Dear Somebody: Birthday thoughts.
Five things from this week that I'd like to remember
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
F was born the day after I was, in late April, after the cherry blossoms have bloomed, beamed, and quietly begun to fall. I like having our birthdays sandwiched together because it makes me feel closer to her—one of the only instances, in my life, where a feeling is more important to me than the actual facts.
For her second birthday, I made F a Bluey cake. F is the strangest bird, afraid of nothing and no one. She’s always in search of coconut water, her sister’s hand, and a good chuckle. F pulled the entire sun and its shine into our lives; she’ll laugh at a room full of darkness and then, when she’s ready, she’ll turn the light back on.
TUESDAY
Birthday thoughts from Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel, my always-favorite.
WEDNESDAY
On one of our recent playground days, I found Anno’s Counting Book in the little free library. I’d never heard of Japanese illustrator and author Mitsumasa Anno before, but I loved the tiny, charming illustrations immediately, and wanted to spend more time with them. Skimming the inside jacket flap, I was struck by his belief that all children are born mathematicians and want to bring sense and order into all they observe through numbers
As a child—and now as an adult, I detest math, because I don’t believe I’m good at it. It doesn’t come naturally to me and never has. So much of what we like and don’t like as adults is rooted in how it made us feel about ourselves as children. When I was young, math made me feel incompetent; today, it still does.
I tell N all the time that her brain is the most powerful thing she has. If she tells it she can do something, it will help her to. I appreciate that Anno, who spent 10 years teaching math before writing books, held the deep notion that all children are brilliant mathematicians, and that our job as adults is to help them believe that.
It is a simple and powerful belief, and I feel silly that I never really considered it before. But, of course, as is the way of books: now I have.
P.S. When Mitsumasa Anno died in 2021, Publisher’s Weekly published a short obituary worth reading.
THURSDAY
“…I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”
—from Edith Wharton’s The Ghost Stories
FRIDAY
today we are possible.
the morning, green and laundry-sweet,
opens itself and we enter
blind and mewling.
everything waits for us:
the snow kingdom
sparkling and silent
in its glacial cap,
the cane fields
shining and sweet
in the sun-drenched south.
as the day arrives
with all its clumsy blessings
what we will become
waits in us like an ache.
—birth-day by Lucille Clifton
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See you next week!
xx,
M
Happy birthday Meera! Great job on the Bluey cake and I'm just melting over your description of F - "pulled the entire sun and its shine into our lives". Just beautiful 🥹