Panda

My daughter's phone did a good job conveying the triumph of Mabel (as knight) and her dear friend (as princess) when they conquered the pyramid of straw bales at the rural pumpkin patch during their mid-October trip to choose this year's pumpkins. .

Established custom allows one costume for the traditional trip out into the country to the pumpkin patch, and then a quite different costume for Halloween.

Back at home, Mabel herself for the first time drew the pumpkin face, while still allowing parents to be the knife-wielders. "What a spectacular pumpkin face," I said to Mabel when I saw it.

Mabel-the-Knight-of-the-Straw-Bales became Mabel-the-Panda on the holiday itself. Mamma appeared all in green, the stick of bamboo that every panda loves.

Every year all her life Mabel has trick-or-treated with the same special friends.  

Last year on trick-or-treat day Mabel had a long white beard. She was a wizard. With a wand.

Fire Fighters

My daughter took this picture with her phone while chaperoning a field trip dedicated to fire fighter role play. Mabel is wearing the red hat, aiming the hose, and remembering the all-important wide stance with the knee-high rubber boots.

Winter

Visitors from Abroad

1

Sometime after I had entered
that time of life
people prefer to allude to in others
but not in themselves, in the middle of the night
the phone rang. It rang and rang
as though the world needed me,
though really it was the reverse.

I lay in bed, trying to analyze
the ring. It had
my mother's persistence and my father's
pained embarrassment.

When I picked it up, the line was dead.
Or was the phone working and the caller dead?
Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps?

2

My mother and father stood in the cold
on the front steps. My mother stared at me,
a daughter, a fellow female.
You never think of us, she said.

We read your books when they reach heaven.
Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of your sister.
And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger,
tightly wrapped in my mother's arms.

But for us, she said, you wouldn't exist.
And your sister –- you have your sister's soul.
After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries.

3

The street was white again,
all the bushes covered with heavy snow
and the trees glittering, encased with ice.

I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.
It seemed the longest night I had ever known,
longer than the night I was born.

I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say "I," it refers to you.

Painting fragment by James McNeill Whistler
Poem fragment by Louise Glück
Square photo by The Most Definitely

Instagram Portraiture

My daughter has learned to make the most of Instagram. In fact, she recently authored a book of Instagrams called This Is Happening.

She used her phone to take this photo of  Mabel and me. We were sitting on the floor, cutting up pieces of paper, taking them out of a little bag and putting them into a little bowl.

Early Autumn Instagrams

My daughter's phone does its best to keep up with Mabel's life.

Baby Minding

For part of April  and part of May in the splendid year of 2011 one of the finest, most entertaining intervals of my life transpired. By some kind of outrageous good luck I got the job of looking after Mabel all day long for several weeks when she was around eight months old. This occurred at the chronological instant when both her parents had exhausted their parent-leave allotments, and both needed to be back at their jobs. How fortune smiled over those weeks of baby-minding. Literature tends to teach that such extraordinary  times in a person's life can only be recognized after the fact. But no, in April and May of 2011 my awareness of my own elation was fully operational. What other grandfather ever had such a clever, good-natured baby to take care of?

Summer Instagrams

All these Instagrams originated with my daughter, reproduced with her indulgence. Mabel ceases to be two and begins to be three.

Six Borrowed Instagrams

My daughter's phone catches Mabel's summer life.

Summer Instagrams

Mabel and her parents are out of town visiting friends this week, where there is another little girl to play with plus a new baby. Away from San Francisco Mabel is able to enjoy warm-weather pastimes mostly impossible at home.