We snap photos of the kids holding hands on South Beach, minutes after our arrival. Snap makes it sound like we were using cameras; the brightness of the beach and the brutish surf and the three kids wanting to head in three directions – the dunes, the waves, a seagull – meant we did not look at the photos as we took them; we took them hastily and looked at them hours after, re-entombed in the relative dark and cool of the rental house. My husband remarked that our daughter always finds the camera; this is true and has been since her very earliest days, lying still and canted right on a beanbag pillow in her plexiglass bassinet, snaked in tubes and wires. When I took her into Children’s for her one year checkup, it was her captive eyes and sunken cheek, still bearing the faint beetling of tube tape, that greeted me from the welcome screen. 

I don’t know enough about photography – taking photos, or being photographed – to have any framework for finding the camera. Written out like that, it seems so obvious. Smile at the birdy! (The cumuloid backdrops of school photos, violet, pewter, mimsy blue; the photographer disembodied, a black hump, so very far away). In person, my oldest son is beautiful; he struggles, much of the time, to find the camera. The exceptions being school pictures and the photographs his paternal grandfather took. I asked my grandfather about this once; in typical fashion, he said he got on their level, and took a lot of shots. “You don’t see the ones I don’t send,” he didn’t have to say. But I see all the ones I take, and the ones other casual if frequent iPhone photographers take of my children; this is how I know that my daughter’s ability to find the amateur’s camera is unique, at least in this family. 

All this camera talk prompted maybe by a recent compulsion, on my morning walks, to photograph my own face. Invariably, I delete the results. Loss of cheek – where did it go? – reveals a displeasing horsiness. Plus frown lines, crow’s feet, skin that is lusterless under its summer tan. The kind of hair that’s just … there. A little each of wispy and lank; also, the color of bilge. I buy sea moss and spirulina; I resolve to wear sunscreen. I read a substack post explaining that most skincare makes your skin needier; some of it injuriously. I delete about $100 worth of vitamin C this and retinol that, feeling superior and virtuous. Without any products, my skin looks better, marginally. Or maybe the credit goes to the spirulina, which Perry, enchanted by its oceanic color, likes to mix up for the both of us. 

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My sister is in an art cult whose focus is on forms of attention that are resistant to capitalism. My sister is not a working artist, exactly; perhaps she is no longer a member; perhaps membership is for life, or at least a stage of it, like a real cult.

We were walking together through the forest that connects Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, along a path bearded with scrub oak and reindeer moss, discussing capitalism, art, mimetic dance, attention (please). The usual sisterly things. The company I work for measures attention in what we call “engaged” minutes — reading must be accompanied by a certain frequency of scrolling, tapping, saving; streams must be in view, sound on. I started to explain this and then trailed off; it was far less interesting than being in an art cult. 

What forms of attention are resistant to capitalism, I asked, though in truth, I was stuck on attention itself. Was capitalism to blame for my lack of it? 

When we’d left the house, it had been drizzling; the drizzle had stopped, or not made it through the trees. I had dressed for a different day, in a fleece and a corduroy cap and now I was hot and fidgeting with zippers, brims, stray spinnerets of hair. 

Friendship, my sister said. 

Friendship is diffuse in form and trajectory. It is averse to milestones and corporate KPIs. It doesn’t come with a registry. I found this marvelous, on the one hand (friendship: a loving act of anti-capitalism transgression); on the other, I couldn’t help but reflect on how vulnerable friendship is to other, less resistant, non-resistant forms of attention. Why, that same morning, a college friend had sent an illustrated essay on the importance of physical proximity to friendship to our roommate group chat.

“Read this this morning and it made me long for y’all and that big blue couch on Henry Street,” she wrote. 

Distance doesn’t so much end as digitize; texts and group chats are both better than nothing and not nearly enough, at risk as they are of becoming another node of opt-in, asynchronous communication. 

“I am most loving when i get to witness someone exist,” the essay’s author wrote, above an electric blue watercolor splotch. The splotch has been allowed to bleed a wide, faint halo above its upper ellipsis. 

My sister lives in Brooklyn, two blocks away from the apartment where we spent our final, reticulated year in the city. Many of her friends live off the G or C trains, or within walking distance. The years of babies and kids and sick parents; the logistical and physical fetters that coaxed and propelled and compelled our city friends to California and Oregon and Colorado, to Kansas City and Naples and Washington, D.C., or at the very least to Long Island and Fairfield County and northern New Jersey have not arrived yet. Perhaps they will not, or not to the same extent.

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That was our second to last day of vacation. In the afternoon, after dropping my sister at the island’s tiny airport (that can’t be the airport, P said, incredulous, as we pulled up), the five of us rambled through more woods, hunting for sculptures. Fist-sized eyes and foot-high elves and mermaids and mad, gaunt-towered castles peeked out from tree knots and rock walls; more arresting were the giant fauns and druids whose bodies were formed of very gnarled, attenuated wood that I took at first glance for driftwood but were actually the inverted roots of trees. The effect was not unlike Carcosa, only with more wild blueberries.

That night, we ate ice cream first and quiche second and put on Frozen 2 (capitalist) for the kids, but it didn’t take, so I switched to an old Raffi concert instead. 

“You loved this when you were little,” I told Perry, who has of late become both scornful of films he very recently adored, and infused with a graduate’s tendresse for his younger self. 

“I remember,” he said. “And me. I remember,” Irving added. He did not leave the mini-foosball set, but sat with his head tilted to the side, waiting. 

Raffi finished “The More We Get Together.” 

“Let’s keep watching,” Perry whispered. Ottie was stock still in my lap, as if electrocuted. 

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The concert we were watching was recorded in 1984, at the Bathurst Theatre in the singer’s hometown of Toronto. It is worth watching for the fashion alone, which is relentlessly wholesome: the kids in turtlenecks and Oshkosh overalls in denim or wide-waled corduroy or plaid dresses with apron collars. A hand knit, robin’s egg blue sweater emblazoned with sweeping rainbow. The mothers in the puff-sleeved dresses in florals as well as pinks; a few in sweaters. Their hair is puffy like the dresses or else very straight and held back with a single, efficient barrette.  The footage, throughout, is grainy; the only special effect is that the background behind Raffi occasionally changes color. That the low-budget quality is the vehicle for forty five minutes of unorchestrated and unbashed sweetness somehow underscores those very traits.

The apex of the concert occurs ten minutes in. “I think you might know this next song,” Raffi says, genially, and launches into “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” Dozens of very young voices join in, unbidden. Raffi stops singing. His eyes shine. His eyes shine and he sits, quietly, and listens through to the chorus. Well, he says, softly. Grins. You know, sometimes, I sing it a little differently. How would he sing it differently? The little faces in the audience, the faces around me – they all hung on his every word. 

Newly curious about the man with the gentle voice and lively kazoo, I read “Finding Raffi,” Shiela Heti’s 2015 profile of the troubador, then 67 years old and recently returned to children’s music after decade of full-tilt advocacy. It is both a survey of how Raffi became the world’s most famous children’s singer, and an excavation, only occasionally needlessly provocative, of Heti’s own relationship to the man and the music.

Heti wonders about the role Raffi’s childlessness does or doesn’t play in his ability to connect to his audience.  She quotes Maile Meloy, who wrote, of becoming a parent, “Your emotional viewpoint shifts, and you start identifying with the parents in stories, rather than with the children.”

Is that too reductive? I want to argue that it tracks, but then again: which stories? It occurs to me that I’ve read two novels with child narrators this month; Demon Copperfield and The Book of Goose, and in neither did I identify with the parents, perhaps because the children mostly looked after themselves. I did not identify with the children, but was entranced by their pluck and original, unburdened ideas.

Raffi, for his part, tells Heti that he didn’t feel he’d missed out by not having kids. He poured his devotion and love into the albums the way the parents he knew, the parents he saw in his own audiences, poured theirs into raising children. 

Raffi is a form of attention resistant to capitalism. You can buy the albums, of course, or the DVD of A Concert for Young Children, which as of this writing is $8 on Amazon. Raffi still plays live shows, occasionally (if you’re in the PNW, you can catch him this fall). But there is no Baby Beluga movie, no line of Raffi-branded banana phones, no Down by the Bay e-game with in-app watermelons for purchase. His website appears to have been made with Geocities, replete with box-shadow navigation and a photoshopped white whale. 

“I’m all for the imprinting of the real world in slow time,” Raffi says. By which he does not mean: upload a Reel of yourself and your babychild dancing to “Vienna” in a desaturated pastel bedroom or a mysteriously empty field of bluebells. Presumably. 

I think: there is something almost religious in these forms of attention. 

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I reread “Losing My Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston,” Jia Tolentino’s seminal New Yorker essay on God and goodness, church and drugs and coming of age at the turn of the millenium in one of the country’s most diverse and most conspicuously demarcated cities. At fifteen, she began to question the big-tent Southern evangelicalism of her family’s church, a forty-two acre Vatican of the south west (“so big we called it the Repentagon”), in which wealth was virtue, homosexuality a sin, and preventable tragedies chalked up to “god’s will.” Alone and uncertain in her parents’ car in one of the vast parking lots that encircled the church’s forty-two acre campus, Jia turned the dial towards a more accommodating modality: chopped and screwed.

The “narcotized bang and sparkle” of Houston rap, rap that dripped and prowled within its cossetting reverb, rap for freeways and disorienting noonday heat and neon tropicalia sunsets; rap for dog breath nights in unguarded swimming pools, sharing big styrofoam cups of lean and Sprite. A slow, dissociative blessing. A revelation.

It’s no secret to anyone who’s watched more than two episodes of The Righteous Gemstones that organized religion can be as much an active participant in as escape from the attention economy. Desiring the latter, we settle for the former. Some, like Jia, turn elsewhere. To music, to mind-altering substances, to therapy and float tanks and the quietest place on earth. To the jaws of a Kamchatka brown bear. 

To be in ecstasy, after all, is to stand outside yourself.

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In the Vineyard, I run along the roadside trail with Ottie in the stroller, blasting eighties power pop (our middle ground) until she rounds the short bend from tolerance to tantrum, and I give in, pretending to be huffy but mostly grateful for the excuse to stop at the farm-and-grocery that has conveniently appeared up ahead. We sit at a picnic table and eat green grapes and split a cranberry juice and Ottie finds such pleasure in carefully unscrewing the juice box cap, taking a measured sip, rescrewing the cap, eating a grape, unscrewing the cap, etc. After each sip she gives a performative exhale. The farm-and-grocery lot hums with arriving cyclists and that eerie chiming sound Teslas make in reverse. The adjacent field is a third full of sunflowers, towering and resplendently marigold, though more slender than usual about the face. I wonder if the farm’s had to install signage asking heady traispers to keep their clothes on, or if traipsing is forbidden period, which, given the sunflowers are for cutting and putting in charmingly dinged up tomato cans, is more likely.  

Are you ready to go explore? I keep asking Ottie. Who is in fact exploring. How many more unscrew-sip-rescrew-sighs does she have in her? As many as she pleases.

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It was August yesterday and now it’s September and I’m writing on the porch, watching Perry fill the brass watering can – a very round base, very long and thin spout, like a genie lamp – and water the geraniums in their planters. He refills the can, walks across the lawn to water each plant that strikes him as in need. We have many flowers and shrubs; he makes a dozen trips back and forth. Solicitous, and pleased by his ability to refill the can all by himself. Never mind that the plants don’t need watering.

It is September and we are crowded at the end of the driveway, holding coffee cups, a portable speaker blaring Barbie Girl, one red converse, and the neighbors’ new puppy, a portuguese water dog the silvery grey of merman beards, or the ocean in winter. Perry has a new red backpack with his name emblazoned in peacock blue; he has all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and three quarters of the Chamber of Secrets under his belt, he has become so at ease diving off the far end of the dock and exploring the deep deep that he’s given himself two ear infections. He dresses himself in double shorts for practicality and striped shirts to please me and a silk crown tipped at a jaunty angle or else a leopard print beret inherited from Brady’s mother. When he tracks dirt into the kitchen, he apologizes. He caroms lacrosse balls across all four corners of the screen porch without hitting any plant stands or baby dolls and calls it moveable art. He can ride his bicycle to the playground and find the little pond without any help, even though the path, at the start, is overgrown with prehistoric lambs’ ear and stiff, longing thistles. When we go out on the paddleboard, he can trail his hands in the water, can get to his knees and even take unartful pulls with the shortened paddle without wobbling.  

“I’m a serious person now,” he tells me.

He is, in other words, ready. To grab the hand of the girl next door and dart across the road to be swallowed up by the idling school bus.

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In Lake Ossipee, I do my first backflip in about ten or fifteen years off the non-anchored dock and haul myself up, smarting, to find a family of loons not five yards away. The mother regards me with warranted wariness. The white ringed neck unfolds and she calls, the ululating sound of her own name and then we listen, together, to the response coming from far across the lake. 

Later, I learn that this particular cry is called a wail, but it is far more sonorous, sylvan and haunting, than any wail I’ve heard.

The signs on the road out of Ossipee say 

lamb 

whole pig 

whole chicken 

bacon 

and then, a few miles on:

Trust 

God

For

Christ 

Is Risen.  

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A strange little winged bug, its antennas as long as its wings, which look like two gull feathers, with a red turned up clasp of a tail in between and an elegant beak of a face has alighted inches from my laptop. Its antennas swivel; the rest of the bug is attentively still, like a sprinter in the blocks. Impossible to put myself in the bug’s shoes – to be a creature so one with its sensors; a creature that is entirely instinct. 

There’s no greater point to my discussing the bug, but the antennas and that siphon head and the carnelian clasp of a tail – I myself would be hard pressed to conjure up a better, more obvious and unsettingly beautiful alien. 

The bug does not need to stand outside itself, because it is only itself.