Repeats

This is a picture of Kate that I took in March 2006. And this is a picture of Tom that I took on Saturday and posted to my blog this morning. It's uncanny watching Tom pick up the same mannerisms that Kate had as a toddler, like watching her childhood rewind and spool forward again in slow motion. On Saturday I took two rolls of film of Tom, one outside and one inside, and he was such a dream to photograph. Like Kate, he's very natural and doesn't wiggle around much. Ana will never that be that easy to take pictures of. My sister calls her our square peg, but... well, I'm too close to her to tell. My sharpest memories of her are all the times I held her and jiggled her to sleep in my arms, just a blurred stream of memories of her teensy body curled in my arms, endless rocking her. She's two and a half now, and she's finally starting to look a little bit older. She engages a little more with people around. She's always been listening, but seeing the responses from her now feel a little startling in ways. This weekend I was holding her on my hip and attempting to find my car keys in my huge work purse. I stood by the car, in the light drizzle, for a good two minutes, fumbling around through tissues and EVDO cards and headphones and my notebooks, and then yanked them out and held them up. She broke out in a huge laugh. We had such a funny moment, standing there trying to get the car open so that I could buckle her in.

This afternoon I walked to pick up a late lunch, down Bowery, past construction site after construction site, blocks and blocks. When I reached St Marks, I remembered all of a sudden what it reminded me of. The staircases and storefronts are exactly like Newbury St in Boston. Really, this had been bugging me for months, every time I walked through there I would get this odd "I know somewhere just like this" feeling about it. St Marks is a crazy place to get that sort of feeling about, in some ways it could be anywhere.