Categories
life

Where I’m At With COVID-19

My daughter’s school closed last week, as did mine, as did my wife’s (three different schools; three different closures). My wife and I continue to teach online, working through Google’s G Suite for Education and Zoom. My daughter, a first grader, completes some of her assignments online, communicating with her teacher through SeeSaw, using a variety of online games to work on math and reading, doing yoga with Cosmic Kids on YouTube, and engaging in plenty of independent learning activities, such as drawing, reading, and building with LEGOs. In addition, my wife and I take time away from our students to help our daughter with science, music, gym, etc. (yesterday afternoon, for example, I helped her begin a personal learning project wherein she will, through the development of a coherent slideshow and accompanied presentation, persuade her mother to let us get a puppy — but I digress).

On the second or third day of our schools being closed, my daughter’s schedule called for social studies. I’d received an email that morning from PBS promoting a two-year-old episode of American Experience titled Influenza 1918, which focuses on the 1918 flu pandemic. I asked my daughter if she was interested in watching it for her social studies class. She said, “Yes,” and we sat down and watched it together.

There’s a lot to digest in the documentary. Caused by an H1N1 virus, the pandemic killed over 50 million people worldwide. In one month in 1918 — the month of October — over 195,000 Americans died from the virus (for comparison’s sake, the total number of American military deaths in all of World War I is 116,516). Towns throughout America were forced to bury their dead in mass graves. Children watched their parents die; parents watched their children die. Cousins were lost to orphanages; families and dreams disintegrated.

As I hear the governor of my state declare a “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order, I think back to the Influenza 1918 documentary, and I remember the way I had to describe to my daughter what a mass burial was, and I see my wife in the other room giving me a look like, “What the hell are you showing our seven-year-old daughter?”, but then I think of my daughter, later in the week, days after we watched it, standing in the door of our bathroom, telling me how lucky we are because we don’t live in 1918.

I also think about the day this week when she and I went out for a walk and we came across two of her best friends playing together and I had to tell her that no, she couldn’t go play with them, and how she listened to me, but how she also put her head down and walked home in silence, and how as soon as we entered the house, she ran up to her room in tears, not even stopping to take off her coat, and how I followed her upstairs to comfort her, and how she collapsed on her bed with her face in her pillow and her knees pulled up tight, and how she didn’t even argue with me about it or scream at me to “go away!”, but instead how she told me she “gets it,” she knows why she can’t play with her friends, but how it still makes her sad and she just needs to cry, and how I walked back downstairs to the sound of her wailing into her pillow, and how later, when she got quiet, I was able to go back upstairs and help her take off her coat, and how, after a good cry, she was ready to go on with her day.

I think about my seventy-two year old parents, one of whom is immunocompromised. I think about my father needing to keep himself busy, and venturing out to a hardware store for some item that will help him do just that, but I also think about all the other people in his hometown who have to keep themselves busy and who also need to go to the hardware store to get an item to do just that, and I imagine all of the people they’ve interacted with and been breathed on by, and like a terrifying movie, I watch the virus move from person to person until it touches my father’s hand, which soon touches my mother’s hand, and soon…

I think about my mother just wanting to spend time with her grandchildren, and their governor’s shelter in place order.

I think about my students, teenagers who have already experienced so much trauma, now being forced to stay inside with their families, some of whom contributed to that trauma. I think about my students’ parents, many of whom are single mothers, now robbed of even unsteady employment, and the number of mouths they need to feed.

I think about my coworkers who are home alone, my cousins and uncles and aunts, my in-laws, my friends across the country, and the loneliness, pain, and anxiety that so many of us are feeling.

But then I think about those mass graves, and with my seven-year-old daughter, I feel thankful to be alive.

Categories
life

A Dream of Spring

I want my daughter to be enchanted.

The word enchanted stems from a Latin word which means both “to sing into” and “to cast a magic spell upon.” To be enchanted is to feel taken away from the world, to be carried away into a realm devoid of worry, to calmly fade into the rhythm of a different reality.

For a father to say he wants his daughter to be enchanted is to say what then? Is it a desire for her to become a passive entity who allows herself to be caught up and carried away?

I want my daughter to be a warrior when it counts. I watch Game of Thrones and I admire the intensity of ten-year-old Lady Mormont, but I don’t want that for my daughter. Lady Mormont’s intensity comes from the world around her: the cold nights on Bear Island; the death of all the elders in her family; the knowledge that her citizen’s lives are in her hands; the need to stand firm against a room full of old soldiers and Lords; and so much more. Lady Mormont is who she is because of the horrors of the world she lives in and the duty she feels as a Mormont.

I don’t know want that for my daughter. I don’t want her to have to fight for her survival and defend the honor of her family at every turn. I don’t want her to have to prepare for a reality where a deadly summer is coming, boiling up from the south with a faceless horde in its vanguard.

Instead, I want her to be enchanted by the possibilities of all those living people, all those intelligences and wisdoms singing of the possibility of a better world, both for themselves and for her, enriching her understanding of her place in the world and sharing with her the need and desire to seek humane and peaceful solutions to life’s individual conflicts and the globe’s existential crises.

I want her to be enchanted by the songs of what’s possible.

But I also want her to be a warrior. To know how to escape when possible and defend herself when necessary. I want her to have a fierceness that strikes the heart, and a laugh that strikes there as well, and I want her to wield them both like a Dancing Master of Braavos.

I also want her to be free from manipulation. To be enchanted is not the same as to enchant. We distrust the witch who would put us under her spell, despise the siren who would sing us into our grave, and fear the goddess who would love us in her chains.

The danger of enchantment, of being under a spell, of being carried away by a song, lies in the distance of the disconnect. The more we become enchanted, the more we risk being made the fool.

I want my daughter to be enchanted, but I don’t want her to be made a fool. Tom Robbins and Shakespeare are right: there is great wisdom to be found in the life of the fool; but it’s a wisdom I’d rather my daughter receive from counsel, not from experience. The life of the fool comes with wisdom, but it also comes with the ugliness of our primate culture: the throwing of shit, the rigorously enforced power dynamic, the constant threat of casual physical violence. I don’t want my daughter to be made a fool.

I want her to know wonder, and to value the amazing things she can dream, and to pursue them the way Daenerys Stormborn pursues her destiny, with confidence and humility and a desire to do the most good.

I want my daughter to let her hope for a better future carry her away. I want her to be enchanted by what she imagines is possible.

Categories
life

1,000 songs in her head.

My wife and I recently gave our five-year-old daughter an iPod. It’s an old, old, old, old iPod, from back in the days when iPhones didn’t even exist yet. The kind that comes with a click-wheel. It’s been sitting in a drawer in our house for over a decade, but now that my daughter can read, it seemed like the right time to give it to her (if she couldn’t read, she wouldn’t know how to put on the songs she wants).

Our original plan was to fill the iPod with all the songs she loves, plus some others that we thought she might like, and then let her have it, but after tracking down an appropriate charger cord and plugging it into our MacBook Air, I quickly discovered that the old iPods don’t work with today’s Apple Music service (which powers all of our music nowadays), so we aren’t able to add anything new to it.

That means my five-year-old daughter has an iPod filled with over a thousand songs from mine and my wife’s old CD collection, the stuff I put on my gum-drop iMac back in the days of “Rip. Mix. Burn.” The first thing she wanted to listen to after I taught her how to use the click-wheel and what “alphabetical order” means was (and I’m super proud of this) the Grateful Dead.

Later in the evening, after I taught her how to put it on shuffle (and what “shuffle” means), she came over to ask me the name of the song she was listening to. I told her to read it off the screen, and she read, “Back in Your Head” by Tegan & Sara, a tune from 2007. My daughter loved it! She ended up pausing the song, stripping down to her underwear, raiding her dress-up clothes, donning a dress that makes her look like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and dancing around her playroom like…well, like a five-year-old girl who is thrilled to dance to music she loves.

I started thinking about this little girl’s musical future. Because the only radio we listen to is Vermont Public Radio, she doesn’t have access to all of today’s teeny-bop music (unless it’s something that my wife and I are willing to listen to as well — Taylor Swift, for example, or the Moana soundtrack). Instead, she’ll have over 1,000 songs that WE love.

I can just picture her sitting in the back of our car, or cuddling up on her bed, or dancing in the living room, headphones on, the little wire trailing around her, her tiny hand wrapped around this relatively heavy, solid black iPod filled with unknown songs for her to explore and discover with no cultural context to disturb the purity of the music itself.

I’m so excited for her to figure out what SHE likes in that eclectic mix of songs that includes everything from the Afro Celt Sound System to Zap Mama, from the Beastie Boys to Wynton Marselis, from Claudio Villa to Van Morrison. There’s songs from Phish and from the Grateful Dead, but also compositions from Mozart and live performances by Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. She’s got access to rap, jazz, rock, the blues, reggae, pop, classical, folk, and music from around the globe, from San Paulo to Rome to Mumbai.

We’re building an adult with musical taste here, and this old, old, old, old iPod may be the magical tool we need to get the job done right.

Categories
life

When Life Gives You A Lemonade Stand…

For Christmas, my mother- and stepfather-in-law gave my daughter a real — screws and paint and lumber — lemonade stand, except because we had to travel with it, my stepfather didn’t take it out of its packaging, leaving its construction to me…the lazy ass father.

When we got home, I did as any lazy ass father would do: I put the stand’s materials in storage and came up with a way to rationalize my laziness. She won’t need it until the summer, I thought, so there’s no rush to put it together. Plus, even if I did put it together, the thing would be way too big; so if it’s just gonna sit around the house all winter, why not leave it as it is, in its most compacted state?

It made sense to me, and whatever I told my daughter made sense to her, so there it stayed, leaning against a wood-panelled wall on my back porch, unrequested, undesired by all.

Flash forward four-and-a-half months, a few days after winter departs, having long overstayed her welcome. I walk out my kitchen door and onto my back porch, and I think to myself, this place really needs to be cleaned. The recycling in the corner overlows its beige and plastic containers. Clumps of mold dot the windowsills, the ghostly reminders of tiny pumpkins my wife and I once left to rot. A stain flows outward from bottom of my black dormroom-fridge, a lesson in the relative strength of ice and glass, as well as a lesson in volumetric pressure (i.e., the champagne I had storing in the fridge froze during the winter, exploding through its glass bottle, and during one of the frosts, the frozen champagne turned back into a proper liquid, only to leak out of the fridge and flow outward over my plywood floor). Reusable grocery bags, boxes of summer toys, and a small variety of camping gear occupy the rest of the back porch.

And then there’s this: the lemonade stand.

All winter long, I’d looked upon this thing as my nemesis, eyeing it the way one child eyes another after agreeing to settle their differences later, with fisticuffs.

But now the spring has come, and school is gonna let out soon.

—

My daughter and I went food shopping today, which meant I had to reach over the lemonade stand to retrieve our reusable grocery bags. My daughter was standing behind me.

“Hey,” I said. “When are we going to put this thing together?”

“Yeah!” she said (she’s still working on the whole time thing).

“How about Sunday?” I offered. “You and I can put it together and mom can read, or take a nap, or something.”

“Yeah!” she said again.

I grabbed the grocery bags, and we walked out to get in the car. Shit, I thought. Now I’m gonna have to make some space in the garage.

—

I offered my hand to help her down from the car. “What else could we do with the lemonade stand?”

She ignored my hand and leapt out on her own. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”

I closed the door behind her and we headed across the parking lot, her hand in mine. “A puppet show?”

“Yeah!”

“Or,” I continued, “I was also thinking like, ‘The News,’ you know, like when you do ‘The Weather’ at Nana and PopPop’s?”

My parents have a pass-through window between their dining room and living room, and my daughter likes to pull a chair up to it and pretend like she’s on TV while the rest of us are in the audience, and she does these little weather reports, but only if her mom will join her, because she can get super embarassed on her own.

Maybe she’d enjoy using the lemonade stand for something like that, playing TV with her friends or something.

“Yeah!” she said. “And what about, just like, a seller?”

“A cellar?” I asked.

“Yeah, like I’d sell my toys out of it…and like…other stuff.”

“Oh,” I said. “Like a storefront.”

“Yeah.”

Shit, I thought. I’m raising a capitalist.

—

She sat in the chair of the grocery cart, delicately picking at the doughy parts of a free chocolate-chip cookie that the store’s baker was nice enough to give her. She doesn’t just bite into the thing; she picks at it, as if the pleasure of food (for her) is communicated not just through her taste buds but also her fingertips.

We were in the last aisle of the grocery store, needing only to retrieve her frozen breakfast foodstuffs and my frozen ice-cream snack (a truly guilty pleasure at this point, my belly already being way too big to indulge), and I started thinking about an article I read a year or so ago about a nine-year-old girl whose father was a journalist and who had followed in his footsteps to begin a neighborhood paper of her own, only to have, several issues in, a bona fide murder occur in her neighborhood, and being an intrepid reporter, she didn’t hesitate to track the story down, her truly young age not withstanding.

That memory led to a fantasy where my daughter used her lemonade stand as a TV frame while she reported her takes on the day’s news. The show would start out as opinion, but as she got older and took more of an interest in the world around her, she’d begin to make connections that others had not yet made, and her take on the news would become a valuable commodity, not in terms of its monetary return but in terms of its social importance. Having by this point graduated from performing exclusively for an in-person audience to broadcasting to millions of viewers on YouTube, she would stand outside on our back lawn, her lemonade stand still in front of her, and offer the world the informed and compassionate perspective of a politically impassioned six- or seven-year-old white, American girl.

“Dada,” she said, “Can we get the cinnemon french-toast sticks?”

“No,” I answered, reaching for the homestyle waffles. “You never eat them.”

__

I realized later that my nemesis had really been my lack of imagination. The package of screws and paint and lumber that my mother- and stepfather-in-law gave to their granddaughter was not a lemonade stand. It was an opportunity. It didn’t require warm temperatures or clear blue skies or potential patrons patrolling the sidewalks of my village. All it required was a young child’s attention.

Puppet shows work fine in the winter, and weather reports bask in the excitement of winter’s storms and snows.

Sure, the stand would have occupied a lot of space in her playroom, totally throwing off whatever interior design may exist there, but who gives a rat’s ass about interior design in the winter, when visitors are few and inhabitants prefer being under their blankets?

Seriously: what a great idea this thing was, what an incredible Christmas gift! To give a five-year-old child in the dead of winter a dynamic opportunity to activate her imagination without requiring the use of a screen, a battery, or even a bit of electricity, a naturally constructed set that cries out for a child to fill it with her creativity and drama!

What a fool I was to have missed it. What a lazy ass fool.

Luckily, hope springs eternal, and it’s never too late to make up for past mistakes.

Her career as a newscaster may start on Sunday.

Or maybe she’ll just want to sell you her old toys.

Tell her Dada sent ya.

Categories
life

Growing Up

My daughter came downstairs an hour after she was supposed to be in bed. I had recently smoked marijuana and had just witnessed one of the greatest runs of basketball I’d ever seen, the Celtics coming back from a 24-point deficit to go into the second half of their playoff game with the score now, against all odds, virtually tied. I was high, my energy was flowing with the excitement of the court, and now here came my five-year old daughter, who’d long since gone to bed.

“Dada,” she said, her voice calling out from the darkness of her playroom at the bottom of the stairs.

“Go to bed.”

“Dada…”

She walked into the living room, her eyes immediately captured by the flickering lights on the TV. “Um…,” she continued, her eyes locked, “Um…um…it’s…it’s…it’s..important.”

“If it’s so important,” I said, “then look at me.”

She glanced over at me, but her brain couldn’t fight the wonder of the flickering lights, and her eyes went right back to the TV. “Um…”

“Look at me. If it’s really important, you have to look at me.” I turned down the volume on the television.

She turned and locked eyes with me. A knowing, impish smile grew on her lips. “Um…”

“What’s important?”

Her smile dropped away. “Um…I have a toenail…that’s… scratching me.”

“And that’s important?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How come?”

“Um…”

She lifted her foot to show me.

“I believe you have a nail scratching you,” I said, “but why is that important? Why did you need to get out of bed and come downstairs to tell me that?”

“Um…because it hurts?”

“Okay,” I leapt from the couch. “Let’s go take care of it then.”

She took my hand, led me out of the living room, across her darkened playroom, and up the stairs.

My daughter has a tendency when she gets to the top of the stairs to forget every intention she might have and simply run across the hallway to dive onto my bed. I know this about her. But I also knew that, at that moment, her mother was on that bed, and if my daughter jumped onto it (which she would inevitably do), she would cause my wife pain, so as we climbed the stairs, I placed my hands lightly atop her shoulders and repeated the phrase, “Remember what’s important. Remember what’s important.”

She reached the top of the stairs, and I felt her hesitate a moment. Something inside of her was telling her to run to the left and leap onto my bed, but something else was telling her to turn right and head towards the bathroom, where we keep the nail clippers. Without putting any more pressure on either of her shoulders, I said it again, “Remember what’s important,” and she immediately turned right. I removed my hands from her shoulders.

The hazard at this point was the full-length mirror at the end of the hallway. She loves to skip and jump towards it, to make faces in it, and to shake her butt at it like her cousins taught her to do. But I needn’t have worried, because all by herself, she turned right again and walked into the bathroom.

She cut a sharp corner to step onto her stool, which we keep right beneath the light switch. My hand went to find the light, but her fingers beat me to it, and I withdrew. She turned on the light herself.

“Is it in the middle cabinet?” she asked.

The mirror over our sink has three cabinets behind it, and we keep the nail clippers on the middle shelf of the middle cabinet, the same place we keep all of our other relatively sharp health and beauty tools.

I opened the cabinet for her because she can’t reach it without climbing on the counter. “I know you can get it yourself,” I said, “But let me help you just to make it easier.” She resisted the urge to disagree with me.

We keep the clippers inside a glass mason jar. Like most houses (I suspect), we have big, honking clippers for toes and smaller clippers for fingers. Unlike most houses (I suspect), we have three different versions of fingernail clippers. The jar contains them all, as well as a pair of scissors, a few pairs of different sized tweezers, and some random hair clips. I dug my fingers into the jar.

“Wait! Wait!” she yelled. “Mine aren’t in there! Where’s mine?” We’d been using baby clippers on her since the day she was born, and she couldn’t see them through the glass jar.

Now, the truth is that I was poking around to see if her baby clippers were in the jar too, but instead of telling her that, I said, “I think you’re ready for a real set of clippers,” and her eyes lit up.

Remember, I was rip-roaring high at this moment and still surging with a ton of energy from watching great playoff basketball, but I also knew it was half time back in Boston and there was absolutely no rush for anything.

I pulled out all three of the fingernail clippers we own, and I displayed them before her on the counter. “Which one do you want?”

Diamonds have never received as close an inspection as the first pair of clippers she picked up. She opened them slowly, rotating the push-handle into its proper, functional position with as much deliberate focus as a trainer testing the rotation of an athelete’s questionable leg. First with her thumb, and then with her index finger, she pushed the handle down, checking for proper resistance against her five-year-old finger-muscles. Her eyes scanned the metal, searching for some perfection or some flaw, her judgement open to both. Satisfied by something I couldn’t say what, she returned the first pair of clippers to the counter and picked up the second of three.

She repeated the process, but I noticed, about halfway through it, that the information she was gathering from her second inspection seemed to be equal to the information she’d gathered from her first, and a look of concern came over her face as she realized she didn’t know how to judge one pair of clippers against the other.

I scanned all three clippers for a moment and saw that on the inside flap of the push handles, away from where her eyes had looked, all three clippers were different: one had the numbers “556” printed on it, flanked by two stars; another was blank metal; and the third was embossed with the logo of its maker, a stylized depiction of the word “Trim,” with a note that the logo was a registered trademark.

“Look at this,” I said, and I opened all three clippers wide so she could see what she had yet to see. “They’re not all the same.” Her concern became curiosity, and she noticed something I hadn’t noticed: one of the clippers came with a filer/nail cleaner attached to it. I was bamboozled by the fact that I had hadn’t noticed it before, but now that we both had, we knew this was the pair for her.

I picked it up and showed her how the hook on the nail cleaner worked. She was mezmerized. She took it out of my hands and inspected it, now less like a doctor and more like a child with a new and exciting toy.

“Remember what’s important,” I said.

“Can I do it myself?” she asked, her eyes still locked on the clippers.

“Of course,” I said. “Those are yours.”

She sat down on her stool, her fingers playing with the nail cleaner. She went to use the hook on one of her toes, and I said, “Remember what’s important.”

“Oh yeah.” She rotated the nail cleaner back into its safety position, leaned over, and clipped the sharp nail off of the inner edge of her big toe. She rubbed her finger over the spot to check if it was still sharp; it wasn’t. I rubbed my finger over it too just to make sure; she was right: it wasn’t.

She started to clip a nail on another toe, but I stopped her.

“This is not a toy,” I said. “It’s a tool. You use it to do its job, but you don’t play with it. You took care of what was important, so now anything you do with it is just for play, and you don’t play with tools, right?”

She stood up without a word of argument (which is very much not like her…nor like any other Callahan I’ve ever met), and she began looking around to find a place to store her new clippers. “Let’s put them someplace where you can reach them,” I said. She stepped onto her stool, reached up, and opened up the nearest medicine cabinet. I pushed aside our toothbrush holder (another mason jar) to clear a space on the bottom shelf. She reached up by herself and put the clippers where she could reach them.

She wasn’t done. After a moment, she turned the clippers over, then turned them over again, trying to find the best way to place them on the shelf.

“If you lay it on the flat part,” I said, “it won’t rock as much.”

She didn’t take me at my word, deciding for herself to test my hypothesis, and when she saw there was some doubt to be had, she voiced it. “It rocks a lot on the flat part too,” she said.

“Yeah,” I answered, “but see how it rock backs into place rather than tipping over like it would if it were on the other side?”

She went to test me again, but I was pretty sure my second hypothesis was wrong as well, so I stopped her, saying, “It’s getting late hun. You took care of what’s important. It’s time to climb back into bed.”

She withdrew her hand from the cabinet. I closed it. She stepped down off her stool and turned into the hallway. “Did you give me those ones because they were the safest?” she asked.

“I didn’t give them to you,” I said. “You picked them. They’re yours.”

We were standing at the door of her bedroom now, and she turned around and leapt into my arms, first squeezing me tight, then pushing herself back so she could look me in the eye.

“Dada?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Watch this.” And then she showed me that she can make a proper “S” sound. For the past year or so, I’ve been consciously working with her to eradicate her five-year-old lisp. I don’t correct her all the time, but it’s something we do together, and she knows it makes me proud when she uses a proper “S” sound.

I gave her a huge smile, completely surprised and amazed, not that she could make the sound, but that she would choose this very moment to make it for me, after we’d just had this really awesome experience where I told her she was now old enough to have and to use all by herself her very own set of nail clippers.

This was her way of saying “Thanks,” and of saying, “I love you”: by doing a thing she knows will make me proud.

I squeezed her tight and told myself quietly, “Remember what’s important.”

~~

Post Script

The next morning, after she’d been tasked with going to the bathroom to brush her teeth, she seemed to be taking a longer time than was necessary, plus I hadn’t heard the sink turn on. I got out of bed to check on her, but she must have heard me coming. “Dada,” she said, “I think I have to cut my nails.”

I laughed to myself and entered the bathroom. “Honey, what did I say last night? Those aren’t a toy, right?”

She clutched them to her chest. “Do I have to ask if I can use them?”

I smiled. “No, they’re yours. But what do we do with them?”

“We don’t play with them.”

“Right.”

She reached up and put them back on the shelf, but I could tell she wasn’t disappointed; instead, she was proud.

As was I.

Categories
creative pieces featured

Sick Day

The blanket to her chin,
eyes cast down and brown like a muddy river
tied-slow long ways to bend;
“I’m dying, daddy.”
Five years old and feeling it,
the burden of a vermin invasion,
a half-denarian german way station,
lying dying sickness forty pounds upon her fluffy mattress,

but not really:
a little girl with a touch of the flu;
“I’m dying, daddy.”

Tonight,
seperately,
the water glaze eyes of a grandfather

on the wrong end of a diagnosis,
his granddaughter’s.
A sexagenarian and a functioning illiterate,
he has to look up the word “lymphoma” on the In’ernet
and try to understand:
his daughter al’dy gone, and now, maybe
her daughter also too?

She looks down at her sheets,

her eyes too pained to rise:
“I’m dying, daddy.”

Forty-eight hours later she’s bouncing on my couch in a yellow
rainbow-dotted nightgown,

challenging me to a fistfight.
She swings at me as hard as she can laugh.

In my browser history: “lymphoma.”

Categories
life

Building A Book Nut

My five-year-old daughter is in a weird place as a reader. She’s reached the point where she can sound out letters and read some of the words that her brain already recognizes, but she hasn’t figured out the rules for letter combinations. For example, she doesn’t know that anytime she sees “oo” it sounds similar to “moon” or “look” or “good” — she still tries to interpret each “o” on its own rather than as a phonetic grouping; except, she has “moon” down as a sight word, so everytime I see her stumbling on the “oo” in something else, I remind her of the “oo” in “moon.”

That’s one example of letter combinations. She still doesn’t have “sh” or “ch” or “ee” or “ea.”

With that being said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the only word she stumbled on while reading the first sentence of the above paragraph was “one.” She wouldn’t have much trouble with “combinations” — well, maybe with the “ti” part.

Anyway, the point is that, when it comes to reading a book to her, we’re at a weird transition stage.

She doesn’t yet like chapter books. She can sit quietly and be interested for the length of a few chapters and she can correctly answer basic comprehension questions (though definitely not all of them), but what she can’t really do is sustain a book over the course of a few nights. By the third night, her brain has checked out and she’s moved on.

She loves books though. Not as much as she loves television, and probably not as much as she loves dancing, but she does love books.

But what I’d like to do is get her over the next hump as a reader.

I know she’ll get there, so I’m not worried about it at all, and I could write this same piece about her video-game playing skills, her skiing skills, her conversational skills, and her sense of empathy. Being five years old means having another hump to get over in pretty much all facets of your life.

But this isn’t about that. It’s about trying to imagine a book that would be right for her right now, when she’s in this weird space.

It’s not just about her reading skills either. As much as she loves books, she doesn’t yet love reading, and that’s something that’s kind of an unconditional requirement for being the child of my wife and I. We need this girl to love reading because, if she doesn’t, our lives as adults who love to read will be compromised — she’ll demand our attention rather than finding quiet joy in a book, like us.

Anyway, she needs to love reading, so the last thing I want to do is make it feel like a chore. I want to give her the opportunities to read, expose her to as many words as possible, and then let her discover the joy of it in her own time.

But again, it’s not just about her reading skills. It’s also about the depth of the ideas she can comprehend. She’s in a weird space here, too. For the last three years, since she really started to speak, I have tried to talk to her in the same way I talk to all of my students, minus some of the swear words and sarcasm. When she asks me a question, she knows she’s going to have a lot of information coming at her and that not all of it she’ll be able to understand. But she also knows that she can ask me what I mean, and I’ll try to explain it again, using different (and not always simpler) words.

My wife talks to her much the same way (though better-er, because she’s a better teacher than I am). Except for Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy, we’ve never really shied from telling her the unvarnished truth. While this has led to her possessing an unflappable concern about the fate of humanity when it comes time for the sun’s inevitable explosion, as well as semi-regular exhortations about her not wanting me to die when she’s an adult, it has also led to serious and deep conversations about a wide variety of topics where her line of questioning revealed not only her ability to comprehend a topic but to also synthesize it with some other experience in her life and then apply it later in a different conversation.

What kind of book do you read to a kid like that?

She’s not picky. Some of her favorite books focus on underpants, and nothing makes her laugh harder than a poop joke. But she also likes to look at atlases and ask questions about the various cultures. She traces her fingers over the drawings in a children’s book on evolution, asking relaxed but pertinent questions about our grandmother the fish. She knows the names and could even recall some of the details of Ahab and Queequeg, thanks to a young reader’s edition of Moby Dick.

But she can’t stick with a book longer than a few nights. She might know Ahab and Queequeg, but her interest didn’t last long enough for her to meet the white whale himself.

She doesn’t enjoy books without a lot of pictures. She’ll listen to them, but she doesn’t enjoy them, not in the same way. She needs something to focus on if she’s to keep her body still.

I’m looking for a book that is long enough to last three or four nights, but that also includes rich and detailed illustrations.

Essentially, a graphic novel for five year olds.

But it has to be more “read-aloudable” than most graphic novels. Graphic novels tend to follow the format of comics, with two or more speech bubbles on a page, making it difficult for the reader to signal to the listener when one speaker stops and another starts.

I also want her eye to move in a more linear fashion than what you normally find in a graphic novel, where each page is divided into frames and the eye is subjected to the talents of a graphic designer.

I don’t want to teach her the grammar of the graphic novel. Not just yet. That grammar definitely has its place, but I don’t think she’s there yet. She still needs to train her eyes and her brain to operate linearly (not too linearly of course, hence all the dancing).

The book I’m looking for would move from page to page, not frame to frame, and its words would flow in the same way, making a clear connection between each set of words and their attendant picture. It would be a book where the pictures almost wouldn’t need the words and where the words almost wouldn’t need the pictures, but where, because they exist together, deeper connections can be made than if each existed alone.

But it’s gotta be about something, and it’s gotta be about that thing in a novelistic (and hopefully non-pedantic) way. I want her to love the book the way I loved my first favorite books, the ones that I couldn’t put down and yet were too long for me not to put down. I want her to be eager for her mother or I to pick it up and read it to her, so eager that when we can’t, she sneaks upstairs to her bedroom to read it to herself, because she just can’t wait to return to the world of the book.

So it has to have words she can read or recognize on her own and drawings to enrich her understanding of how those words and ideas work together. It is has to have a story whose twists and turns she can’t yet imagine for herself, and a theme whose depths will set fire to her soul.

If she’s to escape upstairs and read it to herself, her curiosity for what comes next and what it all might mean will have to stoked to the nth degree; otherwise, her brain will find itself returning to the sensory bath that is modern children’s television.

So where the eff is that book?