Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt

shore with the boys, observes us anxiously. A strong swimmer, she has always been wary of the ocean. Amy was also a strong swimmer. Our favorite photo of her as a six-year-old was taken in a swimming pool in Washington, Amy underwater, doing the breaststroke toward the camera.
    “Daddy! Here I come!”
    Before heading home, we get ice cream cones. Sammy wants a sugar cone with vanilla ice cream and rainbow sprinkles. Jess and Bubbies want cups of vanilla. Harris abstains. Ginny and I have moosetracks. Constellations of families are spread out on the beach. Ours does not look very different from the others.
     
    Late in August, we return to Bethesda for the first days of the children’s schools. Bubbies begins preschool at Geneva. Ginny takes him. He cries on his first day, and is fine after that. School for someone thirty inches high—it seems preposterous. Jessie starts second grade at Burning Tree, Sammy kindergarten. He is excited, mainly about taking the school bus. The first day, Sammy’s bus runs out of oil on the way home.
    “What was your favorite part of the day?” I ask him.
    “When the school bus couldn’t move,” he says. Harris says that might turn out to be Sammy’s favorite part of the whole year.
    On the weekend, we visit the cemetery. Each time, I go with a mixture of need and trepidation, because I know I may break down at the sight of the small rectangle of earth, the boxwood outlining it, the conical brass receptacle for flowers, and the marker, which is so definite. When we chose this spot in December, the nearby office buildings showed through the shorn trees. Since spring the area has burgeoned with dogwoods and magnolias.
    Jessie has brought white carnations; Sammy, a Washington Redskins balloon in the shape of an oversized football, which he plans to release into the air. He seems fragile these days—drifting into faraway stares and silences. Yet he talks more about Amy’s death. Yesterday morning, he asked me again how Mommy died. “The heart stopped. Right?” he said. His first day of kindergarten, when the children were asked to draw pictures of their families, Sammy’s drawing included Amy lying dead on the floor. Catherine Andrews, the children’s psychotherapist, says that Sammy is expressing recollections as they come to him, but that this is a way of expelling them, and they are unlikely to be repeated.
    At the gravesite, Harris asks Sammy if he has something to say. He stands behind the marker and says, “I miss you, Mommy.” He tells Amy about Bubbies’s first teacher in preschool, Ms. Franzetti, and about Jessie’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Salcetti, and about his own, Ms. Merritt. He tells Amy about the balloon, and predicts the Redskins will win the Superbowl. Jessie has no message for Amy today. Sammy asks Harris if he can be buried next to Mommy. Harris says yes, but tells him it’s a very long way off.
    Ginny and I take turns holding Bubbies, who carries a small plastic penguin. When you squeeze its “trigger,” its beak opens and shuts, its little wings flap, and the penguin squawks. On an earlier visit to the cemetery, Bubbies refused to be taken from his car seat, and cried out, “No, no, no!” Today he has his penguin, and is content simply to look around.
    Jessie places the carnations in the conical vessel. Harris writes, “We love you, Mommy” on the football balloon. The children let it go. It flies up in the heavy air and snags on a distant tree. We assure the children that the wind will free it eventually.
     
    Bubbies’s birthday is in September, so is mine. For his, we gathered Carl, Wendy, and their boys, made a to-do, and gave him a toy grill to further his culinary bent. “How old are you, Bubs?” I asked him. “Two!” he said. For my birthday, Ginny gave me the kayak. Harris gave me an imitation Andy Warhol, which he ordered up on the Internet. It consists of four versions of a picture of Bubbies and me in Disney World last January, me