth-home team the first year he was in New Orleans, he might remember his caretakers, he’ll certainly remember his neighborhood friends, but will he remember that Steve Jobs died while the body of Archbishop Hannan was paraded down Carrollton Avenue and one of his mothers turned 45?
Hard to say.