Trigonometry

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“Let’s go higher.”

My youngest daughter is excelling at math. She’s nearly two and she’s got it figured out that the fun stuff comes after 1, 2, 3.

She likes to play 4, 5, 6. That’s when I toss her high into the air after counting 1, 2, 3.

“Whee…”

I catch her.

She smiles and laughs and says, “Again. 4, 5, 6.”

We do it again.

And again.

After five or six times, I put her down and stretch my arms high above my head, roll my shoulders, crack my back and roll my neck slowly.

“OK. Do you want to do it again?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “7, 8, 9.”

“What’s that? To the moon.”

She nods her head up and down. Then she lifts her arms up high for me to lift her and she says, “7, 8, 9!”

“Just a second,” I tell her as I repeat my stretching routine and consider the height of the ceiling.

My Seven Minute Mountain

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A moment of peace. At least it was a moment.

There are moments of peace as a father. They are rare, but now is one of them. I’m sat on the sofa with a book in our city apartment on the midmorning of a holiday. The two youngest kids are playing with cars on the living room floor, and the eldest is practicing her writing – she’s just about got cursive licked. Four-Ton, the dog, is at my feet. And so too is Rain, the cat.

I sink deeper into the sofa and look out the window of our fourth-floor apartment and watch the sunshine reflect off the other buildings. It is as if this is my own The Seven Storey Mountain, my Thomas Merton moment as a Trappist Monk.

Peaceful.

It’s that point in the morning when the dishes are done, teeth are brushed, beds are made and stomachs are still full, and I’ve still not drunk too much coffee to become fidgety.

I’m content.

My mind wanders to my youth and long walks in the neighborhood with friends, tearing around on Big Wheels and then sitting on a wall and talking about not much at all. Then a game of touch football, followed by a raid of the refrigerator and a chill-out with “Gilligan’s Island” reruns. No real worries, and plenty of time to kill.

I look at my son. He is contentedly flipping through his Meg and Mog books. The eldest continues to write.

So I sink even deeper into the sofa and start closing my eyes, and as the lids close I come to spot the end of my tranquility.

The littlest one has taken the five-year-old boy’s favorite Meg and Mog — Meg on the Moon — from under his nose, and he’s just about to realize. And now he has.

“Hey, give me that!”

So I finish closing my eyes and think earplugs would certainly be handy right now.

Cheaper by the Three

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A helicopter would sure be useful.

Late.

With three children, we are often, well, late. We’re on the run, in a hurry, out the door and in the door again. Where are my keys? Then off in a dash – on foot, by taxi and in the car. Beep, beep! We’re here and there and then there and back again, and, oh, did you fetch the eldest? Shit. Out the door and racing to pick her up, and feeling like our life is straight out of “Cheaper by the Dozen” with Steve Martin playing a father of 12.

Yet we have only three.

It doesn’t help that our two eldest go to schools on opposite ends of the city. The far ends of the city, like between Anaheim and Topanga Canyon if you know Los Angeles.

So the other morning we had a school event at the Anaheim school and then two hours to get to Topanga Canyon in traffic jammed tighter than normal because the city had closed off main streets for celebrations of the country’s bicentennial.

Beep, beep!

We raced down clogged streets with the car running on empty and one hour and 23 minutes to get across town.

The kids started to murmur about thirst and hunger.

“We’re starving! We’re thirsty!”

I told them that we’d stop at the gas station.

“How long till we get there,” my eldest daughter asked.

“Ten minutes.”

“How long’s that?”

“By the time you count to 6,000…”

Yeah, I know. That’s wrong but it got them counting and my eldest didn’t figure out my error until 156.

“Hey…” she said.

“Well, keep going until you get to 600.”

My five-year-old son didn’t mind. He’d get to 19 and fall back to 14 and nine and then start up again. One, two, three… The littlest girl liked chanting 33, 34, over and over again.

I turned on the radio and prayed the gas would hold out. If not, we’d be late to my seven-year-old daughter’s performance at school, a dancing and singing performance.

The traffic worsened after the gas station.

The clock ticked.

Beep, beep!

And my wife started hemorrhaging in the passenger seat, wanting, no doubt, to transform the car into a flying machine, or, better yet, into a tank to blow the other cars to smithereens so we could then convert into a super-charged Hummer and fly through the traffic and not at this stop-and-go pace so, so far from Topanga Canyon.

“Take a deep breath,” I told her.

“DRIVE FASTER!” she yelled. “RAM THEM, DRIVE THE BASTARDS OFF THE ROAD. FASTER, FASTER. WE’VE GOT TO GET THERE!”

I started to count…