Quote of the day: I love

The other night, sitting around the little Tinkerbell dinner table, seated on her tiny Tinkerbell chair, my mini-Melía was singing. The song was simple--almost too simple to write about.

"I love Brielle! I love Ashlyn! I love Mommy! I love Daddy!"

But if that's not worth writing about, what is?

Quote of the day - The bare necessities

The rest of us were boarding the minivan for the quick run home from grandma's Friday night.

But not Ashlyn.

She had a song to sing. And with a song, a dance.

She wiggled her way around the Odyssey at least enough times for its gray walls to come a tumblin' down, singing,

"The BARE necessities. Don't forget your worries and your strike!"

Around the rear bumper she sped, half-running, half-boogying, throwing the full weight of her little chest into the emphasis on "BARE." Almost colliding with the front fender, the modified lyric from The Jungle Book came back like a Zen mantra, over and over with each lap around the vehicle. "The BEAR necessities. Don't forget your worries and your strike!"

Her literal wording may have upset Walt Disney's original message. But her performance--free of cares beyond the moment, true to life's essentials of song, dance, passion and childlike power--clearly captured what Baloo was trying to tell Mowgli.

Easter Sunday

Good Friday is hard to explain to kids. It’s hard enough for me to understand for myself how and why we creatures slew our Creator. After who He made us to be, how could we have made such monsters of ourselves? I take that confusion and try to explain it to my little ones and always feel unsatisfied.

But Easter is simple.

Easter is literally a different story. “He is alive!” What must have seemed most unexplainable to the shell-shocked friends of the crucified Rabbi seems so delightfully easy for me to explain to my children. He was dead, but God raised him from the dead. Even Melía, my Princess of Why, doesn’t need to inquire about the reasons for that. Of course God raised His Son! Of course Jesus is alive!

Lent is a soul-search, a fast, a repenting. Good Friday mourns the death of God, an impossibility marking the deepest, darkest point in the history of human evil. These are things to be pondered, observed, remembered.

But Easter is to be celebrated.

In the “Bright Sadness” of Lent the body or mind may rest from some pleasure, while the heart rests from the delusion of self-sufficiency. This rest creates space for reflection on what took Jesus to the cross, including my part in the crime. This is well and good.

But after forty days of facing my own complex cries of “Crucify him!” the simple joy of saying “He is risen!” is warm sunshine on a shivering soul.

And maybe, at three and four, that’s what the simple souls under my care need most.

Community over Convenience: Why the Amish have got it goin' on

This weekend, during commercial breaks in our Adult Conversation (i.e. passionate, adoring chatter between two lovers--about their children), Rachelle and I talked about the Amish. (This is sounding like a really steamy couple's get-away weekend, I know.) But the Amish are like my heroes. If I got into the whole reincarnation thing, my goal would be to graduate and come back next life as an Amish person.

They are all about doing things the hardest way possible, which yields this paradoxical simplicity. They are the antithesis of what Staples is hoping to sell us. This office supply store's ad campaign has captured the fantasy of the 21st-century Westerner: an "Easy" button, the postmodern magic wand that simplifies life's complicated tasks. They actually sell them. I have been buying easy buttons all my life: cell phones, computers, cars, PDAs, books, magazines and the rest of the pile of tools and toys that now isolate us from each other. I love all this stuff. I love "easy." I love harnessing my time and getting organized and being a geek.

In the gym, we are wired to personal audio devices leaving us incomunicato, so plugged in that we're utterly disconnected. My affluence affords me the luxury of driving wherever I want on my own schedule, without needing to rub elbows with other passengers or alter my hours to those of public transport. I live in a single-family home inhabited by my nuclear family. I have My Computer, My Music, My Movies, My Documents, MySpace--all so convenient, so confining.

I have been buying "Easy" buttons for my family, and loving them too. The minivan--complete with wireless headphones for kids to hear their movie while we do not--delivers both kids and parents from the inconvenience of sharing sound and space. Today I had the luxury of cleaning up from dinner while two daughters watched a video and the other listened to music on the computer with headphones. We buy Happy Meals, named for how parents feel when each kid has her own setup: toy, drink, entrée, side. Hold the squabbling over who got more fries.

But for the Amish, the perennial absence of an "Easy" button seems to give them something that I would love even more--each other. A dozen years ago I showed a documentary about Amish culture to a religion class I was teaching, and as we discussed it, this lanky, long-haired kid named Oliver--one of my brightest students--summed up Amish values in a phrase I have never forgotten: "community over convenience." And every so often, when the high-tech clutter of my life leaves me feeling lonely in a crowd, I know that this is what I want more than almost anything else.

The vision comes back: a trio of bearded Plain People plowing a field behind a horse--together. No Easy button there. But oh, how I envy them sometimes.