Dispatches from the Big Person Who Carries Everything.

We fell in a pond. For real. We’ve ‘fallen’ into ponds up to our kneecaps before, but this time we topple-crash-plunged into one. I was balancing on the bank and Aaron had his arms coiled around my leg so that he could lean out over the water… and he leaned too far. Before I knew what had happened, I was lying on my back in water up to my chin, my arms somehow already hoisting Aaron (who had been totally submerged) out without any conscious instruction from my brain. No harm done, but we were unbelievably muddy. He was really mad at me at first, forgetting that it was his lunge that landed us in the water. I apologized and his anger wore off in minutes. By the time we walked back home, he was laughing and saying, “I didn’t g’spect that to happen!” Our quest for dry clothes was thwarted by the discovery that the garage door opener, which had been in my pocket, no longer worked—we were locked out. We called my brother from the neighbor’s house and he brought me dry clothes and somehow managed to fix the garage door opener (I had tried airing out the battery and replacing it, but that garage door opener required a man’s attention, apparently, since he did the same thing I had done and it worked). We hosed off most of the mud and then Aaron took a long bubble bath and we played sharks and pirates. After awhile, the blue plastic shark (voice by Sarah, a monotone modeled after Martin the Martian) decided he wanted to gobble up Aaron’s feet instead of Duplo pirates. This was very funny. “Pirates! Yuck. Pirates taste like Tupperware. Urgh. But you! You taste like all the yummy things you ate today… like Mac n’ Cheese. And Cocoa Puffs. And strawberry popsicles.”

Did you know a blue whale is longer than a tennis court?




At some point, I stopped being The Little Person Who Does Everything and became The Big Person Who Carries Everything instead. Aaron and I ran around in the sun all day and my big purse dragged with Juicy Juice boxes, garage door openers, fresh size 3T Iron Man underpants, Ritz crackers and Cheerios in small baggies, Aveeno Baby sunscreen, library books, AND irregular leaves, seed pods, Queen Anne’s Lace heads, stand-out rocks, rusty nails picked up on the playground by Aaron The Living/Breathing Metal Detector. I came home to find a willow twig stuffed in the back pocket of my jean shorts, and I sure didn’t plant that there. I don’t mind, exactly, but it makes me feel old every time Aaron presses something into my hands and says “You carry it!” before he runs off to do something more fun that requires two hands and a light, free body.

Love should be allowed.

Took a brief break from all my history and foreign policy books to read a collection of short stories by Truman Capote, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s. His writing is everything writing should be—baldly honest, utterly unpretentious, sparkling with quiet humor.

“I think you could get in a lot of trouble,” I said, and switched off a lamp; there was no need of it now, morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape.

Morning was in the room.

I love that.

And this—

He’d been put together with care, his brown head and bullfighter’s figure had an exactness, a perfection, like an apple, an orange, something nature has made just right.

And this—

“No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is. Because I DO love Jose—I’d stop smoking if he asked me to. He’s friendly, he can laugh me out of the mean reds.”

And—

She scooped up the cat and swung him onto her shoulder. He perched there with the balance of a bird, his paws tangled in her hair as if it were knitting yarn; and yet, despite these amiable antics, it was a grim cat with a pirate’s cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds.

And—

I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks… There was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so… She was not alone. There was a man following behind her. The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.

Africa without any Africans.

Reading about Hillary Clinton in Africa seized my sensory memory.

The aides were experts at the camera spray. In eastern Congo, we needed to use two planes to land at a small airport and Mrs. Clinton’s plane circled in the air for 15 minutes so journalists could land first, set up their cameras and get the arrival shot of her, the first secretary of state to swoop into Congo’s conflict zone, despite the fact this very area has been a killing field since the mid-1990s.

In Liberia, though, she missed a great opportunity: Her motorcade drove right past a muddy soccer field where all the players were on crutches and had one leg. It was an amputee soccer game, a spirited match between war-injured men who refused to give up. Bill would have definitely jumped out and charged across the field to commune. Had Mrs. Clinton, that might have been the enduring image of her Africa trip, not the irritated response in Congo.

But the convoy moved on, through the lashing Liberian rain. It’s strange to be in Africa in a bubble. I live in Kenya. I know how it can take two hours to get from the American embassy in Nairobi to the airport. But when the Kenyan government shuts down the main highway for Mrs. Clinton’s motorcade, voila!, it takes only 16 minutes. That day, as we raced to the airport in our air-conditioned vans, we passed thousands of Kenyans lining the road. These people weren’t waiting to wave goodbye. They were stuck in traffic. We looked at them and they looked at us, separated by glass and speed and unable to share even a word. In a way, it was like being in Africa without any Africans. Even most of the big-time hotels we stayed at had windows that didn’t open, denying us that distinctive African pleasure that might have jolted us back to reality: catching a whiff of woodsmoke.

I’m so glad only one night out of three weeks in Africa was like this for us.

Aaron and I tore around all day in the heat. We went to the park, stalked bullfrogs, experimented with ants’ food preferences (honey, berries, Juicy Juice, fruit snacks), ate pudding popsicles (ohmygod, how have I never eaten one of these before today?), pressed oak leaves, ‘planted’ a row of dry-roasted sunflower seeds (I observed that Aaron shouldn’t be too hopeful for bold yellow sunflowers on his return from California next weekend…), and then we struck out for tae-kwon-do, Aaron in his immaculate white robes sitting in his little red wagon. Tae-kwon-do was priceless as far as entertainment goes. Aaron is the littlest of the lot, and the least coordinated. Every other kick and chop sent him tumbling to the (generously padded) floor, and he would grin and leap to his feet. When the other kids stood stoically with impeccable posture, Aaron bounced around on the balls of his feet and gazed inquiringly up at the ceiling tiles. He told me the little colored stripes on his white belt stand for “tegrity, severence, and self control!” Tegrity and severence really do go a long way in this life.

He also dug everything out of my purse (I reminded him never to go through a woman's purse until he had at LEAST run a few blocks away) and disassembled a tampon before I knew what he was up to. He was very curious about it, but I said it was a "girl thing, you know, like lipstick." "Boys like lipstick. Kissy, kissy." "Okay, just a girl thing like nylons, you know, 'funny legs.'" But of course, he likes 'funny legs,' too. Whenever I wear colorful tights, he can't keep from plucking at the fabric!

He totally didn’t want me to go home. He kept grabbing my hands and saying, “Sarah, you forgot something here the last time you were here, so we have to go look for it” (I hadn’t forgotten anything) and “Sarah, I have to show you this!” and “Sarah, I have to take a photograph of you, because I’m going to California and you’re not!” so I made a silly face and he snapped his photograph. I adore him. I wish he were mine. The rest of the world can be positively demented at times, but he is perfect, always, even when wetting his pants and spilling tall glasses of milk and begging non-stop for Bazooka bubble gum. At this easy age, he still plunks himself down in my lap and fashions himself blond mustaches out of locks of my long hair and shouts “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah! Banana-fana…rana…farah!” when I show up on his doorstep, and his arms are still too short for him to tickle back effectively.

Occasional flirtation with domesticity.

Then I would bring an ax, no books.

1) Chickadees are eating our house. Yes, for real.

2) Babysat Aaron yesterday afternoon and evening. It rained non-stop, so we made up our own board games. CandyLandUnoPickUpSticksLife, anybody? We also built a terrific matchbox car race track that eventually consumed most of the basement. Aaron chattered away happily most of the day, but once went quiet for several minutes and then said very (very, very, very) seriously, “Sarah… do you ever hang out with other boys?” I was impressed it even occurred to him to ask, since preschoolers aren’t famous for their ability to look beyond themselves!

3) Oh, and I mentioned this to my mom the other day and she couldn’t stop laughing: When I was younger—11, 12—I used to wear an underwire bra 24/7, even and especially while sleeping. I was totally flat, but I was hopeful. I remember thinking, “If my boobs ‘come in’ overnight and I’m not wearing the right bra, my breasts will be weird-shaped for life!” because I would see old women with sagging breasts and not think, “They’ve probably nursed a lot of children and cleaned a lot of plates,” but “They must not have had the right bras way back when they were little girls!”

Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable?

The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: ‘Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me?’ no longer asks herself: ‘Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What’s going on the political prisons?’

MARJANE SATRAPI. THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS.