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I’m not sure how you write about visiting a point-to-point horse race in Chester County, PA without making everyone involved sound like a pretentious jerk. Sure, there are a lot of toffs at the point-to-point, but the toffs there are of the hardy, open-air variety. For example: Kate’s dad belongs to a five-member lunch club called “the Horse”, which was formed a hundred fifty years ago or so for the capture of horse thieves. Five letters in “Horse”, five members for the last fifteen decades. See? There’s like, five directions that I could go with this, each one of which would make Kate’s dad sound like an asshole. Let’s be clear about this: Kate’s dad is not an asshole. Kate’s dad is a paragon, an exemplar, a pinnacle of mellowness and unpretentiousness, and there he is parked at the finish line of the race with Kate’s mom, her 1962 Austin-Healey, and a picnic basket, talking to his Horse friend who is wearing a needlepoint belt his wife made him with Ducati and BMW motorcycles on it. And neither of them are lawyers. Fit that in your Prizm cluster.

So I guess that you’ll have to just take my word for it that the Brandywine Valley Association‘s Point-to-Point race is not crammed with jerks. I mean, sure, there are plenty of jerks there, all right: there are late-model Land Rovers with insufferable little running-fox hood ornaments, but there are also plenty of standard issue four-wheel-drive station wagons with eccentric hood ornaments (a fairy riding a snail…?) that don’t automatically trigger the gag reflex. And there are also plenty of fox-hunting grandmothers who think nothing of scrambling up on top of the Woody to get a better look at the action.

I guess the best I can do is this: Swallows and Amazons, not The Official Preppy Handbook.

Of course, this race marshall, with his Willys jeep, paddock boots, and ascot, is in a category by himself, and I devoted plenty of time five years ago discussing my enviousness of his finely-tuned schtick.

There were two new things this year. Well, three, if you count the weather: it was sunny and glorious for the first time in anyone’s memory. Second new thing was having a toddler there, which was wonderful: Lydia enjoyed stomping around in the dry winter grass and petting the rabbits in the kid’s tent, and Kate demonstrated the use of an Austin-Healey as a simultaneous playpen and yarn caddy, which I hope does not make me sound like an asshole when I tell you how that makes my heart thump savagely in my chest.

The third new thing is that I saw a bad fall for the first time; a horse tried to refuse the last jump and run out, but caught the chute and tumbled sideways through the air and crashed to the ground skidding on the grass in a way that was (bizarrely) reminiscent of the scene from Aliens where the extraction ship crashes to the ground and bounces towards the screen, causing Bill Paxson to run for his life. This happened about ten feet in front of me, and let me tell you, horses are big, and they move fast, and it was frightening.

Fortunately, both horse and rider were fine, and we wore Lydia out so much that she went to bed an hour early (for her) because of daylight savings, and we’re making plans to paint the house.

In a future blog post: Chester County’s favorite pastime when it does decide to go pretentious: Wyeth Worship.

Kate’s at home now, God’s in his heaven, the birds are chirping in the trees, and all’s right with the world. Here are my thoughts on being in sole charge of a toddler for five days:

1. To begin with, I wasn’t in sole charge of a toddler for five days. Every day, I had between two and five(!) hours of babysitting time from the grandparents. I think having at least one hour of daylight free time every day is the difference between “hey, no problem”, and dangerous mental resource depletion. And then having three hours of daylight free time? Work has proceeded so quickly on my garage that I’m almost ready to launch the rocketship through the sliding roof.

Okay, so I guess I only had one thought, which is “I had a really, really cushy time of it”, and I’m really grateful to the grandparents. Though she missed Kate a whole lot, Lydia was totally happy and relaxed; when I tried to explain to her the third or fourth time that mommy was visiting friends, she nodded and said, “yes, on a airplane.” Duh, daddy!

The weather was so amazingly beautiful today that we went to the bike store and bought a toddler seat for the back of Kate’s bike (sorry, Kate, I commandeered your bike in the name of Justice.) We spent a long morning attaching it to the bike — since the lawn is a lot more toddler friendly than the garage, there was no end of entertainment dropping small allen-head screws into the long, dry winter grass and then searching for them. Without even the comfort of profanity. After that, two diaper changes and a nap, we were all set to go, and wobbled down the street. Lydia looks adorably like Toad from Super Mario Brothers in her big ol’ helmet, and she loves riding in the chair, so I now have…

Oh crap, Lydia just learned how to turn on the television.

We have story time at 9:30, but I’m not sure if it’s at the West Chester Public Library, or the Exton Public Library. Damn, if there’s one impression I did NOT want to give with this whole taking care of the toddler for five days, it’s the amiably-befuddled dad who doesn’t know where anything is in the cabinets. Crap, crap, crap. Okay, both websites inconclusive, and I’m not about to call them up and spend the entire storytime being that dad in the session. Okay, heads it’s Exton, tails it’s West Chester…

Update: Okay, wherever storytime was, it wasn’t at the Exton Public Library, so instead we had the standard course of daddy-daughter “there is no quality time without quantity time” interactions:

1. Rode the rocking moose in the children’s section of the Exton public library.
2. Looked on with some thinly-veiled consternation as other toddlers rode the rocking moose.
3. Picked books to read out of the board-book bin.
4. Looked on with thinly-veiled consternation as other toddlers picked books to read out of the board-book bin.
5. Built houses and escalators (the two design patterns Lydia is interested in) at the Duplo table.
6. Looked on with thinly-veiled etc.

   
   Adjourn to private venue, then…

7. Learned to use the CD player’s controls
8. Blew bubbles (and licked the wand, blech!)
9. Stomped around in the sunshine
10. Nap (for both of us)

So all in all, a very satisfactory morning! Now Kate’s mom is taking LBY for a few hours, so I’m going to go work on the garage. I am a lucky, lucky dad.

Kate is off on her very first mommy-time-off trip, visiting a good friend in Seattle. She left at 6:30 this morning (Wednesday), and she’ll be back around midnight on Sunday. That means it’s just Lydia and me for five days! I’m really looking forward to this, though of course I’m a little nervous about it, especially since the weather is cool and we can’t kill two hours running around in circles on the lawn. And I don’t think she’ll be all that interested in my current project of installing enough lighting in the garage to bake a ham.

So right now, we’re off to the Philadelphia Zoo to see the monkeys. Wish me luck! My goals:

• A good time for both of us
• A healthy amount of father-daughter field trips (the zoo, maybe the “please touch” museum, go get some more broadfall pants in Lancaster.)
• Regular, non-junk-food meals.
• A bath every night. Plus a bath for her, if she needs one.

Update: we just got back. Everything went great. Lydia learned how to say “Capybara.” Pictures here!

If I were going to invent a character that runs a Christian health-food restaurant in midcoast Maine, I would imagine that he looks like a wide-eyed Dobie Gillis, giving off rays of intense, bean-sprout-y enthusiasm. And I might imagine that he works behind a great big linoleum church-basement-style space completely devoid of patrons. Scratch that — maybe with one patron, sitting at a table in the corner eating slowly, staring fixedly into space.

If I really wanted to go all out, I would imagine tracts scattered around this big, empty, echo-ing linoleum basement: tracts about intestinal health and holiness, and everything on the menu would be spelled almost right, but not, since it’s a vegetarian restaurant. “Grilled chz sandwich.” “Chz.”

Since this blog is a work of fact, however, I do not have to invent anything, and I’m horrified to report that I thought the “chz” was real cheese. I thought it was real cheese until after I was finished the sandwich and I heard the proprietor whistling tunes I haven’t heard in twenty years since my family used to go to a Pentecostal fellowship called “The Eagle’s Nest” that met in an empty storefront in a mall in Paramus, New Jersey. IT WAS NOT CHEESE. It was “chz”, and when Dobie started talking about purity of essence (okay, now I’m making stuff up, but only now, I swear) I just nodded, swallowed back an oddly gorgonzola-y “urp!” and beat a hasty retreat, scooping up Lydia before he could get crazy all over her (I hadn’t seen the tracts, yet; this was one of your “slowly dawning realization” things. I knew it was vegetarian, but not vegan, and I hadn’t even spotted the tracts yet, though I was wondering why this guy was whistling “Beautiful Savior” while staring fixedly at the opposite wall.)

Across the street from the “that wasn’t cheese” luncheonette was a walking store that sold expensive shoes to the faithful: “Have you owned a pair of Birkenstock shoes before?” asked the white-bearded man behind the counter, shaking his burlap robes, the betel juice beading on his chin: “Oh, you’d KNOW if you had owned a pair of Birkenstock shoes. You’d KNOW.”

Midcoast maine, apparently, is still the woodsy seine for craziness that all thirteen colonies used to be, and the fires of zealotry still burn bright on its stony shores. The Green Store in Belfast is one of my favorite places to browse, with chemical toilets, 12V solar lighting, and greaseproof oriental rugs woven in Thailand from recycled soda bottles, which is perfect for (just for example) making your motorcycle garage look like Al Capone’s jail cell. (Pictures to come once I get the chandelier hung.)

You can also, in Belfast, spend two thousand bucks on handmade boots — for-real, from stratch, cobbler-built boots: in adjusted dollars, this is about the same as they’ve always been, but midcoast Maine is where the artisans go to eke out a living actually lasting the boots by hand and selling them to the faithful (or to Martha Stewart readers: Martha sniffed out this guy years ago.)

So put all those Xtian Chz-eaters cheek by jowl with the greens, the yoga buddhist purists, and the artisanal refugees, put them in a landcsape filled with gorgeous, dilapidated Greek revival mansions built by retired whaling captains and now falling to ruin, and you have a powerful air of… well, of something possibly akin to the old days when Quakers were called “Quakers” because they were freaky, ecstatic, and tremulous Pentecostals, not sedate Volvo-driving subcommittee members.

The good news is that Kate, Lydia and I had a great time celebrating Lydia’s birthday with my mom’s side of the family, who have gradually been emigrating to midcoast Maine’s ecstatic shores, but so far are only showing signs of the good kind of crazy, born from enthusiasm and love for life and not from a desire to promulgate “chz.”

Also, these new Birkenstock shoes are freaking awesome.