and one for my homies, eluard and breton

"your lives are starting to take on a french surrealist flare...where each poem/painting involves a jester, a balloon, and someone being lifted into the air..." --mamie in gchat

A full week has passed, and I was just going to turn my back on the trauma. But then, Saturday happened.

It’s like this: ever since I enrolled the kids, they’ve been coming home with folders of junk. Stacks and stacks of papers that scatter and blow around our house like so many neon leaves. And most of these have been about an event which has instilled in me the deepest sense of foreboding. I didn’t know what Fall Festival was; I didn’t particularly want to know. Every time I caught sight of yet another request that I bake a cake or donate my life savings, I would viciously stuff it in the recycling bin. You must understand, you must appreciate, the sheer volume of literature we’re talking. Now there will be musical chairs. And now, pony rides. And now, Mrs Whatshername has convinced Mr Whathisname to don a horse costume. And finally, a series of complicated and useless activities designed to make me turtle up in the remotest regions of my soul.


To my infinite relief, the kids didn’t ever mention it. Maybe because they’ve been too busy gibbering a nerve-jangling Spanish song (the whole song is comprised of a single line to be reeled off rapidly and tunelessly: buenos dias, buenos tardes, buenos noches a ti ti ti). At any rate, I grew pretty smug about the whole thing. Being too cool, I thought, must run in our blood. I mean, we’re into social events, just ones that aren’t punctuated with exclamation marks. All they want is to be studious, to listen to Vivaldi’s Fall, or at least Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions, and to watch appreciatively as I write a memoir that will at once fund their college educations and deliver prose so luminous, unprecedented, and startling that people will cry out, Bravo! I am stabbed in the heart by the galloping beauty of this book!


Anyway. Last Friday. We’re walking to the bus stop when I notice the other children are behaving rather oddly. As in, they’re running full tilt at us, mouths open and screaming. I look around wildly for the snarling dog, the escaped convict. Then the screams become more distinct: FALL!! FESTIVAAAAL!!! Oh, Jesus. Really? I look at the other parents like, Hey, reel in your contagious offspring. Kanasta and Aaron tighten their grips on my hand, look up at me confused. I try to look reassuring, Don’t worry kids, I’ve got your backs. Glare at the other parents, and grumpily await their sheepish apologies. Their arms go up in an impromptu cheerleading exercise. They grin. They scream. FALL FESTIVAAAL!!! Christ. The kids are blabbering. Kan’s expression is curious, is succumbing, is tensing with joy. I can feel Aaron rocking on the balls of his feet. Uh-oh.







After school, they want to skip daycare and go straight to Fall! Festival!!! It doesn’t start for another five hours, I tell them, as if that’s any deterrent, as if that’s anything but five more hours in which to get AMPED. In the humid evening, we appear on the scene. I’ve brought my game face, but no adult back-up. I’m considering those leash things. Kan wants to dig in a bucket of sand for a $10 keychain that unaccountably reads STOP YOUR FEET. Aaron wants to bounce in a netted tent. But this, people, is where the failures, the gruesome inadequacies of humanity reveal themselves. A boy about nine runs up to Aaron. He’s red in the face and growling. He punches the air. His mother puts a meaty hand on his shoulder, desperately tries to hold him back. Arrrgh! Rrroweeeerrrr, says the kid, flailing his fists. Aaron tries to climb up me to safety. Someone walks by dressed as a horse. Mr Whatshisname is regretting his marriage, his life. The horse head is on backwards and there are wads of gum stuck to the sparse mane. It’s wretched. I can’t spend our pre-purchased tickets fast enough. Dark now, and the whole place has taken on the unsettling atmosphere of a rave (or whatever gatherings happen now, post-1995). Glowing necklaces and the like. The rest of the evening involves me running crazily back and forth from where Aaron is fishing in a waterless kiddie pool for lollipops to where Kan is getting butterflies painted all over her forehead, hair, and clothing. I yank her out of there before they can spray-paint her hair purple.

Finally, we are in forlorn line of people, shuffling along in a shadowy field behind the school for a ride on a miniscule and melancholy pony. Children are trundled off one by one, for a slow walk in the semi-dark. It smells of river, of damp and rotting pine.

Cut to Saturday. I’m not thinking of Fall! Festival!!! anymore. I’m thinking of quiet, of introspection, of coffee and 800 mils of Ibuprofen at regular intervals. I love that every time I go out on my back deck post 8pm (otherwise known as bedtime-the-moment-of-grace) and pop open the bottle of wine and light a cig, that I feel some sense of accomplishment. I think I’m so smart. Always, the dry-mouthed and aching morning is a surprise. At Dixie this morning, the kids and I huddle together over the menu, only to find that it’s dwindled to three items. I keep turning it over and over, wondering if there were more gallon jugs of wine that Mot brought by and I just don’t remember. But why is the menu limited? Well, because it’s Riverfest!!! The horror. Thing is, I’ve been treating excursions like reconnaissance missions. Leave, avoid brightly colored objects, distract the children with indie music, threaten them with toy boycotts, and buy. milk. fast.





When we walk out of Dixie, it’s a world of jugglers and clowns and giant ice creams. We watch skaters skate, wee girls dance. People try to sell us real estate, funnel cakes, deep-fried candy bars. The kids point at people in wheel chairs, we sit on a bench to discuss general evils of pointing. We buy: one tiger puppet (Smacks—all his toys have names that are variations on Max), one shitzu puppet (Molly). It’s raining on the way home, and I’m thinking of how that pony stopped in front of me and nuzzled the palm of my hand, her eye large and liquid. Her eye was a sad ocean. Her eye was the long-lashed eye of a drunken woman drowning in said sad ocean.