A sense of wonder and a six year old

The Lozenge is six. He celebrated with a Minions party and his world turned blue and yellow for the day while he entertained a clutch of school friends, a mere 25 small ladies and gentlemen, at home.

The cake was gratefully received, and I avoided for another year, an expensive shop-bought, polystyrene-tasting number. Though it took me most of a day to make and my hands were blue for the rest of the week.

When I was one,
I had just begun.
When I was two,
I was nearly new.
When I was three,
I was hardly me.
When I was four,
I was not much more.
When I was five,
I was just alive.
But now I am six,
I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six
now and forever.

AA Milne clearly spotted something special about six.

In the fabulous film Boyhood by Richard Linklater, the opening scene is of a six year old boy, lying in the grass staring at the clouds. The Lozenge has reached this chapter, and now I see a boy with absolutely no baby or toddler left in him, the essence of the person he is destined to be emerging quite clearly in this age of innocence.

Maybe the age of six is when patterns in a child's head become a little bit visible to an outsider. Like you can feel them trying to make sense to the world; of life and how things work, searching for clarity. And marvelling as some knots unravel before them.

Maybe the age of six is the first true age of wonder.

I took the Lozenge, Rashimi and a couple of friends out for a birthday dinner and at the end of the evening, we climbed into our bashed up Nissan after plates of chicken nuggets and a pile of cinnamon twists covered in sparklers.

The night air was cool as I started the engine and as we drove down the familiar seam road dividing West and East Jerusalem. I opened the cranky sun roof just for fun. The little group of friends cooed and sighed at the stars above us, and then it began to rain. 'No! Don't close the roof Mummy! We want to feel the rain on our faces and see the sky'. And in the rear view mirror I saw the small faces gazing up, transfixed. The Lozenge's Swedish friend said: 'This is the most awesome car in the woooorld!' And later as I pulled the duvet over the Lozenge and kissed him goodnight he said to me all in one breath as he drifted off: 'When-can-I-be-six-again-and-have-dinner-in-a-restaurant-with-my -friends-and-drive-home-in-the-darkness-with-the-roof-open-and-see-the-stars?WhenMummyWhen?'

With the recent troubles in Jerusalem I've been collecting the boys on foot from school to avoid public transport and traffic jams. Walking rather than driving provides more avenues for conversation as the pace is slow and considered with the Pea in a pram and two tired dwarfs dragging their feet after a busy day. I love this walk. We all get to see things that interest us. For me it's the buildings and the people: An Ethiopian church, Holman Hunt's House, a Synagogue, Ultra-orthodox men scurrying by, side-locks swinging, and then at the bottom of  Hanevim (Prophets) street, after a gentle downhill slope, to your right, you get a glimpse of the Dome of the Rock - shining gold on the furthest horizon, framed by palm trees, and a tiny peek of the less spangly Al Aqsa Mosque. It stirs me though I am not a Muslim. It amazes me that in this land, where so much has been destroyed in the name of God, so, also, have these beautiful things been created.

As I gazed at the dome, the boys kicked stones along with their trainers as boys do and the Lozenge shooed away a street cat. 'These cats are not nice, and they smell when they're dead Mummy.' (Referring to the rotting feline corpse we had near our garage last year). But they don't smell when they're alive, do they? So why are they smelly when they die? And us too - we're not smelly now, but do we smell when we're dead?

A conversation followed about death and decomposition as we crossed the same seam road, and into our Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood.

'Great Granny was buried under the earth, becuase we went to see the place where she is in Scotland didn't we. Did she decompose like the cat?'

The Lozenge shuddered. 'I don't want to decompose.'

 'But it is quite cool that I'd make the flowers grow.'

'And I don't want you to die Mummy,' said Rashimi.

'Can people still hear when they die?' asked the Lozenge.

'No because our ears are also busy decomposing and making themselves into plant food'.

On the other end of the timeline of life lies the Pea, and since she arrived I've noticed how no one can speak to a baby in a language that isn't their own. Our house has been a revolving door of visiting nationalities since the Pea joined our family. From Bethlehem to Babel she has travelled. We've been inundated with gifts and gestures - a warm Iranian quiche delivered to our door by a glamorous Iranian friend; on the Pea's wall hangs a Hail Mary in Spanish and on her shelf a tiny golden Jerusalem cross on a chain from a Palestinian friend. In her 10 weeks of life she's heard: Armenian, Basque, Catalan, Spanish, Farsi, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Hebrew, Sinhalese from St Grace and plenty of Arabic: Jordanian, Palestinian and Egyptian dialects. I love how my Swedish friends sound out her name 'Pee-a-trah', and it seems her name is the same in every language. Everyone wants to visit when you have a baby in the house, and everyone talks to you in the street. It's like you have a small, breathing charm in tow. Everyone wants to share in the wonder and their mother-tongues come from the bottom of their souls. We all explain it differently but the wonder is shared.

I'm now in my den, the Pea, pea-cefully sleeping, and I'm listening to Bach.  Maybe you know you're a grown up when you appreciate birdsong and Bach. It's music that makes you stop and not do anything so you have space to listen. I remember my Grandfather sitting alone in a sunlit room in North Wales for much of a morning, just listening to Bach. His huge long fingers, like the BFG's it seemed to me, tapping occasionally on the arm of the chair.

I remember the CD was the Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould. It was called: 'A Sense of Wonder'.

A friend put me onto a beautiful podcast which I listened to yesterday: 'Composing a Life' with Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of the anthropologists Gregory Bateman and Margaret Mead.

Every word is gold, but one of her clearest truths, so applicable to our lives in this holy city filled with misunderstanding and hatred, is this same notion of wonder.

She says: 'To me the starting place is the sense of wonder. And that can take you into science, it can take you into art. Other human beings are amazing and beautiful. The natural world around us -- the more we study it the more fascinating and intricate and elegant it turns out to be...
Look. Just look. Realise how beautiful it is, how complicated it is. The wonder of creation...
I got interested in the sense of wonder, because I spent a year of high school in Israel and then I came back and decided I wanted to learn about Islam and I studied Arabic. So I thought I should be doing something to address the Islamophobia, hostility and prejudice that has grown up after 9/11. The way I went about it, was to say: What is it that makes me as a Christian, empathise with a Muslim. At what point are we together? And what struck me is that what actually all three of the religions that come from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam - what we all have in common, is the sense of wonder that leads to praise. That is to say, when you go from wonder to a religious context, a shared worship, something like that, it takes the form of praise. And in spite of the huge differences in other aspects of the traditions: the different set of rules, expectations, behaviours. Praise is central in all of them.'

Wonder must be the sacred we can share.

Especially with a six year old.

From decomposition. To domes.