west of the moon

appropriate presents.

My baby cousin graduated from college last week.  (No, she's not a child prodigy, nor is she actually the youngest of my cousins, and she's well past the age where I should still call her my baby cousin.  But when she was two and I was ten, we were like -best friends-.  I used to read her books, and drag her out of her crib to come sit on my lap, and I taught her how to walk down stairs without falling.  And she doesn't remember any of this, but I do.)

When she graduated from high school, I bought her a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's.  (The book, not the movie, although I like them both.)  It had been my favorite book when I was that age, and I remember reading and re-reading it during the summer between high school and college.  In a quirk or coincidence that sounds rhetorical but is actually true, while I was giving her Breakfast at Tiffany's, most of the rest of the family was giving her jewelry from Tiffany's.  And I'm pretty sure she never read the book.

Speaking in very general terms, I believe that you're supposed to give gifts that the recipient would actually want, rather than what you'd want in their place.  But I can't afford gifts that she'd actually want, so I'm going to keep giving inappropriate ones.  I have a few books in mind--The Privilege of the Sword, mostly, and maybe one or two others.  Books about young women who find a way to make their own choices, books about people who find a way off of the path of least resistance.     When she was two years old, the biggest obstacle she faced was the set of stairs separating her from the rest of the house.  Now that she's twenty-two, I don't know as much about her life as I'd like, but I'm going to guess that (whether she knows it or not) the biggest obstacle she's about to face is the weight of expectation.  Everyone else in her life knows what they want from her, where they want her to be going, how they want her to behave.  She'll need to learn to navigate that.  I can't do much to help, but I do what I can, which apparently means I give her books she'll probably never read. 

playing battleship with j, age six.

We're sitting on the floor in the living room.  He's very carefully sorted all the pieces, and explained to me the rules, including the "rule" where if the other player scores a hit, you have to tell them which ship got hit.  "So if you hit my submarine, I tell you that you hit the submarine.  Who do you think is going to win?"

"Hmm?"

"Who do you think is going to win?  I think, I think you might sink all the rest of my ships before you find the battleship."

"Really?"

"I'm going to hide the battleship."

When we start playing, he says that he thinks he should go first, and I say okay.  We've had two false starts already, one because he wanted to switch boards, and one because he looked at where my ships were placed.   "I forgot.  If you forget, it's okay, you can start over.  But if you don't forget, and you do it on purpose, that's bad."

His first guess lands right in the middle of my destroyer. 

My first guess doesn't hit anything.  "E-5," I say, and he leans over and squints at his board, counting out five spaces.  "It's a miss!  But it's almost a hit.  You almost hit my patrol boat.  You only missed it by one."

"Oh!  Maybe next time, then."

"That's a hint!  That you almost hit my boat.  I have another hint.  I don't have any ships in, uhm, in A or B.  Or C.  Or ten!  But you were just one off from my patrol boat."

"Thank you!  That's a good hint."

"I have one hit so far," he says, "and no misses.  How many do you have?"

"I have one miss."

"No hits?"

"No, but I'm just one off from your patrol boat."