A couple weeks ago, Laura started to ask to go to the Golden lantern while we were driving in the car. She’d ask a few times a week. I could never get her to identify exactly where or what she was referring to. I imagined a Chinese restaurant.
One day, she points excitedly at a store and calls it the Golden Lantern. It turns out to be an antique store at an intersection we frequent. It has beautiful antique lamps in the window. Now that I knew the where and what, Laura wanted to know the when. I urged her to keep reminding me. Birthdays were on the horizon and life was busy. I notice some signs in the window talking about a retirement sale and closed doors in December. Suddenly, our whimsical adventure has a time limit.
She keeps asking, politely and with regularity. This Thursday we had rubber time. Rubber time was a concept I learned about in college in relation to parts of SE Asia. Essentially, a meeting at noon could be a few minutes before and a few minutes after. It really just means when you all get there. That concept has stuck in my head. I apply it to time with young kids. It’s where time slows. When you can move at your kids pace and spend 10 minutes looking at a slug. I finally felt I had rubber time on Thursday after the business of Halloween->conference->colds-> birthdays.
So I took a spontaneous invitation from Susan to have tea with Sean and Ethan. Then, as we walked to the van, it seemed the right time for the Golden Lantern.
So, we entered this place that captured my daughter’s imagination. It is a place full of beautiful lights and things beyond my wallet. Laura kept asking me what we were going to buy. The store’s name bogart, bremmer, & Bradley (http://www.bbbantiques.com/) reminds me of the antique store in Diagon Alley Malfoy found the matching cabinets to get Death Eaters into Hogwarts to kill Dumbledore (since it’s a HP weekend).
