Ryan's blue sweater

In a bag of incredibly cool hand me downs from the Kahn children - there is a sweater I made when I was a different person - for Ryan. It's blue, a cardigan, with primary color number buttons. The knit is a "herringbone" pattern - knit one row, pearl the next, with a knit-knit edging - marled? Anyway, it is just fitting Max, hardly worn by Ryan, one of the few sweaters I knit that came out well, and makes me want to knit more. Max wore it to school instead of a jacket and he looked like a French child from teh 50s.

This last year - and always for Max - has been a year for stories. Bedtime stories, book stories, the story of what he's going to do next, the story of what we did that day (these were big calming devices for him through age 3), but these days, he has stories in the car, stories on the walk to school, stories before bed, stories any time we're willing to tell them.

He tells the stories too. In fact, he takes the stories over - pulling his thumb out of his mouth to interrupt the narrative with his own chain of ideas, sometimes completely incomprehensible, and then nods his head, "and that happened, so tell it that way. keep telling the story." And then he sticks his thumb back in with an attitude of "my work here is done."

For nearly 8 months, Rick told him the story of his "PreK in Canada" at bedtime featuring everyone Max knew from school, friends, TV. The only exception was Miriam - I don't think he wanted to give Miriam the satisfaction - but I think it shows the whole of his feelings toward her - spite mixed with reverence. In the story as it evolved, Little Cathleen (a character in old pictures of me that Mom gave me and I put in the office downstairs) gets eaten by a bear. She used to get saved and then as the story developed, never got saved, first as a ploy to make the story keep going, and then just as a sense of not exactly power, but of possibility - stories didn't have to have endings where everyone lives. (Especially where there seems to be no adverse effects on a person's health by being eaten not just by a bear, but by a bear who is then eaten by a fish, a dragon, a whale, etc. like that German dish that stars with a t - a quail stuffed into a chicken stuffed into a ham, or whatever.)

I wonder if there's a connection between this need for narrative - the distraction of narrative - and learning about death. And God. God talks to Max, apparently. I think he connects God with ancestors - he spent lots of time staring at the picture of Mufasa appearing to Simba as a swirling spirit in the night sky in his Lion King book. He told me that God talked to him in Grandmother and Dziadzi's driveway - on the hill part of the driveway - and that it was a ghost). He is interested in Michael, though not as much as Miriam is. Sometimes in a story, we have to resort to magic to get people back where they belong, but Max already resents the easiness of that solution and will interrupt us to inform us that the magic wands have been lost, or that the magic doesn't work, or that they have to walk to Africa or something equally exhuasting when you still have dishes to do and (for Rick) motions to write.

Oh, and the last thing about Max's stories. He's gone from asking for them to be scary - and he needs them pretty scary - to asking for them to have chapters, start one way, get to feel another way, and end a third. Chapter is his word. And he's figuring out the way that stories go - he used to want them to start happy, get scary and end sad, and the other day he told me he wanted it to be scary but not start out that way. Conflict!

Here are some of the stories I've told him that I can remember. Two of them I wrote down as children's book texts last fall:
Last year:
The story of how he slept in his big boy bed after we locked the door

This year:
The Ball Got Stuck in the Tree (wrote down)
The Butterfly Artist (I loved it but it didn't go far with Max)
PreK in Canada
The Bagel family and how they wanted to change their name to Smith

Wow, I really can't remember them. I thought I would!