This is another story about my daughter. We, as a family, had a wonderful day yesterday. We spent a few hours at the beach -- we joined a beach club not far from where we live. In fact, it is only 1.9 miles from our driveway to the entrance of the beach club. The kids played on the beach all day and ran in and out of the waves and dug in the sand and ate a big lunch and took long naps. The weather was beautiful and it was really quite perfect.

After naps ended, we returned for dinner. You can have dinner very casually outside. When we finished dinner, we went for a walk along the shore and my daughter, who had picked up an old tennis ball, saw some kids playing a sort of baseball game on the big lawn with a tennis ball and tennis racquet. She got very excited and ran over to watch, about a hundred yards away. At that point, the boys hit their ball into a flower bed and couldn't find it. My daughter went over to the flower bed, too. I suppose she just wanted to see what the boys were doing. The boys, by the way, were probably about 10 or 11 years old and towered over my little 3 1/2 year old daughter. Two of the boys saw that she was carrying a ball and took her ball from her. I was too far away to do anything more than watch here but she told me what happened when I did arrive. The boys said to her that it was their ball. And she stood up for herself and said that, no, it was her ball and she brought it with her from dinner. And so the boys gave it back. This is what she told me when I got there. Then she said to me, in a very quiet voice, that she was too shy to say thank you to the boys for giving her the ball back. So I told the boys thank you for her.

I was so proud of her for standing up for herself to these older kids. I was also quite grateful that these were nice boys who let her stand up for herself. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I want to raise a strong woman who never lets anyone push her around. I have worried that she is too nice, that she lets other children take her toys and that she, in essence, won't push back when the world pushes her first. Well, she pushed back last night, when she was outnumbered, outsized, and all alone. And she did it calmly and didn't cry. I hope that she learned a lesson from this. I know I did.

Someone once wrote that when you have children, you have given hostages to fortune. I have felt that way all along. I want to protect her from everything and I know that I can't. So, instead, I concentrate on building character in small ways, so that the big ways will come naturally and more easily. I am trying to make a person here. I am trying, because I can't protect her always, to give her the tools to protect herself and to stand up for herself and, especially, to have the self confidence and to instill in her the belief that she is valuable, valued, and intrinsically worth standing up for. She made me so proud and, as I reread this post, I don't think that I managed to convey even a portion of what I was feeling and how I reacted, inside, to this little incident. I lack the skills and feel it too keenly.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 06:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This resonated with me (sorry, I forgot to get the link):

"Andrew Sullivan dubs the fans of all this cable-nurtured satire “South Park Republicans”—people who “believe we need a hard-ass foreign policy and are extremely skeptical of political correctness” but also are socially liberal on many issues, Sullivan explains. Such South Park Republicanism is a real trend among younger Americans, he observes: South Park’s typical viewer, for instance, is an advertiser-ideal 28."

I'm a bit older, but the rest may fit pretty well. By way of illustration, I support the rights of gays to marry and of women to choose freely concerning abortion. I also support a strong military and a foreign policy that does not depend on or require the permission of France or the United Nations before we take actions in our interest. So, clearly I would not be at home in either of our two tradtional political parties. But I do have a home in South Park, I suppose.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The Meeting.

Last night, I took B to meet with L at the Royalton Hotel bar. The Royalton is a very cool space. It was one of the first of the now ubiquitous boutique hotels in NYC. Designed by Phillipe Starck, the doors to the hotel entrance are unmarked and the space inside is low lit with low tables and chairs. Some of the chairs look like small animals with huge bases and small backs comprised of thick metal bars bent to provide some type of embrace. This is the lobby, by the way. You know, where you check in and say king size, no smoking, please. The check in desk is in the middle of the cocktail lounge and quite a bit smaller than the bar. There are these odd looking glass rhino-horn light fixtures jutting out from the wall every five feet or so. I did not like them. The bar is a great people watching place. Not to be too NYC bitchy, but you get the tourists who wandered in wearing matching sweat suits with bright new sneakers and very big hair (I think it was a mother/daughter team) and you get the Euro-trash types who have not been told that this bar is, to quote a friend, so two weeks ago. Interesting mix and they are all looking at each other trying to figure out what the other one is doing in their bar or hotel.

Then there was blind date table. B and I were in suits and ties. B looked quite dashing in a dark suit, pink shirt, and pink and purple tie. Not very lawyerly but certainly nice for a date. When we arrived, L was already there. She snagged a table for three and was drinking a light beer. She was as I remembered her and we quickly introduced each other and sat down.

Quick first impressions. What do you base these on? What a person orders from the waitress? Well, I did not expect her to be drinking a beer as she seemed more of a Cosmo type but a beer gives a good, honest, down to earth impression. B had a martini with a specified type of gin I had never heard of before. What does that make him? Fussy, perhaps? I just had a single malt scotch. I'm married so I don't care what it says about me particularly, except, I suppose, it says, hah, he's doing a low carb diet!

The conversation flowed easily and I'll be curious to hear B's reactions when he gets in to work today. I thought she was nice, but. . . . I have to admit, I was distracted some of the time by trying to figure out whether she was chewing gum while drinking her light beer. If so, turn off for me and I suspect for B who is really quite picky. Hmn, did I say fussy before based on the drink choice? Perhaps there is some truth to that.

In any event, I think that they got along. I stayed with them for a half an hour and then rushed to catch a train to see my children before they went off to bed.

B is usually in to work by this time. I will not read anything into the fact that he is late. I will wait for the report, which I will share with you, dear readers. Do the adventures continue? Tune in and find out!

Posted by: Random Penseur at 08:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I am at work today (Sunday) preparing to go to Court tomorrow morning and argue with a judge who probably has not read the papers I spent hours preparing -- more on that later, I think.

But yesterday, despite the hangover and because my wife's was much, much worse, I took my daughter out of the house for several hours in the afternoon so my wife could rest without interruption while the baby was napping.

We went to the beach, about 10 minutes drive from the house. There was practically no one there. When was the last time you were at an empty beach? It smelled of the sea. It was this iodine like decomposing rich smell. There were mussel shells all over the place. We came on a whim, so we were neither dressed for it nor in possession of toys. Still, I took off her shoes and rolled her jeans up to her knees and did the same with my pants and shoes. And off we marched. The sand was warm from the sun and went right between our toes. Then we hit the high water mark (and clearly the tide was out) and the sand there was wet and hard packed from the ocean rolling in and over it. That sand was a little cold. I stood there for about an hour watching my daughter run in and out of the waves as they rolled over her feet. She shrieked and shrieked with laughter. We threw sand at the water and I tried to show her how to skip rocks (doomed to failure, but still). The sun was strong on our heads -- it was over 80 f. It was a beautiful moment.

We sat on the steps leading down to the beach afterwards to let our feet dry so we could get the sand off and I picked her up and pulled her onto my lap. She was happy and I was happy.

Her hair smelled like sunshine and all was right with my world as we watched the waves roll in.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 11:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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