Vietnamese Bounty

I had the boys by myself yesterday and so it seemed like about the right time to go out to eat. [Eventually Amy and Madeleine joined us, but that's another story.] Yesterday seemed to be Daniel's turn to pick the restaurant, since we "went Thai" a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to go to the Vietnamese restaurant where we ate a few weeks ago, where teenage boys seemed to be running the joint, playing some ghastly video game on the giant projected TV screen on the wall (where, according to one of the boys - Ian, I think - "the purple lady" turned out not to be a bad guy after all)... Yes, of course he wanted to go back there, because it was almost everything wonderful: Vietanese food [sic] and horrific video games... Ian maintained that Daniel just wanted to go there for the video game. I warned Daniel that they probably would't "have" video games there today (since it's probably not every day that approximately 17-year-old boys are maintaining the ambience)... But more importantly, this particular place was almost 40 minutes away, but there was a Vietnamese restaurant that we had never visited a mere 19 minutes away, so my inner-grownup took over this choice. I had to go into the mode of "where would Daniel go if he had the same gastronomic taste that he has now, but in other regards thought more like a 45-year-old and less like a five-year-old..." So yes, we tried the new place.

The new place was perfect for a few reasons:

1. It was also run by an affable 17-year-old boy (or some such age), with the grownups merely hanging back in the kitchen and peering out to look at the children a bit, apparently somewhat amused.

2. Unlike another Vietnamese restaurant that we like to visit, which is also 20 minutes away - only north rather than west from our house - this is one where they actually seemed to like children.

3. But best of all, this one was not only a restaurant, but also a mini-gift-shop, with a glass case wonderfully tackily set up at the cash register and a small jungle of plastic ethnic-dollar-store pendants hanging on little racks on top of it, among other treasures. This was a factor that appealed far more to the boys than to us, for some reason..,

So the boys and I got down to business, while Amy was still on her way back from Boston with Madeleine, and observed the age-old protocol of ordering the giant-est bowl of "Pho Ga," or chicken-and-rice-noodle soup that they had (which, in a Vietnamese restaurant, always means it's designed to feed a medium-sized boy scout pack). I ordered my little spicy hot-pot oddity (more wonderful than ever, tofu and eggplant: always try the least-familiar-looking house specials...) And long before Amy and Madeleine made it to the restaurant, the boys were finished, and Ian was off at the Saigon-Emporium-of-Wonder, eagerly trying to pick out the shiniest, most sentimental animal-themed pendant he could find. He had soon selected the turtle necklace and asked if he could, um, borrow $1.99.

But within minutes, he came back and announced that now, rather than borrowing $1.99, he needed to borrow six dollars. That was not welcome news, partly because of the expenditure and indulgence involved, and partly because it meant more merchandise, or probably even a more kitsch-o-rama quality, heading for our very expensive storage unit otherwise known as "home." But I didn't say 'no' up front.

Meanwhile, Daniel somehow turned out to want the dragon pendant rather than some turtle. I almost wasn't surprised - but I also was having none of it. Dragons have red eyes and scales, and they breath fire, and these dragons were particularly evil-looking, and there was no way I was going to let him wear one of those around his neck, not to mention bankroll the whole project. He asked in many different ways, many different times, for a dragon pendant, but always got the same response. He seemed to think he could "up the ante" by asking for a black dragon - probably along the lines of trying to ask for an even darker one so that I would relent and let him buy the greenish-brown one instead. But no.

Well, meanwhile Amy and Madeleine arrived and Madeleine got right down to polishing off the tikki-room-punch-bowl-sized bowl of chicken noodle "pho ga," while Amy set about agonizing over which seafood dish to order. Their arrival was especially welcome, because by then Ian and Daniel were well along in "Ancestor Worship Studies 102" - Ian crouched, and Daniel sitting in his classic "W" on the floor next to the ancestral offerings by the register - this one being especially generous, with what looked like a dish of Chinese pastries covered with cellophane, a plate of elegantly stacked red delicious apples, or some similar type, a few saucers of food, a glass of what looked like rice milk, a bowl of incense-stick ashes, themselves shaped like the incense-sticks which they were previously, a few envelopes of what probably contained some real or symbolic form of currency, and a few different statues. Yes, we got to know this shrine pretty well, partly because the boys were fascinated with it, partly because I wanted to make sure that they didn't touch anything (or touched things minimally, to be more realistic) - even though it didn't matter too much, because, as mentioned before, a 17-year-old boy was in charge of the place.. But I was very happy to see the "girls" arrive, because I thought, probably naively, that their arrival would distract the boys from Shrine Studies, either because they would want to catch up with Amy and Madeleine (naive) or because Amy would urge them back to the table, away from the offerings (super-naive...). No, I had "no partners" in the "do not touch the shrine" movement. Daniel once made a move for an orange or two from a similar shrine in a Chinese restaurant - I think in Chinatown, New York when he was about three - so I wanted to avoid a reprise. And now Ian had totally filled in Daniel on the ancestor-thing, no doubt much reinforced by his rich knowledge of Mulan. Daniel asked what ancestors were. I told him I was his ancestor, but that didn't help.

Ian also provided me, atone point in the meal, with more anthropology. He pointed to a yin-yang symbol on some art on the wall, and explained that that was from Mulan. I offered an alternative hypothesis that perhaps Mulan, a.k.a. Disney, was the party that borrowed the symbol...

But Ian's merchandise-investment campaign endured. Yes, I thought Amy would put a welcome kabosh on the multiple-item movement, but she didn't. But meanwhile, she and I were having the same thought: Ian was asking for things that didn't sound like they were particularly intended for him. So we had a moment of "faith" where we both felt like he was probably trying to do something nice for someone - we just didn't know what (probably for Madeleine, I presumed), so we told him, yes, he could buy these odd things for six dollars.

Meanwhile, Daniel selected a small Crucifix in lieu of a dragon. What a world of difference! And he wore it all the way home, even taking it to bed, and looked vaguely like an older Italian man. That was a wonderful surprise after the previous campaign.

And Ian came back with the treasures. The turtle necklace, of course, was for himself. But he presented Amy with a small, quasi-ceramic plaster of two kittens in a box. And what I thought was for Madeleine was actually for me: a plaster of a naked blond baby boy, seated on what looks like a lily-pad, hugging a great bowl, or fountain, which serves as the base support for a snow-globe containing a small white bird perched on a flowering bush. Ian showed me the message on the top - gently running his fingers along the message on the front of the fountain-base and reading it to me: "I love you".

No gift has ever been more wonderfully Ian than this.

When I got home, I set it up in the dining room, on a general display, but he quietly scooped it up and handed it to me, with a smile, probably to remind me that it was really for me, and not particularly for public consumption. So now I need to figure out how to get the maximum use out of it - perhaps somehow making it available to Madeleine, who would "use" it the most and enjoy it in her maternal-three-year-old-girl way, while also properly recognizing that it belongs to me and is my special gift from Ian. But I'm not complaining!

C. S. Lewis says that God, in relation to us, is like a parent on their own birthday. We ask God for His Grace and help, to keep his commandments and worship Him, and He provides it. He knows we don't have what we need, on our own, to live out His will, and gives us the supplement we require to make it all possible - but it's all primarily for us, not so much for Him. Likewise, on a parent's birthday, a child will ask to borrow money to buy the parent a present. The parent doesn't need the present, but he wants very much for the child to learn to give, and to show and return and foster love in a concrete way, so, of course, he obliges.

I always understood this, but I didn't anticipate that the present to come out of all of this (not on my birthday, or any time near it) would turn out to be a ceramic baby boy with a snow-globe and an "I love you" inscription. Somehow, that's all just icing on the cake - a cake more wonderfully elaborate than I had expected.

(March 27, 2011)