My Life as a Superhero

    The square of purple cotton, a dinner napkin, is always out because the minute she arrives at my house--Nana’s house--she demands it. What might look like a simple piece of cloth, meant to keep the crumbs off my lap, is to her as good as a set of wings. It is the source of her power.

    When she asks, I fasten it to her collar or the back of her dress with one of those clips you use to close the potato chip bag, and she immediately starts running in a circle, looking over her shoulder to see if the fabric is billowing behind her. Satisfied her cape is functioning as it should, she turns, puts her hands on her hips and her face up to the sky and bellows  “SUPER HERO, on the way!”

    She runs and runs--“flying” and shouting--until she’s distracted by something: a butterfly, an airplane, a dog barking on the other side of the fence. 

    Really, everyone should spend time in the company of a 2-year-old. There is no creature more fierce, more determined or more charming. Most 2-year-olds walk an invisible line between reality and imagination and they’re always honest. Don’t ask a 2-year-old how your hair looks unless you really want to know.

    A 2-year-old is fast. Last week she watched me pick a spent bloom on the rose that climbs the corner of the house last week and before I could stop her she’d stripped the rest of the buds off the branch.

    A 2-year-old is unpredictable. We were tossing her big blue ball to one another when, like some kind of miniature NBA star, she whirled, rocketed the ball across the patio and bounced it off the fat belly of one of the cats who’d been sprawled on his back, sleeping away the hot afternoon.  The cat, while uninjured, was sorely aggrieved. 

    Want to see pleasure at its most basic? Watch a two-and-a-half year old eat crackers and honey.

    A 2-year-old is strong. Her hands are small but she can still manage to squeeze the nozzle of the hose with enough force to soak me the minute I turn my back.

    My 2-year-old granddaughter rations hugs and kisses and when she says no, she means it. Conversely, when she’s feeling affectionate she shows it with a spontaneous full-body hug, wrapping her arms and legs around you, patting your back.

    A 2-year-old is an inspiration. The other day I finally finished a complicated project, an assignment that had been a source of stress for weeks. I sent it on its way, closed my computer and walked out to the garden, happy to be done with something so difficult. 

Sitting in my favorite spot, watching a hummingbird dip into the petunias in a corner of the garden, I could see the baby’s “cape” where she’d left it a few hours before. 

    It made me smile. Somewhere deep within me, the little girl who lives there still did just what my 2-year-old granddaughter would do. I didn’t wear her cape, I didn’t get out of my chair and run in circles, but I did turn my face up to the sun. I stretched my arms and legs and celebrated my superpower to get the job done.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap’s audio essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the U.S. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

Christmas in Munich: Today's Travel Photo #TTP@CAMera

(Photo by R. B. Millsap)

Strolling along the Munich Christkindlemarkt, passing crowded gluhwein stands and people shopping for hand carved items to add to the family creche, we noticed a crowd in front of shop windows along the Marienplatz. Families were pressed close to the windows to watch a world of mechanical bears and other stuffed animals. But it was the faces of the children that told the tale.

Chocolate souvenirs

In a box in the basement, there are four baskets. Easter baskets. Each of my children has had their own basket since their first Easter. Always filled on Easter Morning with the usual fare: chocolate bunnies, Peeps, stuffed animals, trinkets and treasures.

The children are grown now. Well, almost. The only one left at home is the "baby" and she is 15.
I don't stay up late stuffing plastic eggs to be hunted the next day. I don't buy stuffed animals. No one wakes up at dawn ready to go outside to hunt for the basket left by the Easter Bunny. No one relishes the idea of chocolate before breakfast because for all I know they eat chocolate for breakfast - or cold pizza and leftover beer - every day. They are on their own, after all.

Last year I filled a big basket with all kinds of chocolate and candies and then let my children pick what they wanted to take away with them when they returned to their own homes or went back to school. I decided to do it again this year.

I woke up this morning to find my son asleep on the sofa. He'd slipped in in the wee hours without saying a word. While he slept around the corner of the doorway, I pressed a pot of coffee and filled the basket with chocolate eggs, gummies, licorice, toffee and milk chocolate bars from Iceland. It was all hand-carried on the plane and tenderly transported home.

To me, there is great significance in the basket on the table today. It marks the changes in the way we live. They make their way home to me and I welcome them with souvenirs of places I wandered off to while they were gone.

My Bunny is Back on the Ocean

Two years ago when my son took his first job on a restored 1949 oceanographic research vessel, I wrote the column below. He was to be the boat’s new engineer. It was his first time at sea. And my first experience with sending a child out into an unknown frontier. It has been a learning experience for both of us. The boat, once host to people like Albert Einstein and Jacques Cousteau, has gone through many changes. Now, a work in progress, the skipper and his crew travel up and down the west coast from one charter to another. This month, they are heading back to Alaska to tender - in this case to take fish from the fishing boats, keeping them chillled in the huge tanks on board, and then deliver the load to the processing plants. It’s hard work. And, it’s still hard work to say goodbye.


June 23, 2008
Home Planet: Children leave home but not our hearts
Cheryl-Anne Millsap
The Spokesman-Review


The chime signaling a text message woke me out of a sound sleep. My phone, lying on the bed beside me, there in case of emergency, in case someone needed to reach me, close at hand for late night messages, glowed in the dark room.

“Just left the locks,” the message read. “And hit open water.”

It was from my son.

I typed a short reply, part message part benediction, and rolled onto my back to stare at the ceiling.

I was alone in a hotel room, on a weekend tour through the Walla Walla wine country. At the same time my 20-year-old son was on a boat cruising toward Alaska. It was the first night of his new job, and at that moment he was alone in a tiny cabin, watching land and all that was solid and secure, slip away.

I had run away for a weekend in search of respite, in search of a break from work and worry. He had signed on for a summer in search of adventure, for an opportunity to see new people and places. But for a moment, when our messages crossed in the night, we were connected.

When my children were babies we often read “The Runaway Bunny” by Margaret Wise Brown before they went to bed.

In that beloved tale a young bunny, restless and full of bravado, tells his mother all the ways he will one day escape her.

“If you run away I will run after you,” the mother replies, “for you are my little bunny.”

Her child would have none of it.

“I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away,” he tells her.

“I will fish for you,” she says.

The bunny lists all the ways he will get away, and each time the mother has an answer. “I will climb to where you are,” she tells him. “I will be a gardener and I will find you.”

Each time she refuses to let him escape. “If you become a bird and fly away from me, I will be a tree that you come home to,” she tells him. “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me, I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.”

When the bunny says he will join the circus, his mother promises to walk across air, to walk a thin wire to reach him. When he declares that he will turn into a boy and run into a house, his mother promises to catch him and hold him in her arms.

Finally the bunny surrenders. “Shucks,” he tells her. “I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.”

Of course, little boys do find a way to slip out of the grasp of their mothers. And wish as we might, mothers can’t always find a way to hold onto them. Or can we?

Still clutching my phone, ready to answer if he were to call out to me again, I thought about the book. I thought about my boy – grown into a man – and where he was headed.

True, I won’t be a tall tree on the shore. Or a rock on the cliff at the edge of the sea. I won’t be the wind that blows him back to me. And he will never again be at home in my arms.

But the fact that he typed those two little sentences even as he got his wish, even as he headed out to a life on his own, reassured me.

He couldn’t shake me. I was there in the dark starlit sky, in the sound of the waves against the boat, in the humming of the engine that pulled him out to sea. Just as he was with me in a room lit only by the light of my cell phone.

Even as he sailed away, in spite of himself, he reached out to me.

“Just left the locks,” he’d written. “And hit open water.”

But when I read it again, and read between the lines, I saw only one word.

Shucks.


Cheryl-Anne Millsap is a freelance columnist for The Spokesman-Review. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com