July 2007

Editor's Note

Last Sunday I sat by the Yakima River watching my life go by. It wasn’t an “Old Man River” moment of sweet sentiment. I followed a fluffy weed as it bobbed into view on my right and disappeared around the bend in the river on my left. My younger kids had officially started summer break, and I was puzzling over how to slow life down for the next eight weeks. The rate at which that fluff ball came and went on the river mirrored my impression that I am passing through my life far too quickly.

Parents have a complicated relationship with time. When we are in the thick of daily life – waiting for our kid to put on her shoes, listening at midnight for the 16-year-old to come through the front door, watching our 8-year-old freeze on-stage at his piano concert, worrying over a toddler’s high fever – the seconds are excruciatingly sticky, and we do all we can to push time along. Conversely, try as we might, we can’t slow the pell-mell speed at which our children race towards adulthood.

My own relationship with time is particularly twisted. A friend once told me, when I showed up late for a lunch date, that some people think they can control time, making it slow down or speed up as needed. I sat by the river thinking about how to make the next two months – 88,800 minutes – crawl.

When the kids were little, I was a firm believer in daily summer “siestas.” We each went to our own rooms and did anything we wanted for an hour as long as it didn’t involve screens or battery-powered devices. The languor we felt when we emerged from our rooms was pretty convincing evidence that in summer, the clocks can run slower.

I can’t get my big kids into their rooms every afternoon now, but I’m working on another time warp technique. Last night I picked up my two youngest girls after they had eaten dinner and watched My Fair Lady with my 93-year-old mother. Rather than focusing ahead, on the shortest path I could find to get to bed to read my book, I savored our first official night of summer.

The movie is a whopping 173 minutes long, so there were just a few streaks of light lingering in the west when I picked them up. In our family, siblings usually fight like crazy the first few days after school gets out, and then the bickering drops away. As the girls came towards the car, I noticed that the fractious locking-of-horns ritual had ended early this year. After they got in the car, they told me about a kind, old man in the dining room who fussed over them and gave them a candy. They giggled over a secret. One of the girls started to sing and the other chimed in: “I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things, I’d never done before----“

I hung tight to the steering wheel, experimenting with my time machine. The countdown to the end of our summer had already started, but at that very moment, with a warm breeze coming in the window and sisters singing with abandon in the back seat, time was moving as slowly as the Yakima River in late August.

I always make ambitious plans for summer with my family, and most of what I chart out never happens. Nevertheless, summertime never fails to work its magic on us.
I hope as you browse this issue, you enjoy a good read and find many ideas for summer fun. And that you don’t chase after summer but find it right in front of you for the next 88,797 minutes.

Ann Bergman, Editor/Publisher
abergman@seattleschild.com

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Seattle's Child, a publication of the Washington Post Company
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