ever-fixed mark

A friend invited us to swim in her backyard pool yesterday. Aitch and Minor quickly became involved in a water-gun battle there with her boys, roughly the same age as my two, and some bigger kids from the neighborhood. Presently, the big kids teamed up against the smaller ones and took them “prisoner.”

“Hand over your weapons!” one of the big kids shouted to Minor.

“Why?” he asked.

“Security reasons,” was the answer.

Okay, so that was a little ripped-from-the-headlines creepy, but I didn’t intervene; I wanted to see how Minor would handle it. You could almost see the wheels turning in his brain. Clockwise: One of the big kids is talking to me! If he’s telling me to do it, it must be right! Counter-clockwise: This is a pretty cool water bazooka. It doesn’t seem fair that I would have to give it up.

He decided to fight, blasting his attacker with water to keep him at bay. The much taller kid simply reached over and disarmed him by grabbing the water gun out of his hands. I didn’t intervene, figuring that this was part of the way that boys play. “Put up your hands!” he ordered Minor, demanding his surrender. Instead, Minor put up his dukes, now ready for hand-to-hand combat.

The big kid reached out with his free hand to grab one of Minor’s fists. The next sound I heard was “Owwwwwww!” as Minor twisted that kid’s arm as hard as he could.

Then I intervened, to stop my five-year-old from injuring a boy twice his age. But first I laughed a little bit. Actually, a lot.

Population: You.

Thursday afternoon was beautiful, so my friend C. and I decided to spend the afternoon kayaking. Time was short, so we headed for a nearby lake that had a nice little swimming beach within a short paddle of the public boat launch. It had been years since I’d been there, though, and I misremembered the name of the access road, so we could not find the launch spot. We drove around looking for a place to get directions and eventually came upon a bait shop. C. ran in to ask while I stayed out in the car to try to Google the location on my phone.

After about three minutes, C. came running out. “Did you get directions?” I asked.

“Not only that, but dates for dinner,” she said. “Go, go, go before they follow us!”

She had asked two of the shop patrons directions to the public boat launch, and one responded, “I guess that means you’re not from around here, are you?”

“Not really,” she said.

“Then I guess that means you and your friend might be free for dinner tonight?”

She declined politely (a professional heartbreaker, she has lots of experience) and hightailed it out of there.

Bow down to her, ladies! She picked up two men in three minutes in a bait shop. She ought to teach a workshop at the Learning Annex.

In other kayaking news, I managed to coax the boys out on an excursion by tying an inner tube to the stern and trailing them along behind me. I haven’t yet told them that the the tube is usually towed by a much faster boat.

I left my job of three years last week, just packed it in with a vision of taking the summer off and no other back-up plan. I had recognized some time ago that I wanted to be performing a role that was more central to the success of the organization, but was prevented from looking for a new job internally by the realization that the commute was making me clinically depressed. (Forty-five miles from home, which translates to one hour each way under the best of conditions; ninety minutes on a good day; and two hours if raining, meaning that I was in the seat of my crappy little commuter car anywhere between two and four hours a day.) I tried to look externally, but it was hard to do that and perform my current job adequately. So I gave six weeks’ notice, starting my vacation at the same time as the kids. It was counterintuitive, leaving a well-paid job working with brilliant colleagues who treated me well and supported my professional growth almost without limits, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it especially wasn’t where I wanted to do it.

Upon hearing the shorthand version of this tale (”left my job to take the summer off”), each auditor to a man has responded the same way: “Congratulations!” As if quitting sans safety net were a clever strategic ploy, rather than something that any knucklehead could do. (They even wrote a country song about it.) I suppose what they’re really congratulating is not my sagacity but my circumstances, the fact that I can take time off without imperiling my mortgage. Believe me, I’m beyond grateful that I had that choice.

Last week, with all my new free time (!), I read Poser, a memoir by Claire Dederer about motherhood and yoga. Although I generally liked the book, I felt it verging on Eat, Pray, Love territory: Privileged white woman drops out of workaday existence to solve spiritual crisis through magical encounters with another culture! And then I thought, hey, that sounds kind of like me! Privilege, check; drop-out, check; now all I need is immersion in a foreign culture and a few cheesy epiphanies.

Do you think I could get a book deal based on a weekend in Lowell?