The Geiger Counter

My nine-year-old daughter calls getting out of school “getting loose.” Like she’s Andy Dufresne, crawling through a sewage pipe under the Shawshank State Prison. Like a bonobo that scaled a fence at the zoo.

“We got loose at 3:15 today,” she says, like that’s what time they snuck in some bolt cutters and clipped their way through a chain link fence.

It probably doesn’t help that schools use the term “release” when they talk about the end of the day. “Don’t forget, tomorrow is an early release day!” “Release,” of course, is the same word prisons use when people are done serving their time.

As we passed by a kindergarten where parents were lining up to collect their children the other day, Hadley gazed out the window and mused: “Huh… this must be when the little kids get loose.”

You don’t hear many grownups talking about “getting loose” from work. They use an even weirder term, “I get off work at 5 o’clock,” which is a silly way to phrase it unless you work on a surfboard or carousel.

The way my nine-year-old describes school is actually pretty accurate. If you don’t think so, just go to any elementary school and observe the staffers who roam the perimeter of the playground at recess keeping a watchful eye to make sure anyone who tries to escape is quickly captured and returned to captivity or sent to the hole, or whatever.

Of course, school days, like workdays, are powerful in their ability to add urgency and meaning to the mornings and evenings, to the brief times when we are not pent up and are instead loose with the ones we love.

Before we send her away each morning, I make pancakes for Hadley. Sometimes, particularly if I’m feeling guilty about feeding my daughter too many fast-food burgers or Doritos, I stir together whole wheat, barley, oat flour and flax, filling them with blueberries or peaches. Other times, when I want her to like me, I make them with white flour so they puff up with warm pockets of air. Often, especially when the chickens are being productive and we have a glut of eggs, I make paper-thin crepes, folding the rubbery layers into triangles and topping them with homemade fruit preserves from our miniature orchard in the backyard.

I have done this since Hadley was a toddler, stopping whatever work I’m doing each morning to throw baking powder and flour and milk into a bowl, toss some butter into a hot, heavy black iron skillet, and get to work piling hot cakes onto a plate. I have always loved the terminology that swirls around pancakes. They can be griddle cakes, hot cakes, johnny cakes, hootenannies, blintzes, blinis or latkes. To the lumberjack, they are flapjacks. They can be sweet or savory, fat and fluffy or thin and rich. But they are all warm and delicious and up for the task of making the morning a little better.

Years ago, it was always a treat. Hadley would totter into the kitchen and dig into whatever I made that morning. As the years have gone by, she has started taking her daily pancakes for granted. They are not exactly special, when you serve them every day.

Sometimes, she sneaks into the kitchen before I do, and I will come out and find her eating a bowl of cold cereal.

“Don’t you want pancakes?” I ask.

“Naw,” she replies. “I’m fine.”

The following morning, I always make it a point to listen more carefully for her.  Those days, I’m sure to get to the stove before she emerges from her room, where it sounds like she has to mosh, practice archery, open and slam every door and drawer, and box a one-eyed wallaby each morning while getting dressed. When she arrives in the kitchen, there are already cracked eggshells on the counter and dogs licking up spilled flour from the floor. There is already a deformed first pancake, and a stack of subsequent nice ones, steaming on a chipped plate next to a jar of maple syrup we boiled from our sap in the spring.

Sometimes she eats them all. Others, she takes a couple bites then grabs her backpack and walks out the door to play with her friends for a while before all the students are captured and held in captivity for the day. She told me she got in trouble for walking to school too early the other day, because apparently all kids are required by state law to go to school, and you get an angry note from the district if they ever get sick and miss a few days, but showing up 10 minutes early is wildly unacceptable.

Then, of course, a little after 3 o’clock each afternoon, my daughter, and all the other kids, escape, getting loose and fleeing to their respective homes. We live just around the corner from the school, and the entire neighborhood pulsates with palpable, joyous energy upon their daily escape. We have a little time together that evening, not enough, then it’s off to bed.

The next morning, I get out the mixing bowl and grab a couple eggs, beckoning the burner’s blue flame and building another stack of flapjacks, or crepes, or johnny cakes, depending on my mood.

The task is silly and Sisyphean, and it’s completely taken for granted. By the time she gets to high school, she will probably stop eating gluten out of spite, and I will have to make them with garbanzo bean flour or dried pleather or some other joyless nonsense. But I will. Even if she doesn’t touch them, and each day our dogs and chickens get to scarf down a towering stack of human breakfast food. I’ll still make them.

Because someday, probably after she has gotten loose for good and moved away to start her own family in the wild, or perhaps after I have finally gotten loose from my mortal coil and escaped to whatever there is (or is not) after this life, she will wake up early and stand on her toes to reach the flour (she will always be short), then knock over some spices locating the baking powder. She will get her hands sticky when she grabs the jar of syrup, and spend a few moments trying to fish a piece of eggshell out of the bottom of the bowl…

And she will realize that this is the most important thing she will do all day. Not the myriad tasks she is forced to perform afterward. Not work, not school, not mowing the lawn or paying her taxes. Not the wasteful and meaningless things we do in the confines of society’s very tall fence and the even taller fence of our own mortality.

The most important things are the things we choose to do in those fleeting moments when we get loose, for the people we love. Hopefully, if we are lucky, they will take them for granted. Hopefully, if we are lucky, they will know that we are here, with them, not because we have to be, but because we want to be.

They will know that when we escape, when we can go wherever we want, we are right here with them.