Maestra Luna

 

joy, originally uploaded by nezua.

Lunita cracks me up. She takes a blue marker and scribbles on her VHS tapes. her favorite movies, she brings me a tape of Fantasia with scribbles and I don’t get mad of course, but laugh and say “Oh, very pretty!” but she had other ideas.

“Oh nooo” she says. That’s what she says when she sees something out of place or wrong. Like when the people who did the front stair repairs used concrete with pebbles in it. She stopped and pointed at the patch with the odd texture. “Oh nooo.”

She wants me to clean the tape now, wants me to show her how to clean the scribbles off. She assumes they will come off. She’s right, when I scrub, it comes off. She brings me another tape. I tell her “It’s okay,” meaning we don’t really need to take the scribbles off. But she insists. Points at it urgently. “Oh noooo!”

Won’t play it until it’s cleaned. So I clean it. Try to sit back down and finish up what I’m writing. She comes to me with another tape. “Oh noooo.” I say “It’s okay, Luna. It can stay like this, really.” But she gets upset, “Oh nooooo!” and now she’s not just evoking sorrow and alarm, she sounds aggressive. And I just begin laughing. “What are you getting angry for?” I ask her. “You are the one that scribbled on it! You didn’t even get in trouble!” I’m still laughing the whole time. Not angry, just cracking up in earnest. “If you don’t like them scribbled on, stop scribbling on them!”

I hadn’t brought up that she is the one that did it yet. She gets it, and leaves the tape on my desk, goes back to the living room. She suddenly looks happy to escape the conversation.

So funny. Reminds me of us grownups. We scribble on things and then get mad because they are scribbled on. Blame it on others. Want them to fix it. Kids are just straightforward…we learn later how to confuse ourselves about these things.

Yeah.

All Luna’s life (and before she was born) I will sort of orchestrate certain sounds or songs. Like the THX sting and the FOX Pictures riff, and the opening song to the first Star Trek show. I like the physical channeling of the energy. Luna is used to this, and she now does it faithfully if you play Star Trek.

When I first played Fantasia for her, she was delighted to see the conductors! Doing what papi does! To music! It was so funny to see her jump right into conducting along with the movie. How many two year olds can you sit down in front of Fantasia and they not just watch through the non-cartoon part, but conduct along with it? Too much.