Three Peas in a Pod

Well...not exactly.

I really wasn't prepared to have children so strikingly different.

The oldest, Carina, stepped promptly into a management role at three, telling me what to do, and making sure I had remembered everything. Always an early riser, when she reached the very responsible age of five, she got up at six thirty, fixed herself a bowl of cereal, packed her books and her lunch, then woke me up to take her to kindergarten. When she was in the third grade, I went back to work. Since I drove a school van, and left early, I hired her to wake up, dress, and feed her little brother and sister so they would be ready to take to day care when Turtle got home from his night shift at the hospital. She took to the task with great competence, and has been helping me organize their lives ever since. She married a responsible man and now has her own children to manage, but we remain close, talking on the phone and solving the world's crises one at a time.

Daughter number two, Claye, is a plodder. (We called her turtle as a very young child; some families name children after their fathers and ours is no exception.) All her life she has struggled with writing and math and excelled at reading comprehension and visual memory, a mystery to the analysts of such things. She deplores swarms of people and socializing, having to be encouraged to attend even the most important of events. She'd rather sit up all night in a fourth floor studio at the old art building on campus, working on a sculpture, than call somebody on the phone and chat for ten minutes. She takes an inordinate amount of time to decide what to do. Once she decides, however, she perseveres with unusual patience. This persistent, moving-along slowly-with-her nose-toward-the-goal helped her graduate from college--with honors--to the amazement of all the hares-like her brother, for instance.

Elijah jumps from one grandiose plan to another, showing tremendous ability but no organization. Every deadline has to stretch to accommodate his careening into it at the last possible moment, doing a flourishing dance, and handing in the masterpiece to the drama of a four part jazz ensemble background. He rushes onto every stage of life in time for the finale, and usually manages to pull it off ten seconds before the absolutely last call. Of course when he gets back out to his car, he discovers that he's locked his keys in it and has to call his mom, dad, or one of his sisters to bring him another key.



Here's a picture of them all--including my daughter's husband--taken about five years ago. I would post a recent one, but I think I don't have one. If Carina were here she would tell me to set up an appointment for family pictures immediately. Claye would shrug and say, "What does it matter? It's the same people." and Elijah would write a melancholy ballad about the passing of time and how we are all mortal before he dashed off, fifteen minutes late for one practice or another.