Over the Rainbow

By my calculation, Lilly probably listened to “Over the Rainbow” between 35 and 45 times today. The CD player in her room somehow got jammed on “Repeat” during her rest time and I didn’t have the juice to climb the stairs—13 of them, I’ve been counting lately—to fix it. Not that I would have known how. And not that she minded. It’s all Wizard of Oz all the time around our house these days. And in our car. On our walks. Compared to the Wizard—meaning, mostly Dorothy and her impossible/possible journey—Santa didn’t have a chance. He came and went on Christmas with barely a mention, outside of a couple of pudgy-looking reindeer that came to us from folks who work at the church next door to our house.

When he’s not asleep or smiling up at one of us from the changing table, Joey spends his days right now in his bouncy seat, swinging from side to side and caroming off the doorway leading into the kitchen. He’s 4 months now, grabbing at everything and threatening to sit upright at any moment. Lilly meanwhile is running around the kitchen, screaming: “Let’s sing Over the Rainbow superfast Dada. And she skitters around like the song is propelling her motor. “Somewhereovertherainbowwakeuphigh,” like that. I say “wake up high dada.” There’s another fix she’s made to the song that she loves and here it comes. “theresalambthatIheardofonce inalullaby.” This morning, she sang it to a handful of people before church started and she looked up at me playfully when she got to the “lamb” part. A little too knowing in her charm maybe but charming nonetheless. She’s 2 ½ after all.

Mostly, we surf across the top of the charming madness that is our children’s childhood, pretending that we’re fully evolved adults with mortgages, meaningful work, books on our bedside tables, and messy histories that we’d rather not talk about—especially around toddler ears. The truth is messier than that though and lately I feel like I’m constantly dipping in and out of my own childhood, even while the God that I know seems to have put me and my partner in charge of a couple of children of our own.
I’m in church this morning kissing my sons cheeks, and he’s not cooing as much as he’s humming like a lovestruck bee. His voice echoes around the simple sanctuary and my mind immediately spins to my own father. Did he kiss and cuddle me like this? Lie down in bed with me at night and listen to my breathing, the way I listen to little Joey’s. Did he crave that skin-to-skin contact that I can’t get enough of lately?

The past also echoes its way into the present when we’re driving around the Valley, Lilly and Joey strapped in for whatever our latest gambit is. I know it’s 2008 in my head as we cross the river and head for the grocery store a day after Christmas. But the strip of stores that is fast replacing beautiful farmland puts me in mind of the iconic strip near my own hometown and the not-quite-square farmstands that slowly melted away with my youth. We had designs on cutting our own tree at a farm in the hilltowns west of where we lived. But an ice storm that cut power to some towns for upwards of a week pushed that idea aside. A few days later we found ourselves across the river and guiding our car into a deserted farm stand where someone was selling trees off the back of a tractor trailer. We nosed our car almost up against a rotund balsam and I suddenly saw my father in the driver’s seat. “Maybe we should take that one,” he would say, even before getting out of the car. But this time it wasn’t my father. It was Nell, who at times exhibits his gift for efficiency. I protest, because not to means drifting completely into the past, and falling completely out of the present, which will be calling from the backseat momentarily. Soon we’re home with the tree and reaching directly into the past in the form of ornaments that have come down through our own childhoods. Tin soldiers, a crocheted Christmas ball made by a wonderful aunt, an entire entourage of snowmen with their permanent-marker dates on the bottom offering more proof of my ever-present childhood. Lilly plays with them like toys, or manages to dismember them with the cheerful ineptness that is 2 ½. I want to gaze into them for hints about the future, the way the witch gazes into her crystal ball to scout out Dorothy’s location. But we hang them on the tree, plug in the lights and barely take note of the tree's tender beauty before rushing onward to the next event.

Santa and Oz did cross for a minute this year in the form of a 30-minute, toddlerized version of the Wizard of Oz that Amazon.com, I mean “Santa,” gave to Lilly. In this version, the wizard looks no more other-worldly than a bowling ball. The music, clearly left behind in some ugly copyright battle, is nowhere to be found. The whole thing comes off like an episode of Scooby Doo. It’s an assault on our artistic sensibilities but not on Lilly’s. She watches transfixed from the couch and doesn’t care a whit that the Tin Man’s song—perhaps the most clever few stanzas ever set to music—is nowhere to be found. The witch scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid sitting on my own couch. We haven’t watched the adult version yet because Lilly’s too young. But contemplating the flight of the witch past Dorothy’s window as the shards of Dorothy's life spin about still gives me chills. I contemplate the way the shards of our own lives appear and re-appear from time to time as I move about through our lives. Just this afternoon the sight of Lilly stamping in muddy puddles and of her little jeans soaked nearly up to her crotch nearly made a puddle out of me. But there were dishes in the sink, and piles of things that needed to be moved around and made into other piles of things, only to be moved and moved again, across our house and across the ages.