Four Bamboo Sticks

I was telling Lydia about Polar Bear swimming. It was mid-morning, and we were walking on the levee along the delta in Stockton, California, where Amy’s parents live. I saw a seal pop its head out of the water; she and Louisa didn’t, or couldn’t, see it. She had a dirty bamboo stick in her hand and a lemon Starburst in her mouth. (She actually likes lemon.) In the other hand, a dried reed bent at the middle, her fishing pole. While I told her about Polar Bear swimming, she walked over the rocks to the water’s edge and dipped the reed in the water and yanked a huge salmon out of the delta and told me to put it on the chain with the other invisible fish she’d caught—mostly trout.

I tucked my freezing hands in my pockets and asked her if she wanted to go swimming.

She looked at me with narrow eyes and said, “Are you serious.” It wasn’t a question.

I had Polar Bear swimming on my mind because we were planning to sit in my brother-in-law’s hot tub on New Year’s Eve, and undoubtedly we would dare each other to jump into the cold pool next to the hot tub and tread water until our blood was about the consistency of wild cherry Slurpee and then get back in the hot tub. It is exceedingly macho to do this, even if (A) the word “macho,” when you use it in English, sounds cretinous, and (B) swimming in cold water surely can’t be good for your reproductive organs. (Seeing as how we’re not interested in having any more kids after Child Four, that may be a cheap way to end my breeding power.)

Hot, then cold, then hot. Quite a sensational experience of opposites.

Like Lydia herself.

A few days ago we went to Six Flags in Vallejo, and I was asked to accompany my delightful ten year-old niece, Morgan, on all the rides, like the Medusa, calculated to mangle thoracic vertebrae. After throwing up in the bushes, we limped over to the dolphin show where the rest of the family had taken seats, way outside the splash zone. Right on schedule, the tall guy with the stupid hat who always sits in front of Lydia at every engagement—anytime, anywhere—shuffled over and took his place in front of Lydia, so she came over and sat on my lap. The dolphins leapt, the dolphins splashed, the dolphins waved their tails and and held their heads high and smiled their smug smiles and looked exceedingly cute and un-shark-ish, and Lydia, Nature’s Child, loved every minute, as we knew she would.

At the end of the show, when we told her we were going home, she exploded.

“O! now what!” Her new favorite expression–also a grammatical question that isn’t a question. “This is the worst day of my life!” She threw her hands in the air and looked into the cloudy heavens for divine intervention. “Every day is the worst day! I’m never ever coming back to Six Flags again!”

The next day her affective gyroscope spun the other way and the sun came out over Star Land. After we walked along the delta, she wrote this story, titled “The 4 Bamboo Sticks”:

On my walk I saw 4 bamboo sticks and we all got our own bamboo sticks. And we walked all the way home. And we had so much fun we forgot all about Six Flags. The End.

We were sitting at grandma Crum’s table in the afternoon, a cheerful sun streaming through the open blinds, a plastic bucket full of markers in the center of the table, the two girls marking up every page of every coloring book grandma owned. Lydia was on a roll. After spinning out The 4 Bamboo Sticks, she wrote me about a hundred love letters. “To Dad,” she wrote at the top of them. Smiling girls with a dozen fingers on each round hand, floating in constellations of hearts and stars, a galaxy of love. She drew a girl that had a great big heart for a body—a great big green heart bulging with love for me, the father of the luckiest girl in Christendom.

She gave me this picture and said, “Daddy,” also not a question, and then she went back to coloring.

An hour later she was sprinkling the bedspread with tears.

“Why are you scaring my head off?” she screamed at me.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” I said. “I just don’t want you to throw things at your sister.” She’d just thrown a Fisher Price lantern at Louisa and slammed the door closed.

“Fine! I’ll stay here and never ever go on a walk ever again!”

“That’s not necessary, Lydia.”

“I know I’m in big trouble!” And then the real zinger: “I know you’re going to kill me!“

What happened to that girl with the great big heart, the green one shaped more like an arrowhead than a heart? Maybe she’d meant it to be one of those optical illusions that look like one thing at one point and another at another. Look now, and it’s a heart. Look again, it’s a weapon.

Why fret? Life’s most acute learning moments come from dramatic contrast. A cold pool, then a hot tub.

My wife Amy got a hot/cold blast just yesterday. She got a note from Lydia, who for the past six months has been quite a prolific author of interpersonal notes of all kinds.  The first note she gave Amy was gushing with good stuff:

I love my mother so. And I like to be with her. And here is something I want to tell you. I love you.

In the left margin was a drawing of an oval womb inside which a floating a stick baby said, “hi.”

Later Amy got a note on yellow paper. Lydia uses a little yellow notepad to send us sweet letters with nothing but stamps on them. The stamps, I’m guessing, act as staccato endearments: the more stamps, the more love. Sometimes she sneaks up behind us and crams a folded note into our pants, a note covered in dog stamps and candle stamps and smiley stamps and owl stamps. Amy got one with cupcakes and coffee mugs all over it.

And then later, after Amy asked Lydia to do something she didn’t want to do, Lydia asked for the cupcake note back. She took out a pencil and drew a big fat ex over the whole thing. Then she wrote one word right in the middle: canceled.

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