Taking Care Of The Sick Kid

I have seen way too many episodes of SUPER WHY! and DORA THE EXPLORER in one day, but at last, after many Pedialyte popsicles, Thing Two (the girl) is on the mend.

Poor kid woke up saying "I don't feel good," and proved her point a little later by throwing up the previous night's dinner.

Much of the day was spent in lethargy on the sofa in front of children's television -- thank goodness for TiVo, something I am putting on my "things I am thankful for" Thanksgiving list this year.

But between that and napping, there were some sweet moments when I fed her soup and helped her squeeze the last of those push-up popsicles for all their juice, and just lay beside her.

The day was long and staying in the house every waking hour of it was claustrophobic. I was testy by the end, but not with her so much as with her brother, who somehow remained a Tigger-like bouncy bundle of energy far into the evening.

But the whole experience brought to mind a school sick day from my own childhood. I remember the crunch of Saltines. I remember the sucking down of grape juice. And I especially remember daytime 1970s TV: The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, Let's Make A Deal, The Galloping Gourmet, and the only soap I could ever stand, though it gave me nightmares: Dark Shadows (to this day the name Barnabus Collins gives me chills).

The feverish, icky days spent at home were claustrophobic then too, save for trips out to the doctor. I remember submitting to "throat cultures" and drinking treacly pink fruit-flavored, strong-smelling antibiotics to cure Strep. I remember keeping the cleaning lady company: her name was Elizabeth, she was African-American, from the South, once proudly told my mother "I voted for Mr. Nixon" (my liberal Democrat mother was appalled) and when she could get it, enjoyed chewing on the fat from lamb chops.

Those days seemed impossibly long to me whenever they came. I hated the sore throats -- it hurt so much to swallow. I hated burning up in fever and having to be given a cool alcohol sponge bath. I especially hated having to do more homework to make up for what was missed in school.

Maybe that was part of the reason I got so testy by day's end yesterday: I had a visceral memory of those shut-in all-day sick days from my school days.

But in the end I'm glad I was there for my kid, who thankfully was much better today, save when she woke up from a nap after having a nightmare and cried and thrashed until only Daddy could get her calm. That's the other thing I'm glad for: Late Blooming Dad, who was ready, willing and able to take over.

Here's hoping there won't be any more sicky sick days soon. And to all the Late Blooming Moms and Dads staying home with a sick kid, I wish you patience, and a high tolerance for kids' TV.

I Miss My Cat

He died last Tuesday.

He was my first child.

I got him 13 years ago at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter, for seventeen dollars. In exchange, I got 13 years of love.

He was my bridge from being single to living with my boyfriend, getting engaged, getting married, having kids.

He came into my life a few years after I'd lost both parents. My closest family member was nearly four hundred miles away from where I lived, and at the time, I wasn't dating anyone. I didn't have a roommate, I was working full-time from home, and I was in regular need of a hug.

He was in need too -- not just of hugs, but a home. A three-year-old who'd been brought in by his owner, for no reason that was shared with the shelter, he'd been in a cage for ten days and had already won the hearts of the staff, who dubbed him Marmalade because of his coloring. I couldn't take him home the first day I saw him, because I'd come without a cat carrier -- I didn't own one. But it didn't take me long to bond with him, because he meowed each time I walked by eyeing other cats, and drew me in with his gorgeous honey-colored coat with creamy white highlights around his cheeks, nose and eyes, and creamy chest and paws tipped with white, and his tiger-like tail, full of rings. When I offered to scritch his head, he knew a good thing and he promptly flopped down, belly up.

It was love at first belly rub.

I was back with a borrowed cat carrier when the doors to the shelter opened at seven thirty the next morning.

After a quick whisk to the vet, where he was weighed, inoculated and declared "somebody's love muffin" by the smitten doctor, I brought him home. I introduced him to one room at time in my West L.A. two-bedroom, and each time, he'd come back and "buuuush" me with his head to thank me, and meow as if to say, "It's all mine now? I can live here? With you?"

I dubbed him Honey Bear, because he was honey-colored, soft as a Teddy Bear, and simply brought to mind those bear-shaped honey dispensers you can get at the supermarket. He had the sweetest dispostion and gentlest nature of any being, human or animal, I have ever met.

He was a high-maintenance kitty, but worth it.

He demanded food at ungodly hours. He stood on hind legs and poked me with a paw if I neglected to feed him or break for lunch or stop working in time for dinner, or stayed too long on the couch watching TV before bed. He took up half the bed and most of the covers. In his last four years, when he battled lymphoma and endured chemotherapy, he demanded lots of medicine, costly treatments, and even, for more than a year, nightly administration of IV fluids. But, as the vet once said, "He never gave us a moment's trouble."

Always, he was there for me. Through the ups and downs of my romantic life, till I finally settled down, he was a constant comfort.

He moved with me, living in three apartments.

He allowed himself to be adopted by my boyfriend, who became my fiance, and then husband ... and made a man who'd never had a real pet turn into an adoring father willing to take allergy shots to be around him.

He taught my husband and I how to be parents, how to put our "child" first.

He saw me through surgeries and miscarriages and the birth of my twins.

He saw us both through those crazy first months with two babies.

He somehow cajoled my husband into being chief belly-rubber, and the love sessions between the two of them became a regular feature of their lives. I've never forgotten the night he planted himself atop my husband's chest when my husband had cried out from a nightmare. My husband always told the cat, when the cat settled down on his side of the bed, "Puss, you honor me."

But always, always, always, he was my cat first, my guardian, my mascot, my Patronus.

He was unfailingly gentle. He never bit save in play, and then, he would barely leave a mark. He never scratched except by accident, even when I sat him down and put him through the torture of cutting his nails. He rarely hissed -- maybe once, at a visiting human who smelled of cats, and maybe once at another cat at the vet's. Never at me. Never at a family member.

If I made the bed, he got under the sheets.

If I put a blanket down, he sat on it, assuming it was for him.

If I read the newspaper, he lay atop it.

He would often sit on my desk and get right between me and my computer: if I had to work, so be it, but he was going to be a part of it and that was that.

He would sit in a chair at the table during most meals, hoping, mostly in vain but not always, for a handout -- chicken, fish, or even better, the chance to lick a cereal bowl's residual milk. Boldly, he'd leap onto the table even though he was lifted off time and time again. More than a few times, he managed to snag somebody's supper before he was caught.

But mostly, he was just here, content to hang around me, a being whose very presence in my life kept me grounded and safe and enveloped in the sure knowledge that I was loved, no matter what.

He left the world just as my kids, nearly five, were starting to really appreciate him, wanting to feed him, giggling when he licked treats off their little hands, and marveling at watching him lap up water.

I'm glad they got to know him at least a little.

By watching me and their dad take care of him, they learned about being gentle to animals, about how they didn't always come first, about softness and sweetness and coziness, and about how great it is to have a little bit of nature, a touch of something wild, in your home.

But he was my cat, not theirs. He made his loyalties known time and time again, ushering me into the bedroom and plopping down in his accostomed place on the bed, sharing not just body heat, but the simple comfort of being in each other's company, and I was the company he loved best.

As I write this, I am thinking of an old Hoagy Carmichael song that captures the many, many nights (and days) I was fortunate to have with the cat I named Honey Bear. Funny, I never sang this one to him -- mostly I sang him a version of "You are So Beautiful," with lyrics rewritten to refer to a cat, to which he would meow in call and response ... or my own bastardized version of "How Are Things In Glocca Morra?" (I retitled this, "How Are Things in Honey Bear-land"). But it's this Hoagy song that best captures my feelings for him and, I think, his feelings for me:

It's not the pale moon
that excites me
that thrills and delights me
oh no
It's just the nearness of you

It isn't your sweet conversation
that brings this sensation
oh no
It's just the nearness of you

When you're in my arms
And I feel you so close to me
All my wildest dreams come true

I need no soft lights
to enchant me
If you'll only grant me
the right
to hold you ever so tight
and to feel in the night
the nearness of you.

I Got Into The Halloween Candy Last Night

It was mocking me from across the room, in the bright orange plastic Jack O' Lantern pails.

I was helpless to resist the siren call of the snack-size Three Musketeers bar. Which is, by the way, a candy bar filled with some mysterious mock-chocolate, mock-creamy, foamy substance I have never been able to identify, but is something I suspect will survive a nuclear holocaust intact, much like a Twinkie.

My stomach was unhappy later. I must've downed a pint of milk in the aftermath just trying to rid myself of the trans-fatty acid aftermath.

But this afternoon, the candy was mocking me again.

Today I managed to resist, but only because the husband came back from lunch at the studio commissary bearing a brownie, and when faced with the choice between a fresh-baked goodie and a factory-made, preservative-packed treat, I am adult enough to choose the slightly more wholesome option. Afterall, there are eggs and flour and milk in brownies, and the fat involved is mostly butter, not hydrogenated corn solids or some such artificial evil.

I hope to be a little more of a grown-up tomorrow and skip the sweets entirely. But I'm not holding my breath.

Halloween itself was marked by the children finally "getting it" this year. They went full-on trick-or-treating for two full city blocks, tramping up the front walks of a dozen or so decorated domiciles (we skipped the ones that didn't have Halloween decor, the universal sign welcoming trick-or-treaters). And they did so in the dark. The girl, by the way, who had been utterly terrified of the whole prospect last year, and opted out except for the well-lit trick-or-treat fest at the local mall, was fearless this time around. This year, as soon as the very first door opened and a kind, smiling stranger deposited candy in her pail, she was sold on the entire enterprise.

The girl dressed as Cinderella, and got admiring stares, particularly in the costume store when she first tried it on. But the boy was the stand-out hit in his store-bought Wall-E outfit, a sort of foam sandwich board duplication of Wall-E's front and back, with the addition of a light-up glow stick on the top left, Wall-E gray goggles for his eyes (which he wore perched atop his head like movie star sunglasses), and Wall-E gloves that made his hands look like electronic arms (he mostly left the gloves in the built-in treat pocket on the bottom of the sandwich board). Wall-E was greeted all night with exclamations of "Look, it's Wall-E!" and "Cool Wall-E costume!" and "Hi, Wall-E!" Either Wall-E is much beloved, or my son looked simply adorable as Wall-E, or more likely, some combination of both factors.

As a Late Blooming Mom who has fond memories of this holiday (as posted previously here), I feel I did the kids right this year. I can check off the Halloween box. I carved a pumpkin with the kids. I took them to a Pumpkin Patch AND a Pumpkin Festival. Late Blooming Dad made a chocolate pumpkin bread. And I even got a tiny bit crafty: I didn't handmake the costumes (leave that to the moms who have the time, god bless 'em) but I DID wind up sewing the Wall-E goggles' headband so they would fit without slipping off my son's head. Plus the kids got to go trick-or-treating at the Star Eco Station on Friday, the mall Saturday afternoon, and in the neighborhood Saturday night. Oh, and did I mention the Halloween picnic for the West Los Angeles Parents of Multiples? (The highlight for me: the quadruplet toddlers dressed as Elvis ... or should I say, Elvii?)

A lot of people get down on Halloween these days as rampantly commercial, a waste of money and bad for the environment (given all the treat bags, treat wrappers, and decorations that get tossed when it's over). Religious groups of all stripes are starting to oppose it: it's got pagan origins, it involves images of evil, etc. But let's face it, America has embraced it and turned it into something it never was back when it was All Hallow's Eve. And your point is?

All the trouble Late Blooming Dad and I went to was worth it when we heard our daughter say, as we brushed teeth post-candy, "I wish every week was Halloween." Now would someone pass me the StarBursts?

"It was so yummy that I can hardly feel my eye."

You read it right.

That's what Thing 1 said the other day.

I can't remember what he ate that was so yummy, but I don't think I'm soon to forget his creative attempt to articulate what he was feeling in response to aforesaid yumminess.

I am sure I am dating myself now as a very Late Blooming Mom indeed when I say moments like this remind me of an ancient TV show with Art Linkletter, ART LINKLETTER'S HOUSE PARTY, which ran for something like 20 years and was later revived with Linkletter and Bill Cosby as KIDS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS. It can't be quite as obscure as I'm making it out to be, because WIKIPEDIA tells me it's been mentioned on FAMILY GUY, SOUTH PARK and THE SIMPSONS. The basic idea was that Linkletter (and later Cosby) would interview kids and, well, they would indeed say the darnedest things.

My kids oblige daily. It's getting so that I don't even notice the mangled English that is their attempt to master their mother tongue. "I'm gooder than you at swimming, "Thing 2 brags to Thing 1. "No you amen't!" proclaims Thing 1. And so it goes on.

They take in what they hear me say like sponges, yet somehow things don't quite come out the same way when uttered from their mouths. "Why are the cars in their lines on the freeway?" Thing 2 asks. She means lanes. "What's an exit?" is Thing 1's question when I say I'm taking the next one. Sounds like an easy concept to explain -- it's the thing you take to get off the freeway, the ramp, the lane, the way you choose to take your car when you leave the freeway to go where you want to go. But somehow this didn't really clear it up for him.

They're piecing together how the world works, using language clues, and the results are sometimes not exactly accurate, yet betray a certain logic.

Perhaps my favorite mistaken assumption the kids are under is that when you kiss, it means you're married. It comes from too many Disney movies in which the princess kisses the prince at the end in a big wedding scene. Somehow, this recently led to my daughter kissing daddy and then proclaiming, with a huge smile, "We're married now!" (Elektra complex, anyone?) And when Thing 1 kissed his sister, he proclaimed that they, too, were suddenly wed. (Ah, incest. I won't be explaining that one to my four-and-a-half year-olds.)

All too soon, they are going to understand way more about the world and I won't have to explain why the car is thirsty and we have to stop for gas, or that we're not in the earth, we're on it ... or that regular TV -- as in, TV not recorded on our TiVo -- has something called commercials.

I'm in no hurry. I realize that right now, I am, to my children, an expert on the world. And I'd better enjoy it now, because in a few years, they will have dethroned me from my lofty perch. They'll be the self-proclaimed experts, and they're going to be explaining it to me.

It's Not The Terrible Twos You Have To Worry About: It's The F^&#ing Fours

Sometime last year, I was at one of the monthly support meetings thrown by my local parents of multiples club, and the club co-president was decrying "The F^%#ing Fours," the phase her twin boys were going through. She said, "Everyone talks about the terrible twos. But no one warns you about the fucking fours!"

At the time, I just laughed, and figured maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe she'd had a particularly hard day with her boys, two kids I'd only glimpsed at club events, where they were invariably well-behaved and adorable.

But now I know about the F^%#ing Fours. And I want them to be Fucking Over.

Okay, not entirely. Four has mostly been a fun age, a better age, an age during which my kids have learned to use three and even four-syllable words, play together without need of near-constant intervention by a referee, go to the bathroom before going to sleep, and only rarely wet the bed. They eat more and different foods (maybe not vegetables, but you can't have it all), and they're easier for one parent to manage on a trip to the mall, the store, or the movies.

But lately, at least one of the kids -- Thing 1, my son -- has entered into a new and infuriating stage, the "I will whine about everything and throw a fit if I don't get exactly what I want, when I want it" phase. This morning, he could not handle the concept that he wouldn't be able to get the toy Late Blooming Dad had procured for him at a baseball game -- thunder sticks -- because he was refusing to eat his breakfast. He threw another fit because he had forgotten to take a different toy to school with him. And he proceeded to go "batshit" in the back seat of the car -- "batshit" being the technical term for kicking, screaming, and crying at a pitch designed to induce headaches in all but the most Zen parents.

Thing 1 is sometimes egged on by, or inspired into, his poor behavior by his sister, who though technically the same age (well, younger by two minutes), knows better and is developmentally advanced enough to realize that throwing a fit is NOT gonna get her what she wants. Though she went through something of a Fucking Fours state around three-and-a-half -- isn't it typical of the girl to hit the behavioral milestone sooner? -- she manages to regress quite dramatically on occasion.

Tonight that occasion was the minute we arrived home, when she demanded Late Blooming Dad carry her over the threshold into the apartment. Dad, who was busy cooking dinner and had already taken his shoes off, refused, asking her to just come inside. This prompted a five-minute crying fit that included dragging herself along the floor on her back, while refusing to take off her shoes or get up.

You'd think the gods of parental hell would have taken compassion on us then and let us off the hook for the night. But it was not to be. Thing 1 refused to sit for much of dinner, or to eat his food without assistance he no longer really needs. He lay on the floor demanding to be carried, and we responded by ignoring him for about fifteen minutes... though it seemed more like the 100 Years' War before it was over.

His fits continued in fits and starts, interrupted by instances of him spitting and then being given a time-out for having done so. Somehow or other, he calmed down enough to get into PJs and brush his teeth. But come bedtime, it was Torture-Your-Parents Hour again. He wound up getting a time-out, but since he wasn't going to stay in the family room alone, I sat in there with him and made up a bedtime story about dinosaurs that seemed to calm him at last.

He's in bed now, after one last talk from me about how being difficult means you don't get TV, you don't get toys, you don't get a treat, or anything else you really want. I hope it sunk in, but my suspicion is, to paraphrase Jackson Browne, when the morning light comes streaming in, he'll get up and do it again.

The co-president of the twins club warned me. I should have known they were coming. All I can do now is hope to hunker down and get through them ... and for those of you who have kid or kids younger than mine, CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!

The Still-Pretty-Great-Pumpkin, or HALLOWEEN: The Next Generation

I remember Halloween pretty fondly from my Upper West Side childhood.

My friends and I used to dress up in home-made costumes -- they were ALWAYS home-made in those days, never store-bought. And we'd trick or treat "for Unicef," shaking our bright orange cardboard boxes -- which I loved putting together the day before, tucking in all the tabs -- chanting in singsong, going from apartment to apartment. (The next day, mom would break open my box and help me count the coins we'd donate.) I had Halloween parties in which my art-loving, ever-creative mom used to "web" a room in our apartment, stringing twine through everything to creative an enormous web. Each string finished off attached to a wooden clothes pin, and each kid at the party got to try to wind that string around the clothes pin and untangle the web. We used to eat candy corn until we got stomach aches. A great time was had by all, and it didn't cost a lot.

But these days, Halloween is big business, the kind of massive consumer-goods-heavy enterprise that makes me think of what one of the PEANUTS gang says about Christmas in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," that it's all run by "an eastern syndicate."

I want my kids to enjoy it, but I don't want to be compelled to buy, buy, buy to make that happen.

Yet it isn't easy.

A Halloween SPIRIT store has opened up on our corner. It has a huge inflatable orange man-type figure of undefined identity -- is he a scarecrow? A big orange stick with hair? And there's an inflatable Jack-O-Lantern snow globe and skeleton. It's pretty enticing. For several weeks now, we drive right by it on the way home from school, and I admit I've promised the kids we'll go in to buy costumes. Unlike my mom and many of my friends' mothers of that day, I don't have time to make a home-made costume, so store-bought is gonna have to cut it. I will part with money there.

A couple of weekends ago, Late Blooming Dad and I packed the kids into the car and drove the 29 miles to Pasadena. The lure was Kidspace Museum's 15th annual "free" Pumpkin Festival. But "free" didn't really mean free. True, there was no admission fee. The festival was in a big park by the Rose Bowl. But other than one arts and crafts table open to all (we made ghost puppets), everything else required that we purchase tickets. Tickets were a dollar each, and each attraction cost anywhere from one to six tickets. After the kids endured the lines and visited two bouncies, played carnival games, got face painting, and temporary tattoos, we'd spent quite the wad. Might've spent more, but they RAN OUT of pumpkins.

So much for free Halloween festivities.

And yet... I feel compelled to spend more. On Sunday, it's off to an urban pumpkin patch, the kind of temporary attraction thrown up for a few weeks in October on an otherwise empty lot. There will be a train ride, pony ride, more bouncies and face painting, and I hope we will actually be able to purchase our pumpkins there.

I'm drawing the line at decorations on our door; I really don't need cobwebs and a hanging paper glow-in-the-dark skeleton, now do I?

I promise I'll stop the financial bleeding there, really I will. Oh, except for the following weekend, when the local elementary school puts on their 62nd annual "Halloween Hoot" carnival. 62nd annual. I kid you not.

Clearly I'm not the only one who finds this holiday so compelling, despite the money parents part with, me included, and the commercialism run rampant. I think it's about some very good childhood memories, and a compulsion to give my kids some of the same, while they're still young enough to appreciate selecting a pumpkin, taking it home, carving it, turning out the lights, and watching the glow of a candle through those Jack O'Lantern teeth and eyes.

Pass me the candy corn, will ya? Who says wax-like sugar concoctions are just for kids...

Their Fred Astaire Moment

The very first time you're exposed to something wonderful in this life, be it the person you fall in love with, or your very first taste of ice cream as a child, I have a name for it. I call it a "Fred Astaire moment."

Back when I was fourteen or so, living through the hormonal and social hell that is eighth grade, I felt alienated from pretty much everyone I knew. My parents could not relate to me, and my middle school classmates had turned on me. It wasn't that they hated me. It was just that they didn't "get" me ... and I didn't "get" them.

I'd always had friends in kindergarten and elementary school, and coasted along with a comfortable social life through sixth grade or so. But in seventh, the girls I used to like, and who used to like me, became a lot more interested in boys... to the exclusion of all else. And the boys in my class I may have been friendly with once upon a time pretty much ignored my existence and paid attention to the girls who were boy-crazy.

Maybe my pubescent hormones hadn't fully kicked in yet, or maybe I was never one for gossip or speculation about the crushes and the rites of teenage physical exploration about which my classmates had suddenly become obsessed. I know I had no interest in shutting out some people because they weren't "cool." But by eight grade, that is what happened to me. Kids whom I'd known since second grade and who'd always invited me to their birthday parties and sat next to me in class started to ignore me. And when I didn't act coy around boys and talk of my latest crush -- because really, I didn't have any yet -- the gap between me and my classmates only got bigger.

It didn't help that I enjoyed doing my English and History homework, loved reading and writing essays about Shakespeare or world politics, and was often a teacher favorite in the classroom. I was soon branded a nerd, and though no one ever said it to my face, the social isolation that I experienced made it clear to me what my reputation was.

As if it wasn't unfair enough that most of my classmates were in the midst of full-blown boy obsession and I wasn't, I still suffered from the mood swings and hormonal symptoms of adolescence. I had braces, glasses, and now pimples, and I felt very much alone.

My mom knew how unhappy I was. But she was a nosy mom and the last thing I wanted to do was share my feelings with her because of that. Like any teen, I jealously guarded my privacy. She tried to get me to talk to a child psychologist, and when I caught her on the phone with this shrink, I hung up the phone on both of them.

Then one day, when I found myself having a crying jag and just couldn't seem to stop, mom dragged me out of the house. She walked me over to the Regency theater, a movie revival house a few blocks from our apartment, and sat me down in the midst of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. It was a black and white musical from 1936, and I had never seen anything like it.

A few minutes after I arrived, I couldn't resist looking up at the screen and watching, through my tears, a tap dance number so breathlessly exhilarating, exuberantly musical and irresistibly swinging, that in a moment, I utterly forgot myself. I was lost in an experience of grace, of sheer joy and disbelief and wonder and delight that a human being could do what the man I was seeing -- and his dance partner -- did on screen.

In that moment when I was lost, I was saved.

My adolescence turned around right then and there.

No, I didn't stop being a nerd. On the contrary. I become a teenaged Fred Astaire aficionado at the height of the disco era. I also finally understood what it meant to have a crush, even though, in reality, the object of my affection was then in his seventies (this being the late 1970s). It was the young Astaire I fell for, the guy up on screen, not the real one. And while it would be awhile before my movie star crush that could never be was replaced by real crushes on real boys my own age, the feelings began there.

I also developed a compelling interest outside of school that led me to haunt the stacks of Lincoln Center's library for the Performing Arts, to read all about the golden age of Hollywood; about movie musicals; the songwriters and composers who wrote the "standards" of the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s; the Broadway shows of those same years; the New Yorkers, many of them Jews like my family, who emigrated to Hollywood and what they did there, writing comedies and musicals and great songs ... and a fascination with American film so strong that I would wind up moving to Los Angeles and storming my way into the movie business not so many years later.

But the main thing I want to convey about that moment isn't that it influenced my life course. It's that it made me experience something wonderful, unique, exhilarating and the delightful, that I'd never experienced before, in a way so powerful it lit me up inside.

Tonight my kids had such a moment.

My daughter is taking a pre-ballet class on Saturday mornings, not because I got her to do so -- I really couldn't care if she dances or not -- but because she feels like it, and finds it fun. Last week she saw some girls at the school in tap shoes, having a tap lesson, and she wondered what that kind of dancing was all about. So I promised her that I'd show her some tap dancing at home.

Today, I remembered the promise, and so after dinner, before the bath, when both kids were ready, I put on the very same dance that had lifted my soul years before, a jovial little number called "Pick Yourself Up." (Gotta love having DVDs with scene selection; you can watch in on Youtube too.)

I sat back and watched my kids watch Fred Astaire for the very first time.

Curiosity on their four-and-a-half-year-old faces soon gave way to smiles, laughter, and light in their eyes. When Fred pulled his first tap dance move, I gestured to the screen and said, "That is tap dancing." Suddenly, it was like a light switch went off inside my kids. Within seconds, they wereup out of their seats, and nothing could stop them from what they simply had to do next: they were trying to tap dance -- in their socks -- all over the living room floor.

Their joy -- and the need to participate in full body with what they were witnessing -- was as potent as the exuberance I'd felt as a lonely teenager suddenly lifted out of herself in a darkened movie theater on west 67th street.

It's not my hope to don't condemn my children to years of old movie musical nerd-dom. It's an odd interest, I'll admit it, and I've taken some social heat for it over the years.

But I am damn happy they had a Fred Astaire moment. And I'm taking a moment now to marvel at how a small joy like watching tap-dancing shadows filmed decades before I was even born can make my kids get up an dance.

I reveled in this moment, especially because it's one I never have imagined all those years ago in a movie theater on west 67th street.