Simple pleasures

Bella spent the night with me after the Nutcracker. We went to her favorite sushi place for dinner, talked about the beauty of the production we’d just seen, made and decorated cookies, and spent an hour or so filling in the spaces of a new coloring book. She remained wide awake and excited till midnight, and after her bath I read her the story of Christopher Robin’s Epotition to the North Pole, which she’d never heard before. 

Today, as a kind of follow-up to that story, I took her to see a documentary about a 13-year-old Kazakh girl, a sweet-faced young thing who paints her fingernails, smiles demurely, and trains a fifteen-pound female golden eagle to swoop down from the mountains at unbelievable speed and land on her arm as she’s riding across the steppes on horseback. It’s called Eagle Huntress. Glorious Mongolian scenery, stunning photography, “and it’s all true,” I whispered. It was Bella’s first time to see a movie with subtitles, and I whispered the words to her. The filmmakers interviewed Kazakh elders, all of whom insisted girls should not be eagle hunters: girls aren’t strong enough, they get too cold, they can’t take it. “They’re wrong,” Bella whispered back to me. “Girls can do anything boys can do.” The film proves her right. 

Here she is, fearlessly opening her box of M&Ms before the movie started.

I had planned to attend and photograph an anti-Trump protest tonight, but it’s raining again, the wind is howling through the streets, and I’m opting for a cup of hot Pero, a couple of cookies, and some Chopin nocturnes instead.