Burning Bright in the Forests of the Night

It's taken a family tragedy to bring me out of a 6 month blog-hide.  So Jack, who is now an 18 month-old dynamo who wrestles, runs, and grunts instead of saying "yes," had this stuffed animal named Mr. Tiger.  I will tell you Mr. Tiger's story.

Last December we took Jack to see Auntie Sarah in New York, and braved F.A.O. Schwarz at

This is what love at first sight in FAO Schwarz looks like.

Christmastime.  It was magical, despite the press of humanity. Whilst walking along a corridor filled with impossibly cute and expensive stuffed animals, Jack fell in love with a baby tiger.  He was only 8 months old at the time, so it was sweet to see him respond to something so ecstatically.  However, after checking the price tag, we figured we could find it online for much cheaper than what the Manhattan F.A.O. Schwarz could get away with.  So a couple weeks later on Christmas morning Jack got a a very similar stuffed baby tiger, 12 inches long, that we found for $13 on the internet.  It was true love between Jack and Mr. Tiger from the start.

This is what love at first sight on Christmas morning looks like.

Mr. Tiger became the privileged stuffed animal very quickly--the only one Jack wanted to sleep with.  Mr. Tiger was Jack's great friend in the manifold miserable moments (how's that for alliteration) spent wailing in his crib before naps and bedtime.  Sometimes Jack would not be screaming, but be jabbering and chuckling.  I'd peek in at him and find him wrestling around the crib with Tiger, his tail flying.  One time I checked on him after he fell asleep and found Jack flat on his back, with Tiger resting his four paws on his chest, as if Jack had fallen asleep staring into Tiger's friendly face.

For 10 months Jack and Tiger have been the best of buddies--lone companions during the long watches of the night, and it has even given us comfort to know that Jack has a friend in there.  For several months Jack wouldn't go outside without Tiger or his back-up, Mr. Doggy.  I'd wait at the door while he scampered around the house, gathering up Blankie, Tiger, and Doggy, and with his great strength he'd haul them all out the door and into the wide world, where they would get muddy and wind-blown together.

Jack on an adventure with his buddies.

Then yesterday morning, we lost him.  I still don't understand how it happened.  If I were a little more superstitious or if we lived in a place with slightly more romance I would blame elves or impish spirits.  I carried Jack from our third story apartment down the stairs, out the building, down the sidewalk, to our car.  I thought he had both Tiger and Blankie (praise all good things that we didn't lose Blankie because his attachment there is even stronger than Tiger) in hand, and I saw him drop Blankie right as we were getting into the car.  I assumed he had dropped Tiger behind me, so I got Jack in and buckled, grabbed Blankie, then turned to grab Tiger, but he wasn't there.  I stepped back to the sidewalk to see if we'd dropped him somewhere between the car and the building, but I could see nothing.  I was puzzled, but I'm mostly braindead most of the time these days, and assumed Jack must have just left him in the apartment.

An hour and a half later, when we'd returned from our errands, Tiger was nowhere to be found in the house.  I put Jack down for his nap and then turned the house upside down.  I retraced my steps time and again out to the car, getting down on hands and knees in the parking lot, searching under cars.  I looked in bushes.  I prayed.  I called the office and they contacted the cleaning crew.  I accosted the maintenance guy who'd been working on the apartment below ours.  I cried.  I knocked on our neighbors' doors and asked them.  I cried again.  I prayed some more. Josh made a "Have You Seen Me?" poster with a picture of Tiger on it, and we posted it on the front door of our building.

Josh and I keep opening the front door, looking to see if somehow Tiger has magically appeared on our door step, or as if he were a real Tiger, come wandering home after hunting squirrels. 

I have come to conclude that Tiger has either been stolen by a neighbor or carried off by a hawk. When the latter thought struck me I started wandering far afield, looking for places where Tiger may have been discarded or fallen from a tree branch.  Oh the places your imagination can take you.

It feels like a family member has been lost to us.  I am tortured by all the memories of Jack looking for Tiger before bedtime, and the joyous giggle and embrace that always followed discovering him.  I would sometimes find Jack lying on the floor, looking out the window, just holding Tiger and Blankie.  Every time he'd wake up screaming in the middle of the night and we'd go to comfort him, he'd be clutching Tiger to his chest.

Part of why this has been so disturbing for Josh and me is because we see daily evidence of how the line between real and imaginary is so flexible for infants and children.  How can you possibly say: "it's just a stuffed animal, we'll buy you a new one, it's not like it's a real Tiger"?  Because he is real, and very much alive for Jack.  Just yesterday, on our morning walk to the lake, Jack and I were sitting and eating crackers next to the statue of our city's founder.  The statue looks like a jolly fisherman (although he was a very wealthy real estate entrepreneur) and he sits on one side of a bench along the lake.  When Jack first saw him, months ago, he treated him the way he treats dogs: half in love, half afraid.  He half laughed, half whimpered; he wanted to draw near, but he was afraid to touch him.  Now, he accepts him as a kindly friend.  He likes to pat his knee, and smile up into his jovial metal face.  Yesterday morning we sat next to him, with Jack in the crook of the statue's arm.  I gave Jack a cracker, and he reached up and offered it to Mr. Statue. That is why losing Tiger has broken my heart.

How has Jack reacted to all this trauma, you might wonder?  Well, I shall tell you: he has been heroic, even stoic about it.  Last night when we put him to bed for the first time without his friend, we tried a few other stuffed animals.  He pushed them away, but finally accepted my old bunny, the one with the two pink heart-shaped patches that my mom sewed on after he got singed by my nightlight back in 1985.  But when Jack awoke in the wee hours last night, and after I had soothed him and put him back in bed, he pushed bunny away, into my hands.  He was ready to face the rest of the night alone with Blankie.

Tonight, we tried again.  He pushed Doggy, Duckie, and Bunny away with loyal disdain.  He would go it with Tiger, or he would go it alone.  He didn't even cry--just clutched Blankie and lay silent while we left the room, heads downcast.

We are ordering him another Tiger tonight from Amazon.  When the New Tiger comes he will be sleek and silky, not matted and fuzzy like Mr. Tiger was after countless washings from his rough and tumble life with his best friend.  He will smell like a new toy, not like a comforting mixture of Jack's sleep smell and laundry detergent.  I wonder if Jack will see in him a counterfeit, or the ghost of his old friend, being dragged through the leaves and mud, getting applesauce in his fur, or being clutched in the trusting arms of a sleeping babe, all well in the night shared by two dreaming friends. 

On Hobbit Holes and other Nerdy Longings

I have been a bit obsessed with the idea of living in Middle Earth lately (we watched The Hobbit this weekend).  My conversation with Josh went something like this:

"I'm obsessed with Middle Earth.  I want to live there."
[Chuckles].  "Wait -- like, New Zealand?  Or Middle Earth?"
"Middle Earth.  Mostly I just want to live in a hobbit hole."

I really do.  I want the lovely round door, the larder stocked with huge wheels of cheese, loaves of bread, and tasty sausages.  I want to sit in my garden, flowers bobbing near my head, talking to Gandalf when he stops by.  I want to sing hypnotic dwarf songs around the hearth.  I want one of those dwarves to look like Richard Armitage.  I can say this because Josh has his own man-crush on Thorin--after we saw The Hobbit for the first time, we had a conversation something like this:

Josh: "Do you mind if I dream about Thorin tonight?"
Me: "Depends on what kind of dream we're talking about."
Exasperated: "Like, where we go on adventures and stuff together."
Me: "That's fine." Pause. "So long as you don't mind if I dream about Thorin."

And so the nerdiness deepens.  I've tried to figure out where it's coming from.  I've been beset with Narnia and Hogwarts longings in the past, but this hobbit-hole longing is palpable.  I mean, I really want to live there. I'm nowhere near the educated Middle Earth nerd that my husband is (he actually knows the mythology), or that my sister Sarah was (she dreamily envisioned accompanying the Fellowship as their cook when she was a 10 year-old reading the trilogy).  I am definitely not the winner when we play Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit at McDonald family Christmases (sister Emily usually wins, but I think this has something more to do with Vigo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom than it does Aragorn and Legolas; her girlhood crushes were pretty intense).  My brothers could still probably sing the orc marching songs from the old cartoon version of The Return of the King.

All this being said, I blame the time of year.  There is something about the ripening of spring that makes me want to take to the open road, the backcountry, the anywhere-but-here.  It's a delight to be out-of-doors in this blessed window between the bone-wet cold of winter and the unbearable weight of a Virginia summer.  This is the time of year when I historically took all my back-packing trips overseas.  In 2001, in the bygone days before 9/11 and the euro, I wandered Europe for 5 weeks with two dear friends.  It was a heady experience--my breathless entrance upon the wide world as an almost-grown-up.  Memories of a full moon in Venice, waterfalls and white peaks in Switzerland, folk-dancing in a sunlit park in Barcelona, brioche and chocolate in Limoges, and swimming in the Scottish North Sea at midnight still follow me.

Four years later in the spring of 2005 I walked through Scotland, England and Wales with twenty-five others, and from that Wordsworthian utopia I never recovered.  When May approaches every year I think of grass-clogged hiking boots, rain-smeared journals, the smell of honeysuckle and roses, and the indefinable joy of true camaraderie.  Hiking, reading, learning, seeing, living--it was a sort of personal Eden; a removal from the world that nevertheless equipped me for the inevitable re-entry and deeper immersion into the world.

Two springs after that in 2007 I went to Iceland with my sisters--a crisp, austere, mysterious island, filled with enormously tall, well-groomed, very good-looking blonde people.  The landscape was eerie, still, and very beautiful.  It almost never got dark, and I remember sitting outside our little mountain cabin, overlooking a black-rock desert stretching to the sea, writing in my journal near midnight in sharp, clean, pale light.

Spring of 2010 saw me headed once more for a northern isle with my sisters--Ireland.  It was a week of steak-and-ale pie, buttery scones, Irish cheddar, ancestral lands, coastal hikes, windy hedgerows, and musical people.  We slept in a castle, wandered little villages, walked the Giant's Causeway, and almost sailed to Skellig, the mysterious monastic clump of rock in the Atlantic.  

And then just a year later, in 2011, I went to other ancestral lands with my newly-trothed husband.  For 10 days we hiked around Scotland, rarely indoors.  We scaled deserted mountains at sunset and ran down them again in twilight.  We skipped rocks on lochs and pranced among the bluebells (actually one of us skipped the rocks; the other pranced... I'll let you figure out which was who).  We trod past ruined abbeys, along ancient Roman roads, waving fields of brilliant yellow rape seed, and winding river beds.  We munched on apples and bread and cheese as we went; we nibbled on shortbread and pasties on mountain-tops.  Food tasted better and we slept more deeply; time wasn't measured by minutes and hours but more by the movement of the sun and the hunger in our bellies.   

I suppose every season carries historical association and the weight of memory, yet every spring I wrestle with the restless Romantic (note the capital "R") urge to be up and away.  Maybe my foreign springtime jaunts have ruined me.  But there is something about this visceral period of spring--when color is everywhere and the very air is laden with the smell of sweet growing things--that makes it hard to be an indoor, industrial-aged urbanite.  It is the time to be frolicking through blossoms, drinking nectar, getting grass stains, having dirt under the fingernails.  It is the time to be in the bosom of nature, or at the very least, cozily ensconced in a hobbit hole.

And so this year, instead of wandering the gorgeous, remote places of my girlhood imaginings, I wander Virginia's parks and playgrounds with my boy.  We pick dandelions and clover; we eat Cheerios and string cheese.  We crawl through mulch and get staticky hair from plastic slides.  Instead of Cumbrian bluebells we have Virginia bluebells; instead of wild garlic growing in primeval forests, I watch the dogwoods flower and azaleas begin to open next to trim townhouses.  The romantic wandering in lonely, desperately beautiful places is put aside for another age; for now, Jack sits on my shoulders and smashes cherry blossoms into my hair while I tell him about hobbit-holes and the good things of the earth.

Our Son, Beowulf Dalton

When I was pregnant with Jack, Josh and I would pray often for the baby to grow "strong and healthy."  It seemed the right thing to say at the time.  I remember, however, musing on the phrase one night, and saying to Josh: "Wouldn't it be funny if God took our prayers literally and Jack turned out to be an incredibly strong child?  I mean, for months we've been praying specifically for him to be strong.  What if he ends up like Hercules or something?"  We chuckled at the thought and commenced eating dinner.

I should have known when he was still in utero that he was no weakling.  I may have mentioned before that whenever I was reading with a book against my belly he would kick savagely at the binding of the book with enough force to make it bounce. But now that Jack is nearly a year old, I am convinced that our prayers were, indeed, answered literally.  Throughout the past 11 months, Jack has manifested astonishing physical strength.  On his second day of life he did a push-up off my chest while the lactation consultant was there to witness it.  Her brow furrowed slightly.

"Huh," she puzzled, "I've never seen a newborn do that before."

His power grew as his little body did.  He went through a phase when he was around 6 months old of thigh-clenching.  He would do this every time I tried to change his diaper--clench his legs together so tightly that I had to use both hands to force them apart, grunting and sweating, sometimes hollering to Josh for back-up, just so I could get the diaper up.  All the while Jack would stare innocently and curiously at me, seemingly unaware of the feat of strength that his lower body was performing.

He Army crawled at 6 months, muscling his way around the house.  Shortly thereafter, around 7 months, he began pulling himself up on things, and from there he graduated to full-scale body hangs off the edges of chairs, table ledges, etc.  He went through a Thor's Hammer Chop phase as well, where he would swing his arms violently and forcefully when either happy or irritated, bringing his hands crashing down upon whatever poor frail creature happened to be within reach (usually me).  Our friends, Brett and Lindsey Walker, watched him the night of my sister's wedding, and got to be first-hand witnesses to the strength of both his lungs and mighty fist.  Brett attempted to give him a bottle and Jack straight-up knocked it out of his hands.  "Freakishly strong," was the descriptor Brett applied to our little cherub.

I quail at the power of his terrible hand.  Look out, modern day Grendels.  When he was first learning to walk we would go around outside together, and I often felt like he was going to break my finger off--it would turn purple, and his hand was white from clenching.  Thankfully he now struts around by himself like he's conquered the world, so I don't need to have my blood vessels cut off and finger bones crushed every time we go for a stroll.

Sometimes I think he's just showing off when he walks around carrying both of my 2.5lb hand weights, one in each hand.  That's basically a quarter of his body weight.  At this point these antics have convinced us he is bound for a career in freight (or dentistry, for that matter, as he is also obsessed with teeth and toothbrushes.  Nothing makes him laugh harder than when I bare my front teeth to him).  His new move is to horse-kick during diaper changes, lashing out with both legs.  Not conducive to easy clean-up.

We usually come on the short end of Jack's stick of thumping, swatting, slapping, clawing, and clenching.  But sometimes in the quiet middle-of-the-night nursings he will reach up very gently to touch my chin or nose or cheek, and his little chubby fingers are soft and sweet.  Occasionally these tender moments end in a fishhook to my nostril or a swipe at my lip, but such are the risks in mothering a wild little Hercules such as ours.