Authority

Our friends from the States (Caleb, Susan, and their kids Sendak and Abigail) left this morning at some ungodly pre-dawn hour to catch their train south. It was truly lovely having them here, and they’ve promised to come back when it’s warmer. (Except it’s going to be a balancing act; if it’s too warm, they’ll be like, “Let’s go outside! It’s fabulous!” and we’ll be like, “Have a great time in the hellish humid heat! We’ll be here in the apartment with the air conditioning at top blast!”)

Paul and their son, Sendak, played for four days straight with nary a grump or a tear.

Sage This always playing with another kid is perfect. I think we should have another baby.

Todd Hee.

Caleb You may have a slight age problem, if you approach it that way.

Sage Nah. I’ll just magically age Kid 2, so it’s as old as Paul.

Caleb Or you could adopt an older kid.

Sage Okay, cool. I pick Sendak.

Caleb, to Susan How about it? We could come pick him up in a couple of weeks.

Susan Tempting, but…no.

I have to admit to rather liking running around Toronto, six people in tow, being the Loud Americans. (Or, when I was in the lead, the Lost Loud Americans). We spent Friday at the museum, and then Saturday we visited Lake Ontario. I sat down and started moving the rocks around (the beach at Lake Ontario is rockier than an Ozark garden) and ended up with a large circle and a small path leading off of one side. I was amused later to see a couple stop and look at the circle, trying to puzzle out what it meant and why someone would arrange the rocks that way. I like the thought that something I created changed someone else’s day even that slightly.

After Lake Ontario we had lunch and while Todd went grocery shopping for dinner, the rest of us headed off to Ward’s Island, which is basically just a fancy name for a sandbar just off Toronto’s shoreline. Susan wanted to try her hand at Geocaching, and we’d found a cache on the island. After getting off the ferry, we started walking the 3 kilometres towards the cache.

Trying to get the boys to walk in the same direction at a steady pace was about as fun as herding cats, and eventually Susan, Caleb and Abigail ended up sitting on a bench in front of the fire house to wait for me and the boys to catch up. When we finally did, Abigail elected to wait for the rest of us on the bench. After another kilometre, the boys spotted a playground and I stayed with them while Caleb and Susan found the cache on their own.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Abigail had fallen asleep on the bench. She woke up, hearing one firefighter say to the other, “Do you think she’s okay?”

“I don’t know,” said the other. “Let’s try to wake her up.”

Once she was sitting up they asked her all kinds of questions (beginning with, Caleb pointed out, “Where’s your mom?” and never really proceeding to, “And…your dad?”) and ended with, “Okay, I think we should pile into the fire van and go find your family.”

So, back at the playground, Caleb and Susan showed up just as the fire van cruised in and parked and the firefighters got out with Abigail in tow.

And here’s where, if I had been Abigail’s parent, I would have been shaking and apologizing and swearing never to do that again, and basically doing everything but hiding my tail between my legs, and only skipping that because I don’t have a tail. But Susan and Caleb were absolutely fantastic. They saw that Abigail was okay, they heard the bare bones of the story, and they laughed and laughed.

“We thought,” said Firefighter One sternly, “that she had been abandoned.”

“Abandoned! Ha!” said Susan.

“Like, we’d taken her here on the ferry and then snuck around back where she couldn’t see us and taken the ferry home?” giggled Caleb.

And because Susan and Caleb found the situation so funny, the firefighters started to find it funny too. And we spent the rest of the trip back to the ferry talking about the island (only 500 people live there, they have 99 year leases, and the only way to get a house is if someone dies and leaves it to you or if someone dies and doesn’t leave it to anyone, then it goes to the waiting list, which also has 500 people on it, kind of like a prettier New York City) and their jobs, and then when we got to the ferry dock and the ferry (which only comes once an hour) was there waiting for us, a, “Thank you so much! You showed up just in time!” and a smile.

I found it all tremendously inspiring. Because Susan and Caleb didn’t treat the firefighters as someone in authority, they stopped believing themselves that they had any power over the situation. Something for me to remember.

But the best part of the entire visit, hands down, was when we decided to take the boys to the playground at night. It was around ten, and they were showing no signs at all of slowing down - in fact, they seemed to be winding up instead - and the parents decided that to keep our collective sanity we should take them somewhere that yelling and stomping wouldn’t bother anyone.

We walked through the deserted streets and when we arrived the boys played almost completely silently on the equipment, while Abigail and the grown-ups probably annoyed the people in the surrounding apartments by laughing and playing and shrieking.

“Darling, shut the window,” they were saying. “It’s those Loud Americans again.”