Jesus in the Closet

Baby Jesus has always been welcomed by our daughters. The Christmas story is fairly pleasant and child appropriate (minus Herod’s infanticidal tendencies). There are lots of animals, singing angels and locals visiting the newborn in a barn (though in Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus is a cave over which was built the Church of the Nativity). Here baby Jesus is appreciated and celebrated.

Adult Jesus, not so much.

Once, when Dalia was two and a half, I’d just put her to bed and as soon as I shut her door she let out a piercing shriek. I rushed back into her room. When I asked her what was wrong she just said, “Please check my closet, Dad.” I shrugged, turned on the light and opened the closet door.

“There’s nothing here that’s unusual,” I said.

Dalia wasn’t convinced. “Are you sure Jesus isn’t in there?”

“You want me to check your closet for Jesus?” I asked, trying to keep myself from laughing. I expected to check the closet for monsters, ghosts, Coco the Stealth Cat who regularly slips into the kids' rooms, but I didn’t think I’d have to be checking it for Jesus.

Dalia was not joking. She was genuinely worried. “I don’t want anybody in my room while I sleep except for Mama and you. Grandma said that Jesus was with me all the time and I don’t want him in my room while I sleep.” 

How do you describe to a two year old that she should take things metaphorically, not literally? How do you tell children that sometimes words don’t mean what they say but they aren’t necessarily lies? I tried telling her that there was no bearded, robed man in her closet and that Grandma didn’t mean for her to be frightened of Jesus. He was really quite a nice guy.

Luckily my daughter is smarter than I was at her age. “You mean it’s just a say?” she asked. 

“Yes,” I replied, “it's just a saying.”

“Like when Mom tells me I’m in her heart? I’m not really in her heart. Blood is really in her heart. Really I’m in her feelings.” I laughed. This is what happens, I guess, when your Dad is a biology teacher and your Mom was a veterinary assistant; bedtime conversations turn towards organ functions. “Yes. Just like that.”

She seemed satisfied and snuggled back under her covers, but not without having me check under her bed to make sure Jesus wasn’t there either.

Hop Fairies

My daughter can see things that I can’t. 

Dalia (who reminds everyone she greets that she is five) notices mermaids and fairies wherever she goes. Last week we were driving over the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and she spotted a mother mermaid and her baby swimming south, an impressive visual feat considering we were moving at about 45 miles/hour, 145 feet above the Hudson (I’m assuming the hypothetical pair were migrating south to escape the impending winter). 

I did not see the mermaid duo for two reasons. First, I was driving across a bridge and needed to pay attention to the road. Second, I don’t think that mermaids are real.

The reason I don’t think mermaids exist is because I’ve never seen one in the wild, an aquarium or at a museum. I’ve also not seen any fossils of them. There is no experiential evidence that convinces me that there is any reason to place mermaids in my mental cardboard box labelled “THINGS THAT ARE LIKELY TO EXIST.” In this mental box I place reasonable things like talking crows (they are very, very smart birds), black holes, and electrons. (And, yes, the boxes of ideas in my brain are made out of cardboard and are themselves categorized in the box, “MENTAL CARDBOARD BOXES.” These are located directly behind the mental box labelled, “MONTY PYTHON REFERENCES”).

I currently store the idea of human/fish hybrids in the mental box titled, “THINGS THAT ARE NOT LIKELY TO EXIST.” Here, mermaids are in good company with King Arthur’s return, congressional bipartisan agreement, and another of my daughter’s regular sightings: fairies.

This summer, as Dalia and I were harvesting hops from our garden, she constantly interrupted the task of plunking hop cones into a basket to deal with fairies. She would cup her hands to move a fairy from the leaves or untangle a fairy that got stuck in the deer fence. “This one is a water fairy,” she explained me, “and this one is a garden fairy.” 

“Here, get this one,” I suggested, as I continued my meditative hop removal. 

Annoyance tugged on her mouth. “What one?” she demanded.

“This one, right here. It’s a hops fairy.” I gestured nebulously to the thick coiled bines that sagged from the supporting wires (bines are like vines, but are covered in small, irritating, velcro-esque protrusions).

Dalia rolled her eyes. “There’s nothing there, Dad.” 

“Sure there is. Right here. Look. It’s a hops fairy.”

Her demeanor changed to very serious. “There’s no such thing as a hops fairy.”

“What?” I feigned shock. 

“You don’t see a hops fairy for real, Dad. You are only using your brain, not your imagination.” Apparently, I don’t hide the labels on my mental cardboard boxes very well. She was frustrated that I wasn’t truly considering her belief that fairies really exist. And she’s right. I’m not ready to take the idea of fairies out of its box (they rest comfortably next to Champ and Nessie).

The thing about these organizational boxes is, I find it frustrating to reorganize them. I like considering new things, but I hate reconsidering old things. I dislike finding out that I’m wrong about something and having to switch the mental boxes they are in. So to avoid being wrong, I have another, fairly large mental box labelled, “IDEAS THAT ARE NOT YET PLACED IN MENTAL CARDBOARD BOXES.” In this box are things like dark matter, the nature of God, and whether or not trees that fall in unpopulated forests make sounds. New concepts get placed here and then eventually, when I’m ready, they are re-categorized into the appropriate, more permanent, box.

I’m pretty sure that most of the ideas and experiences in my daughter’s mind are in this box and as she grows, she’ll organize them as her experience teaches her what reality is. It may be possible that a person’s creativity and imagination is directly related to how many concepts and ideas are NOT placed in more permanent mental cardboard boxes. Perhaps this is why children’s imaginations are more vibrant than mine. They haven’t locked their ideas up yet. Possibilities abound. 

A few days ago Dalia and I were outside stacking wood (in reality I was stacking wood and she was searching underneath logs for insects, grubs and fairies). She returned to our summer conversation as if we’d never left it. “You know, Dad, there are things that are real that you can’t see. Like angels and fairies. And God.” 

At first, I just nodded, as if she were stating a general truth. Then I realized that she was encouraging me, as directly as she could, to rearrange my mental cardboard boxes. Perhaps this is the most profound, frustrating, and meaningful things that children do to parents. They constantly ask us to reconsider ourselves and our relationships with the world around us. What she really meant was that there were things that were real that I, her Dad, couldn’t see. Like angels. And fairies. And God. 

Maybe it’s time once again to reorganize my boxes.




*Humulus lupulus Photo Credit: Courtney Howard.

Floating Signs

I love to brew (and drink) my own beer. To me it is a fusion of both science and faith, of technology and mysticism, and, well . . . it’s beer.

The science of brewing is straightforward and multivariate. Both ales and lagers are made from malted grain, hops, water and yeast. Put them together and a few weeks to a few months later you will probably have beer. How you put them together is a question that can be answered ad infinitum. Each recipe can be crafted differently than the last. What style should be brewed next? What types and roasts of malts would yield the perfect color? How much and which varieties of hops should I use to produce earthy, citrusy, or floral aromas? Brewing is a playground for those who love to question and to experiment.

The mysticism in beer brewing lies not in the preparations of the brewer, but in the metabolic enthusiasm of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ale yeast. 

Outside of my family, yeast may be my favorite type of organism. 

After choosing the right recipe for the style of beer to brew, mashing the grains, boiling the “wort” with specific amounts of hops added at different times, after all this organization and control, the rest of the process is left up to single celled fungi that eat the sugars and the organic compounds surrounding them. We have a taste for their wastes; alcohol, carbon dioxide, and esters that lend the beer different flavors. Though I can comment on the chemistry of yeast excretions, compare yeast subspecies, and comment on the fruitiness or dryness of their wastes, how they turn a slurry of brown sticky liquid into beer is more like magic than anything else.

Yeast magic (which scientists sometimes call “fermentation”) can last anywhere from 3 days to two weeks and during that time I am in the dark. I’ve taken a step into Kierkegaardian discomfort, full of hope and worry. I don’t know exactly what is happening in the mystical bucket and I want a sign.

One of the ways to tell what is happening on the yeast front (and easing my faith-challenged mind) is by taking measurements of the density of the brew at different times. To measure this, I use a hydrometer. 

A hydrometer is essentially a beer buoy. In denser liquids the hydrometer floats higher, bobbing about near the surface. In less dense solutions, the hydrometer sinks. By comparing the first measurement (original gravity) with subsequent measurements, a brewer can calculate the amount of alcohol produced by the yeast and can get an idea of how close the beer is to a final target (final gravity) and final alcohol amounts.

The hydrometer won’t tell me what the beer will taste like in a month, or how it will age, but it will tell me approximately how much maltose my yeasty friends are or are not using. It can tell me whether the young brew is going to be sweeter or more dry, or even if the yeast cells are done with their magic. It is a floating beer sign.

It occurred to me as I brewed my last batch (a stout with a sweet grain bill and hops I harvested in 2010), that I could really use a type of hydrometer for my daily life, a kind of floating sign that could give me some general feedback about how I’m doing as a Dad, a husband, a teacher. Then I realized that I had several. My daughters (who at their young ages lack any kind of filter and tend to be very overt in their signing). My students. My wife (who, thankfully has a very kind filter and allows me to be my geeky self the vast majority of the time). My family and friends. 

This blog is about floating signs. 

It’s also about beer.