Genius

My older brother is a genius. I've never told him so. And chances are I never will, in person. We just don't have that kind of relationship. As my mom put it, for 18 years we were at each other's throats. It wasn't until college that we became friends. Apparently we wrote each other letters, though I have no recollection of this. We said we missed each other, but I have no recollection of that either. I remember things like the time we were arguing vehemently about something and he paused in the middle of driving a car, reached over, unbuckled my seat belt and tried to push me out in the middle of a busy Bangkok intersection. That was the sort of thing that epitomized our relationship.

The thousands of miles and decades in between have softened us. We have matured, married, become parents. We have diverted our attention and channeled aggression towards our respective separate lives. Now whenever we're together, it is a welcome novelty. We are interested in each other's goings-on and are eager to share our stories. It helps that our spouses are there as buffers. It helps that he and my husband are college buddies, and his wife is consummately tranquil and low-key.

He and his brood visited us over Halloween weekend. They arrived to five pumpkins that we so eagerly carted from the pumpkin patch, then left to languish uncarved and unadorned on our front porch. My brother is a real estate investment adviser by day, but an architect by training and an artist in his soul. Without a second's hesitation, we commissioned him to sculpt our pumpkins, and fortuitously for us he accepted.

He began by making sketches of the relative shapes and sizes of the pumpkins...















He then brainstormed various design possibilities including traditional cultural motifs like Thai yaks (giant demons) and Chinese fu lions. Dissatisfied with the complexity of his first-round ideas, he resorted to taking requests from the little patrons behind the commission.

Elie requested a happy bat...













Puck said he wanted a scary pumpkin...













And my niece asked for her favorite cartoon character Totoro...



















He granted every wish to perfection. He carved names on the back so that there would be no mistake as to whose jack-o-lantern it was. He used no templates, God forbid, just hand sketches. He crafted wings and ears out of scraps and carefully affixed them with toothpicks. He worked each carving tool we had to its limit and honorably discharged every last one to the garbage can. There were no holds barred. He gave the undertaking his all. He spent five hours doing so.

His creative virtuosity may have eluded my outward praise, but it has secretly won my unspoken admiration. I now confess: His artistic vision is vast, his well of talent is deep, and his execution reverberates with mastery and passion. Even in the conventional act of carving a set of Halloween pumpkins. I hope that one day he will allow himself the indulgence of doing just what he is truly great at, what he was clearly put on this Earth to do, without distraction, guilt, or apology. Until then I will continue to collect and curate the random traces of genius that he dismissively leaves behind. Maybe one day I will pass my collection onto my niece so that she can appreciate her father's legacy and the genius that flows also through her veins.

Ten

The sight of her on the basketball court used to send the crowd roaring. She was our high school team's point guard. She was fast, she played smart, and she could sink the ball from just about anywhere. Ten was a sight to behold.

She is one of the most incredible, most natural athletes I have ever met. Her talent was not limited to basketball. She exceled at just about everything she dabbled in -- field hockey, track, cross-country, soccer. I will never forget the day I taught her to play tennis only to get beaten by her within a couple hours. I wasn't sore about it. I was just amazed. You can't help but admire someone who is that good at what she does.

She is also a steadfast, constant, loyal friend. She is who she is and in twenty-five years of knowing her she has not changed. On some levels she is a mystery to me, but on myriad other levels there is so much to love: her quirky lingo, her even temperament, her infectious laughter, her uncomplicated emotions, her lack of drama, her openness, and her energy. She is everyone's friend and no one's enemy. My affable, fun-loving Ten.

Light of my life

Where light and dark meet, there's Elie.

Sweet, rowdy Elie. Tender, out-of-control Elie. Butterfly kisses, hitting-my-leg-with-his-fists Elie. He is high and he is low. His moods span every extreme.

I find myself thinking nightly that I don't recall Puck getting on my nerves this much, or at least this consistently. In his darkest moments, Elie emits this awful shrill cry that sends shock waves through every inch of my body and makes me wish someone would shoot me and put me out of my misery. It's that bad. In the heat of the moment, it really is that bad. And the heat of the moment can go as long as 30 minutes, which makes me feel like I've lived and died an entire lifetime and have been reincarnated back to the very same cliffhanger torture spot to continue the drama.

But then there are sublime moments like this:

It's past 8 at night, time for the boys to go to sleep. Elie is in his pajamas but in the kitchen, with me, nosing around to see what I'm doing. I'm not doing much of anything, just standing there brain-dead, paralyzed by the thousand things I should be doing that will never get done because my body has already signed out for the day. My tepid dinner plate lies ignored on the counter.

"Mommy you didn't eat your dinner," Elie observes, his little face riddled with concern.

"That's because I didn't have time. I have so many things to do!" I sputter, looking around at the lemon bars I just baked for our neighbors who returned home 5 weeks in Europe, the clean dishes waiting to be put away, and the mountain of dirty dishes, pots and pans overtaking our sink.

"When you finish so many things, you can eat your dinner," he says, locking eyes with me as if to elicit my promise.

I almost do a double-take: Is this my tempestuous almost-four-year-old or a guardian angel sitting in my kitchen? How does a child who still can't completely wrap his tongue around the word "table" notice that I am not taking care of myself, let alone try to help me?

It is these moments that I cling onto and I write about. Not because that's all there is. I just can't spare the excess baggage if I am to be in this for the long haul. I purposely avoid giving words to the dreadful moments because living them once then reliving them in my head while wallowing privately in regret is punishment enough. Besides, at the end of the day, the blips never do overshadow the glorious unexpected bursts of love that Elie will send my way. My heartache vanishes instantly the moment he shines his light on me. And I thank the great spirit in the sky above that he does this often.

I run because I can't dance

A light bulb went on in my head the other day while running. Suddenly it all made sense, how someone like me could come to love running...

I am a naturally inward and sedentary person. I could pass entire days sitting in a room, thinking, daydreaming, writing. As far back as I can remember, I never instinctively felt the need to get up and run around. My childhood memories are largely filled with stillness and silent spaces, despite apparently being chatterbox as a kid. I just remember my surroundings being very quiet to the point of dull. But every now and then, there would be a song. I don't remember anything specific but I remember me either singing or hearing a song I liked, and how that song would have me springing to my feet, shaking my hips, bopping my head, and waving my arms. Music could always move me. In my teens I used to go into a state of near-trance dancing away to songs that electrified my soul. I couldn't help it.

In keeping with my sedentary nature, for years I hated exercise. I never felt the urge to exert myself physically unless there was no risk of pain, or there was some ulterior motive (like seeing if I could beat my older brother or male cousins at tennis to prove that girls were not athletically inferior like they claimed we were). Otherwise, I just didn't see the value of pushing myself to the point of discomfort when I could be home listening to music, munching on a bag of potato chips, or dancing my heart out to Bow Wow Wow's "Do You Wanna Hold Me." That was as close as I got to physical exertion.

I began exercising voluntarily in my twenties. I joined a gym. My boyfriend at the time figured it could be a pastime we enjoyed together. Except it turned out that we never worked out together. We would enter the building together, but once inside he mostly hung out in the weight room while I went to a class. One place where we overlapped was the treadmill. I ran on it, just like everybody else who worked out at a gym. But I found it painfully boring and a bit physically disorienting. After about ten minutes I would feel dizzy and out of balance. Meanwhile I would look around and see everyone else plodding away unfazed. These people were listening to their Walkmans. I concluded that music was the key to erasing the monotony. From that point on, I never ran without a Walkman. And that was more or less what phase one of my running career looked like.

Phase two came when my husband and I began dating. By then I had let my gym membership lapse and gravitated more towards rollerblading. I don't know if it was the speed or the outdoor setting, but rollerblading seemed infinitely more fun than being holed up in a stinky gym banging out miles on a treadmill. My husband in his infinite wisdom suggested that I try running outside. We ran in Central Park on the same routes where I would typically rollerblade, and along the Charles River whenever it was my turn to visit him. When we moved to San Francisco, our runs continued in Golden Gate Park and culminated in yearly 10K races from bay to breakers or bridge to bridge. I came to love running for the chance to breathe fresh air. My Walkman broke, my Discman became unwieldy, so I ran gadget-free. Then two rambunctious boys came into my life. Running was left behind.

Phase three, where I am now, was borne out of a perfect storm of age-defiance and rebellion from everyday responsibility. My fortieth birthday loomed large and I felt compelled to do something epic to mark the occasion. At the same time I needed a solitary outlet from being a mom, a wife, a person needed by someone else to do something urgently every minute of the day. I resolved to run a half-marathon. The training was my escape. Running became a form of meditation. The longer I ran, the more I could blur out the chaos back at the house, the fight last night, the anxieties and frustrations making loopty-loops in my head, the cold air, the deluge of rain, the unforgiving road beneath my feet, the tweaky pain in my knee...everything. And at some point I acquired an iPod and rediscovered music's transformational effects on running despair. When my favorite tunes are being piped into my ears, I feel joyful and light and invincible. I can't help but move. My heart can't help but sing. Having uninterrupted interludes with my music became the ultimate reason to sneak off with my running shoes.

If there is one type of athlete that I wish I could be, it is a dancer. I envy the dancer's ability to let music ripple through her body and make it look so beautiful and raw it brings tears to the onlooker's eyes. The fact that a dancer can conduct music the way a lightning rod conducts electricity gives me hope that there is a god. I can't dance like that, but I'm decent now at running. So when a song sends power surges through my veins, I get out and run and I keep running. No matter how bleak the weather. No matter how sweaty the brow. No matter how achey the feet.

Fantastic four

I'm in the bathroom at home, and as usual someone bursts in.

It's Elie. He's squirming around as though he were dancing to a tune that only he can hear. He then suddenly focuses on me and pronounces, "Mommy, when I'm a grown up, I'm gonna go poop from my wee-wee and go pee-pee from my tushy!"

A book that I'm reading (in preparation for Elie's fourth birthday in a couple months) says that four-year-olds are prone to exuberance and drama and, alas, potty talk; and if at all possible parents should indulge in their extremism and have fun with it. So I say, "Oh really? Well, maybe when I'm a grown up, I'll go poop from my wee-wee and go pee-pee from my tushy too!"

Elie scrunches his nose, guffawing. "Noooooooo! Girls don't have a wee-wee!" So he is somewhat grounded in reality after all.

"Well, maybe when I'm a grown up, I'll get a wee-wee," I wonder out loud.

"When I'm a grown up, I'm gonna have a giant wee-wee!" he declares.

"Me too!" I say, and we high-five. I can see in his eyes that part of him is enjoying our outlandish conversation, and part of him is nervously contemplating whether what I say is actually possible for girls. Oh, I can already tell that for this wild and silly guy, four is going to be one fantastic ride.

Nine

Another morning in my office spent staring at the computer. The phone rings. The monotony breaks. It's Nine. "Hey, are you free for lunch?" he asks.

"Sure, I can have lunch! What time?" Social plans with him are always spontaneous. Not that he's a spontaneous kind of guy. It's more because he works so much that he can't commit to leisure time in advance. But the opportunity does spring up in the wake of a work meeting rescheduled or cut short. You learn, as his friend, to grab him whenever you can.

"Noon-ish? I'll meet you at your building outside."

"I'll see you then."

Noon comes and we meet on the sidewalk below my building. We say hello. He is smiling, but tensely. He seems weighed down. As we begin to walk towards the restaurant, he tells me, "Can I talk to you about something that you can't tell anyone about?"

Without a blink, I say, "Sure." The prospect of sharing the burden of his secret does not faze me. I've been the guardian of men's secrets seemingly all my life. I have two brothers, and most of my friends are guys. And guys do a lot of things they aren't necessarily proud of the day after. At that point they come to me, as if to come clean at the confessional. As if telling me, a woman, was equivalent to telling the woman they actually offended.

Nine's secret is not a day-after secret. It is a day-before one. As I listen, I begin to realize what it means to be in this is unfamiliar territory, how it obligates me to take on a certain unaccustomed responsibility...

He tells me that he met a woman. It was one of those chance encounters, those casual conversations with strangers that typically amount to nothing more than passing time. But this woman mesmerized him. He can't stop thinking about her. She is exotic and beautiful. She shares his passion for existential inquiries, art, and travel. She is an artist of sorts herself. And she is married. As is he.

We are sitting on a bench at one of the piers by San Francisco Bay. His secret falls onto my lap piece by piece then flows into the depths of the ink-blue water. Seagulls squat on the bleached-out wood posts near us, eyeing our every move, hoping to snatch a crumb from our lunch. "I haven't done anything," he assures me without any solicitation on my part. "I've spent time with her, hanging out and talking, as friends. I don't think she even realizes that I'm attracted to her --"

"No way," I interject. "She definitely knows. Trust me, she knows. And I would bet she's attracted to you too. If she wasn't, she wouldn't bother giving you the time of day."

"I don't think she finds me attractive," he quibbles disingenuously, like an awkward teenager fishing for compliments to numb the sting of unrequited love. "Seriously, if you saw me in a bar, would you find me attractive? I don't know..."

I want to pull out a mirror to show him that he has officially transformed into a lovesick puppy dog. Instead, I give him this pat on the shoulder, "I can't answer your question because you're my friend. I don't make it a point to check out my friends."

Something about my high-road comment must have unnerved him, because out comes this, "Haven't you ever been attracted to someone besides your husband in the time you've been married? C'mon, be honest!"

"You know, I actually haven't," I answer truthfully, then pause to dwell on why this is. It's not because I subscribe to some holy morality. And it's not because I'm married to Adonis. The reason, it turns out, is quite mundane, "Ever since we had kids, sex hasn't exactly been at the forefront of my daily consciousness. What I crave more than anything is sleep, and time alone."

He doesn't buy my answer, "Must be a guy-girl thing then."

"Apparently it's not," I chuckle, "because this woman you've met seems to be straying!"

"Well, we haven't done anything...it's been completely innocuous. The thing is, I can't stop thinking about her. It's crazy -- I don't know why I'm doing this! I love my wife. She's great. She's amazing with the kids. There's so much that I love about her --"

"But there are things you don't love about her, right? These are not new things, are they? Have you ever talked to her about how you feel? Maybe if she knew, she could try to give you more of what you need."

"She's not gonna change. She is who she is. We've talked about it a little but honestly I don't think she really gets what it is I'm after. I've just resorted to seeking that kind of stimulation from friends."

Ultimately, I know where our conversation is going. He wants me to understand that it's hard to live with less when more is right at your fingertips, which I do. He wants me to see the frustration of not having needs met year after year, and I do. He wants me to agree that it's amazing to find someone on this planet who loves what you love and thinks like you think and makes you feel utterly alive like never before, and I do. He wants me to be a friend and tell him it's okay to go for it just this once. Or, because his wife is also my friend, he expects me to damn him to hell on her behalf so that he doesn't take this any further. But I do neither. I just tell him what I believe. I tell him that marriage is a commitment that in this country we have the privilege of making by choice, and that has to mean something. I tell him that love is not always about feeling good because sometimes it requires sacrifice. I tell him that if he acts on his feelings for this woman, it may turn out to be the experience of a lifetime, but he will forever have to look in the eyes of the woman who bore his children and dedicated her life to raising them, knowing that he betrayed her. I tell him that only he can decide if that is a cross he can bear. I tell myself that I could not.

Superpuck

Faster than a speeding bullet! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! It's a bird... it's a plane... it's Superpuck!

Puck wakes up in the morning, shakes his head, and in a matter of mere seconds, he is collected and ready to go. He bounces off his bed, beelines to the bathroom, and in a flash pulls on the clothes I laid out for him. Before zipping down the stairs, he stops at the bathroom one more time to brush his teeth. This he insists on, because Daddy has been coaching him on the importance of brushing one's teeth not only before bed, but before starting the day too. So even when I forget to bark it out during morning drills, he makes it his duty to execute.

Not a morning goes by that I don't pinch myself for the great fortune of having a child who's happy in the morning. Puck is never surly when he wakes up. He never whines. He springs to life as if imbued with the glory of the sun itself. On weekday mornings, the faster I rattle off the commands, the faster he moves. If I were to say jump, he would most definitely say how high. What is the carrot that he sees on the end of stick? School. He just loves being there. That's his motivation.

And there is a bonus incentive on the mornings when he carpools with the family on our block. You can always tell which mornings those are. You'll see him put on his shoes without me having to remind him. You'll hear him ask if he can go out and wait on the front steps. There he'll sit -- all 43 inches of him -- looking longingly westward, a blue and orange Diego bag straddling his back. At 8:05 a pale blue Lexus SUV will pull up and he'll wave excitedly at the sweet eight grade girl sitting in the backseat. At that moment he'll hop off the stoop, often times forgetting to kiss me goodbye. Oh, yes, it starts early. It starts so very early. Be still, my aching mama's heart... And that goes doubly for a mama of a superhero.