Head over heels

Devon has truly adoped the concept of "mine" to the fullest degree. She got the whole concept of "mine" about two or three weeks ago (and has been using it with abandon ever since), but now she's taken to holding something or pointing at it and declaring, "Mine!" just in case you might be tempted to take it. This declaration, of course, has no relationship to any external reality. Today Walt had bought a bag of the natural cheese puffs (a contradiction if ever there was one); Devon had a couple and immediately pointed to the bag and said, "Mine! My cips!" (my chips -- any salty thing is a "chip"). Perhaps she was just hoping that, like our president, by saying it she could make it so.

After yoga this morning we went to the Civic Center farmer's market. This is the far rougher, smellier and more urban market than the one at the Ferry Plaza -- this is not the market that you take your friends to when they're in town, since you're apt to be passing more homeless people than shoppers at any given hour. We went there because there is a farmer from Santa Cruz who sells dry farmed tomatoes that are about as close to nirvana as one can get with a tomato, and since it's August and high tomato season, it was time to indulge. Since we went around noon, though, he was already out of the Early Girl and we had to go with only the heirlooms. Oridinarily I'm an heirloom-type of girl, but these Early Girls are even better in this case since they're like the distilled essence of tomato; far more tomatoey than the heirlooms for some reason. The others are nothing to sniff at, though, and we'll be having some excellent salads and sandwiches with these tomatoes and some of the fresh mozzarella I picked up at the store recently.

This market tends to have a wide range of "alternative" panhandlers. One of them was a guy who did a yoga-esque headstand with his head propped on a soda bottle and his legs out horizonally. It was quite amazing, really; I was especially astounded at using a bottle as a prop for one's head; it's not an object that one would naturally think, "Hey, I could do a headstand on this bottle and use it to prop up my head." In addition to yoga positions on his head, he kept up a running commentary the entire time (most of which was kind of like street guy stream of consciouness -- he was telling Devon about how she shouldn't take this out on Daddy but the world is a matriarchy but that most men just haven't had it explained to them). Devon was quite entranced with this guy and spent quite a while checking him out. I think she really wanted to run up and touch him, but I wouldn't let her get close enough because I was worried that he might accidentally hit her with his feet as he was changing positions. Walt happened to have the camera and got a great shot of him in action.

Jim had a great post recently about fleeting memory, that of children (we have yet to encounter that, since Devon isn't verbal enough for us to have a meaningful conversation with her) and that of adults as children. I was thinking about that this weekend, the earliest memory that I have, and it's honestly hard for me to separate out what is directly from me and what was influenced by what I was told, photographs, and the like. My earliest memory is of being in the basement of the apartment where we lived and seeing a pink formica table, the type with little gold speckles in it. It was at night, and there may have been other people there, but I don't remember that. I think it was a laundry room, actually, although I have no memory of washing machines or anything like that. My parents were at school in Illinois at the time, and I remember them telling me that there were regular tornado alerts. It's all very fuzzy and vague, but I do remember being in the basement and seeing, maybe staring at, the table. After that I only have sporadic memories of fleeting things around age 5 -- the brown and pink paisley dress that I wore to the first day of kindergarten (that I thought at the time could not possibly have been more fabulous), the time I buried the sandwich my grandfather made me in his backyard because I didn't like it but was too afraid to tell him -- and then it gets a little more regular (but still very sporadic -- I don't have a good memory for the most part) when I'm in elementary school. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Devon remembers from her early childhood.