I don’t remember my seventh birthday at all, even though I have a number of memories from the year I turned seven. I remember second grade reasonably well, and the kids that I played with. My brother Dan was born in November of that year. The day he was born, I was in a Thanksgiving play in my class, playing the part of Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford. In the early summer of 1971, right after school finished for the year, my family moved from Massachusetts to Maine, where I would spend the rest of my childhood (and then some). But I haven’t got even the merest hint of what happened on my birthday in August 1970.

Today is Charlotte’s seventh birthday. I can’t help but wonder how much of this time of her life she will remember and how much of it she will turn to me and to Bridget to remember for her. I wish I felt that I would be a better resource for that. My memory was infallible and complete for so many years, but not any more. I am grateful that I have written so much about her here over the last seven years, because now I must rely on this eternal and universal memory myself. From what I can decipher from our conversations, Charlotte’s active memory now goes back about three years. She doesn’t really remember our trip to London and Paris, she doesn’t have a lot of clear memories about her time at her first day care (where she went every day from the age of four months to four years), and only some vague recollections about my heart surgery. Her memories of this time will be clearer, but by the time she reaches her middle age it’s likely she won’t have a complete recollection.

So, Charlotte, on this, your seventh birthday: the sky was bright blue and sunny when we rose from bed, with puffy white clouds that eventually covered the sun for the afternoon. You climbed in my bed while Mom wrapped your birthday presents; you woke me up with cartoons (a recent habit of yours), but I convinced you to let me watch the first few minutes of the Today Show. It’s the middle of an election year, but the American news could only talk about the brain cancer diagnosis that will take the life of Senator Ted Kennedy possibly before your eighth birthday. I tried to tell you about him this morning, but you weren’t particularly interested.

Today in school you are doing a big presentation about cheetahs for your classmates. All the first graders in your school have had to do a report about an “organism”, and you choose cheetahs. For the last couple of weeks, you and Mom and I have been looking at books about cheetahs, finding pictures and videos of cheetahs on the Internet, and we even made a trip to the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island to see a live cheetah. The poor animal is 17 years old and dying and all she could do was lie prostrate on the ground, but see her we did. Maybe you will remember that, and maybe you’ll remember the three of us putting together your display board and rehearsing your report the way I remember being William Bradford with my little black construction paper Pilgrim hat.

Your birthday party won’t be for a couple of weeks because your schedule is so booked solid with practices, games, rehearsals, and the annual dance recital. So tonight we’re surprising you with a trip to a fondue restaurant for a chocolate fondue experience. Even if you don’t remember that in years to come, I know you’ll get a huge kick out of it now.

Most of all, the one thing I hope you will always remember is that I love you more than anyone or anything else ever in my whole life. As you grow up and have all the experiences that yet lie ahead, I will save as many of these memories for you as I have the power to do. Together we can cherish the ones we both recall, soften the ones we’ll wish we didn’t recall, and I will share as much as my own waning memory can summon from the time before yours could save them. Happy Seventh Birthday, Charlotte.

Parenthood is often a very interesting object lesson in perspective. The memories we have of our own childhoods are quite often subverted and revisited through the lens of our children’s experience. Similarly, we gain insight, very often a great deal of sympathy, and (sadly) an occasional taste of bitterness for the way our parents must have felt. These effects are often amplified because we literally retrace our steps as children through many of the same places and activities we remember and cherish. I have had this go both ways — revisiting places that were integral parts of my childhood and re-discovering their magic through Charlotte’s wonder and amazement, and returning to places that I hadn’t seen in thirty-odd years only to be disappointed or saddened by how they changed (or how I had changed).

We’re heading down a trodden path right now that should be a good experience. A few weeks ago, Charlotte started talking to me one morning about wanting something she’d seen on a TV commercial. This isn’t a novel experience; I am often besieged with requests for Moon Sand, Kids Rock CDs, various breakfast cereals and/or sugary snacks and the occasional erectile dysfunction drug. It took me a couple of tries, though, to get what exactly she was going on about. Eventually I was able to parse out that she wanted to order a butterfly kit. You send away, get a half dozen caterpillars, watch them pupate, and, hopefully, hatch into butterflies. Ah, the miracles of nature! The Circle of Life! All for $29.95 plus shipping and handling!

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It’s April school vacation week here, and Charlotte has been spending the week at my in-laws’ house in Maine. Earlier in the week I posted about our misadventure trying to go see the Battle of Lexington re-enactment, but the untold part of that story is that Charlotte was so excited to get to her grandparents that she willingly gave up going to the Patriot’s Day parade in Lexington, which is an event we usually attend, just so that she could get there that much sooner. In fact, she even packed her suitcase a whole week before she was supposed to go.

Given my own choppy relationship with my in-laws, you could have knocked me over with a feather when Charlotte and her grandmother developed such a special bond, but ultimately I am very glad that they did. Charlotte gets to have cherished memories of her grandmother and the time they have together, my mother-in-law gets to enjoy this time while she is still able to do things with her only grandchild, and Bridget and I get a week off from playing Mom and Dad. It’s a real win-win-win. This year, in fact, we’re also planning to send Charlotte to Maine for another week in August after her day camp finishes up, and we’re all looking forward to that a lot, too.

So, while the kid and the old lady have been having some bonding time, the wife and I have been enjoying our Flashback 2000 Week. 2000 was the year before Charlotte was born and the end of our 15-year era of being DINKs. We had a much longer time than many married couples do to live on our own terms and on our own schedule, and once we were settled in Boston and had good-paying jobs and such we grew to be very attached to that lifestyle. Recently, my blog-buddy Jack wrote this very thoughtful and obviously sorrowful post about how his life choices have taken him to mid-life without raising children. Jack has been going through a lot in his personal life, and I genuinely have a lot of empathy for how he’s feeling, but I can say that I went through quite a long stretch of mourning my childless adulthood and the freedom it gave us. It’s only in the last couple of years as Charlotte has started school and begun the process of being her own independent self that we’ve had a chance to have these snatches of escape back to those earlier times.

Every night this week, we’ve been able to go to restaurants that don’t use paper place mats or have kiddie menus, we’ve gotten to see movies that aren’t animated or about a toy, and haven’t had to read bedtime stories, yell at someone to brush their teeth, or watch a single minute of Disney Channel programming. I haven’t had to rush to get out the door to go to work, haven’t had to listen to my child’s incessant babble in the car, or argue about appropriate clothing for first graders. Tonight we’re going to a cheese tasting seminar, then coming home to watch a DVD that doesn’t have Barbie in it, and then going to breakfast in the morning at our favorite breakfast spot. And then the vacation is over. We’ll meet Charlotte and Bridget’s mother at our customary rendezvous spot, make the handoff, and go back to being Mom and Dad again until August.

The funny thing, though, is that even though Charlotte is not quite seven (less than a month to go now), both Bridget and I know that these times don’t last forever. As we were having dinner at a brew pub in Waltham the other night, Bridget said ” Before we know it, she won’t want to be seen with us in public”. And I knew she was right. These seven years have been such a blur, and the next seven will assuredly go by even faster. It’s April school vacation week elsewhere as well, and my friend Tony and his oldest daughter have been spending the week touring colleges that she is interested in applying to for Fall 2009. Lindsay will be 18 in November. I vividly remember going to visit Tony and his wife just a few weeks after Lindsay was born. So where did those 18 years go, and am I going to wake up one morning soon and be packing my daughter into the car for her college road trip? This morning, my blog-buddy Mig found himself reminiscing about the time he and his oldest daughter (whom he calls “Beta” online) went to Galway to buy a harp when she was just eight years old (scarcely a year older than Charlotte is now) and all the years she has gone to orchestra camp. This is their last orchestra camp together before she, too, goes off to college, and he made me cry as he wrote about having to realize some experience is “the last time” you’ll share that particular thing with your child. Of course, as children grow, they naturally leave behind elements of their younger selves, but at our stage with Charlotte, the discards have been a relief, not a twinge of remorse — no one misses changing diapers, after all.

I can’t honestly say I’m the least bit remorseful about sending my little girl off to her grandmother’s house for a week, but now I think I’m ready for her to come home so I can be Daddy again tomorrow.

For weeks and weeks, we’ve been saying that we were going to go see the annual re-enactment of the so-called “Battle Of Lexington” on the Lexington Battle Green. Charlotte is waaaaay into the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere in particular, and we are always looking for related places and events to go to, but the battle re-enactment has always eluded us. That’s primarily because it’s so freaking early in the morning. In their desire to be faithful to the events of the day, the re-enactment is always scheduled to begin around 6:00 a.m.

Which means, of course, that you have to get up earlier than that in order to get out the door and reach Lexington Center for the appointed hour. Unfortunately, none of us are early birds. We figured setting the alarm clock for 5:00 a.m. would be sufficient. HAH! Though the three of us, especially my wife the slugabed, deserve a huge amount of credit for actually getting up with the alarm and being out the door by 5:30, we were so far off in our estimation of how to see this event that dopeslaps are in order all the way around. It’s only 15-20 minutes from our house to downtown Lexington, but that means we arrived around 5:50 for an event that starts at 6:00 and only lasts about 10 minutes. The crowd was already big enough that we had no chance of seeing anything, and a quick reconnaissance drive around Lexington confirmed our suspicions that there would be no parking close enough to let us walk back over in time, either.

Barely awake and now disappointed with our failure, there was not much else to do at 6:00 except drive to the nearest IHOP and have breakfast. Now that we know better, we promised one another that next year we’ll get up at 4:00 a.m., which might give us a better shot. Adam at Universal Hub, who lives all the way down in Roslindale, managed to get his tuchus to Lexington and snap some pictures (including the one at the top of this post). He also recommends bringing a ladder to get up above the crowd if you’re more than a few rows deep in the pack if you want to see anything. That sounds wise.

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