The Knight and the Dragon

Last night, when I should have been sleeping, I was thinking of another clip from the vast collection of video we taped of the girls as they were growing. In this clip a very little Emma, maybe 1 ½ or 2, is sitting beside the bookcase in our living room, crisscross applesauce style, hunched over a book that is open in her lap. The book is The Knight and the Dragon, by Tomie dePaola, and it is one of her very favorites. The book has only two sentences: “Once upon a time, there was a knight in a castle who had never fought a dragon. And in a cave, not too far away, was a dragon who had never fought a knight.” The rest of the story is told completely through Tomie dePaola's wonderful illustrations. The book has been brought to life for Emma by the voice her daddy has given to these illustrations. Each time he read the story to her it was like a performance, complete with character voices, sound effects and even enthusiastic gestures. Emma would join in at her favorite parts, like when the bumbling knight and timid dragon charge each other for the first time. “Da, dada, da – charge!” You would hear Emma and Peter chant in unison.

But in the scene we filmed, Emma is telling herself the story. Hearing her little voice around the corner, we have snuck in from the kitchen to watch her. Peter has managed to grab the video camera almost without Emma noticing and begins to film. Emma is completely absorbed in the book, flipping the pages and reciting the dialogue she has heard her daddy perform for her hundreds of times. But then Peter makes a rookie mistake. “Hi Emm. What are you reading?” She looks up and seeing Peter there, immediately thrusts the book towards him in her outstretched hand. “That’s okay, Emma. Let’s hear you read it some more,” Peter tries.  But now she’s walking toward him, still holding the book out to him. “No, Daddy. Put down the camera, Daddy. Read the book, Daddy.” 

And with that the camera is switched off. But I know what happened next. Peter seated himself on the living room floor, Emma plopped herself into the comfortable nest formed by his crisscrossed legs, and another magical performance of The Knight and the Dragon began.

The Candy Queen

I was sorting through some old VHS tapes the other day and I came across a tape on which we had recorded several episodes of Candy Unwrapped. For the uninitiated, this is a Food Network show which takes you on a tour of the factories where they make candy favorites. My guess is that this is a show that most people watch by accident. They are flipping through the channels when nothing was on and were momentarily drawn in by the story of lollipops were made. But not Emma. I guess you could say Emma was kind of a candy groupie. So she planned to watch Candy Unwrapped. She loved Candy Unwrapped.

When she first discovered this show, it was usually aired after her bedtime. She would hear the promos for the show and be so disappointed that she would already be in bed when it came on. "Well, I could tape it for you," Peter would offer. She would go off to bed happy, knowing that when the weekend rolled around, she'd be able to indulge herself in a marathon of Candy Unwrapped episodes, including the latest from that week. 

It made me smile to see that videotape. It was just so Emma - another one of those silly, quirky little things that made her unique and unforgettable.

To see an episode of Candy Unwrapped click here.

Easter 1994

Here is an entry from my Mother's Journal written on Easter day, April 3rd, 1994:


Emma loved Easter. She hunted eggs like an expert in our living room and marveled at the surprises inside them. When she saw what the Easter Bunny brought, she was amazed. "Ohh," she said, "presents, baskets, flowers!" She hunted eggs again at Gram & Gramps' house. Later she climbed out of the crib where she was napping for the first time! I was amazed and terrified to see her standing at the door when I went to check on her. 

 

Easter Morning

A few days after Emma died, my family was gathered at my home and a group of us went downstairs and started watching some old videos of Emma and Sarah. One of the videos we watched that day was filmed on Easter morning when Sarah was 3 or 4 and Emma was 7 or 8. The girls were in our living room. They had small paper bags with handles draped on their wrists and they were excitedly darting from place to place discovering brightly colored Easter eggs all around the room. The joy and excitement on their faces and in their voices was so uplifting, but what made this video so memorable was the touching depiction of Emma and Sarah’s relationship as sisters.


Easter egg hunts have a way of bringing out the competitiveness in kids. So we were all amazed as we watched the video to see the spirit of cooperation and caring that Emma and Sarah exhibited, even at such a young age. At one point, Emma found an egg and brought it to Sarah, saying “Here, Sarah. I have more eggs than you, so this one is for you.” And then later, Sarah was on a roll finding eggs and she brought one to Emma, saying, “Here Emma, I found two eggs, so you can have one.”  Peter and I were completely silent observers in this scene. We’d not warned them to share, or to be fair. They had just cared enough about each other to do that instinctively.


I think I was drawn to watch those videos at that time because I was so shocked by Emma’s death that I had to check to see if my memory of our life together was accurate. Did I imagine that happy little girl who skipped and danced and sang through her days with us? Did I imagine that she loved and cared for us, and that she knew we loved and cared for her? What I saw in that video answered those doubts. It was as I remembered, in fact, even sweeter and better. Those Easter morning images brought her back to me in the way I had always though of her, the way I’ll always remember her.


That is my Easter story.

Our College Trip

On this day last year, the Thursday before Easter, the four of us took off on a 1,700 mile college visiting tour. The girls and Peter had Good Friday off and then the whole following week was spring break, so we had an extended amount of time available for travel. Emma was planning to be at music camp for 6 weeks during the summer, so we wouldn’t have much time in the summer to look at colleges. Also, we really wanted to see schools while they were in session so we could talk to professors and students and sample the food in the cafeteria. We had gotten a chance to see a small number of New England schools in February. We decided this was our chance to see the schools she was interested in that were further away.


To tell you the truth, the trip didn’t get off to the greatest start. Emma hadn’t followed through on a commitment she had made and that derailed our departure. We were already planning to start our first 5 hours of driving at 4 pm, but we didn’t end up hitting the road until much more like 5 pm.  We hit some bad traffic in New York and New Jersey because of our late start, but still managed to get to our hotel in College Park, MD by 10:30 pm. We were all tired and grumpy by then, though, so we went right to bed.


The next day, things started to go better. Emma and Peter got up early and went for a morning tour and information session at the University of Maryland. Sarah and I hung out at the hotel pool and had breakfast. We promised Sarah that she would not have to visit every single campus on the tour. In the afternoon, we all visited Goucher, which both Emma and Sarah loved. We found a crab house for dinner and had a blast breaking open crab shells with mallets and devouring the spicy crabmeat inside. In the process, we got covered in crab juice and the spices they put on the outside of the shells. Wet naps were not much help to us as we tried to clean up. We all agreed that meals at that restaurant should come with a complimentary shower.


After dinner, we headed down to visit Peter’s parents who lived about 45 minutes away. We stopped at a mall on the way to get them an Easter gift. Emma and Sarah picked out some headbands at a store in the mall and were more than a little embarrassed when the sales clerk asked them if they had just had crabs. Those wet naps definitely had not done the job!


We spent the weekend with Peter’s parents and decorated eggs, went bowling, celebrated Easter and took in a baseball game at Camden Yards. Then on Monday, we were back to our college touring. We traveled from Maryland to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio, back to Pennsylvania, and finally to upstate New York. Along the way we bowled, played miniature golf, watched movies, listened to music, and ate at restaurants good and bad. I played skeeball on the iPod Touch for hours on one leg of our journey, managing to get my name in about 5 of the 10 high score spots. But then I handed the Touch to Emma and in about a half hour she had wiped me out and occupied all but two of the top positions.


Emma got very involved in the visiting process. She asked questions on the tours, went to classes, rehearsed with the band at one of the schools, and ate in many of the school cafeterias. On the advice of a colleague, I had bought Emma her very own camcorder to use to record these visits so she could look back at them later. She filmed some of the tours, but mainly the camera was used to record Emma’s reaction afterwards. Sarah would man the camera as we were driving away from each school and interview Emma about her reaction and thoughts. So many times she was saying she could picture herself at the school and was looking forward to college more than she had been. Many of the schools we visited were on the “Colleges that Change Lives” list and we were impressed by the individualized approach they took to higher education. The faculty at these schools were teachers, not professors; the distinction being that they were committed to their students, not their subjects. Emma was very bright and a good student, but we knew she needed that personal approach. We were thrilled to find schools that did it so well.


Mile after mile, hour after hour, we found that we were really enjoying this college trip. It’s probably the most concentrated amount of time we had spent together in a long time and, amazingly, we didn’t get on each other’s nerves. I think that all of us had anticipated the trip with a little bit of dread, but by the end we all had to admit that it was really fun.


Of course, now that trip seems like such a gift. We were with Emma every minute of every day for ten days, just soaking her up. We had no idea that time was short, but that’s what we would have done if we had known – not necessarily the driving 1,700 miles part, but definitely the just being together part.


And the other gift is the recording done with that camcorder I gave her. I meant those recordings to be a tool for picking her next school, but now they are like a treasure, capturing the image, the voice, the gestures, the laugh, the singing, the smile of our 17 year old Emma just two months before we lost her forever. I haven’t been able to look at those recording yet, but I can’t tell you how much comfort it gives me to know that they are there.