family ties

When you're traveling you have a lot of time to page through your old cameraphone pics and think about all the things you meant to blog but haven't yet...

This is my niece M. I took this shot in early August, twenty minutes into a 45 min wait for a roller coaster ride at an amusement park in Vallejo, California. It would be her third roller coaster ride ever: she and I rode the first two earlier that morning, and left the lines of two others in disappointment because M is a little pixie of a girl who didn't meet the minimum height requirements.

("Green means I can go," she explained to me as she measured herself against the height charts. "Red means stop -- no go -- and Yellow means you must be accomplicated by an adult." A beautiful malapropism which, of course, I immediately twittered, thinking "kid, if you only knew...")

Forty five minutes is a long time to wait when you're 8 years old, so I checked in with her every little while to see if she still wanted to wait it out. She did. We played "I'm going on a picnic..." to pass the time, and imagined how wonderful it would be to ride the ride; how we would scream during the scary parts.

And then it was our turn. M stepped up to the gate that would soon fly open and let her take her seat in the car where the bar would clap down on her lap and shoot her up and over the perilous screaming heights. She stepped right up to the gates that separated her from that pure delicious fear that we had been talking about all day.

The car screeched to a halt, its riders tumbled out still buzzing with adrenaline and then, with our gate still locked shut, came the announcement.

They were closing the ride.

"What did they say?" asked M.

The announcement came again: they were closing the ride for inspection; something mechanical; they needed to look into it; no word on when the ride would reopen.

We waited 45 minutes to be told they were closing the ride.

We discussed our options. We could wait for them to reopen the ride, but there was no estimate of when that might be. I was crushed that the thing we waited so long for wasn't going to happen, and expected she would be crushed too. But she amazed me by uttering one sad, long "ohhhhhhhhhh -- that's too bad." And then she said: "let's go."

That was it. She was over it. No fits, no tantrums, no whining, no tears.

I was seriously impressed. Thinking this behavior highly unusual (who are these beautiful self-possessed children that my brother has spawned anyway? can we really be related? or is this that eerie stillness that so many of my friends complain about -- that feels not so still to me, when the emotions are roiling beneath the surface, but is, I'm told, invisible to the naked eye) so I did the aunt-like thing and offered her a tonic to lessen the blow.

That is, I offered to buy her something. With sugar.

"Let's get some ice cream -- you were so patient for so long and that was a huge disappointment." (What -- am I trying to train her to pitch a fit? Teach her that, for every disappointment, she must be mollified? Oh the hell with it -- I'm her aunt, which means I'm entitled to certain privileges.) "Let's find D & K" (her sister and my sister, who were off somewhere else riding the tall girls' roller coaster) "and get everybody some ice cream. Ice cream always makes everything better."

M's face brightened -- she's a big fan of ice cream, she comes from a long line of ice cream lovers -- but then she did the thing that for me crystallized the character of this self-possessed little girl who knows precisely what she wants and will work it work it work it to negotiate her way to having precisely that thing.

That, and I suspect (or maybe projected) that she understood context is all and local is best and there are some things that you can come by at an amusement park that you simply can't come by anywhere else. Who might understand, maybe, that the best way to experience a place is to taste it.

She said: "Okay. But can I trade my ice cream for cotton candy?"

That's my girl.