The title of today�s entry is borrowed from some spam in today�s mailbox urging me to buy a potion to increase the size of my pecs and tone up my abs. I have no idea what �illusive tea� means in such a context, but I rather liked the sound of it. If I ever decide to turn my music compositional skills in the direction of mellow electronica, perhaps I�ll adopt it as my band name.

A couple days ago I was talking with a friend who had recently returned from Europe with her boyfriend who had never been there before. R is in her 50s. Her kids are grown and gone. She was married to many years to a man who�s zest for travel may even have surpassed her own. She's been all over the world and lived in Europe for many years, although she�s never kicked the southern lilt from her voice. Several years ago, her husband was on a bike trip out west with her son. After hiking to the top of a high mountain, he had a heart attack and died. He can�t have been much more than 50. It was a shock to all who knew them. But life goes on, especially for someone as energetic as R. She met someone else a few years later, bought a new house, and remade her life.

R and her friend went to the place she had lived and worked for many years, or, as she put it, �I went home.� We talked about how amazing it was to take someone you love someplace you love that they have never seen. They ask questions you had never considered. They marvel at things you may never have noticed.

Of course, travel alone can do that to you. So can a change in age. I remember vividly when my family moved to London shortly after my ninth birthday. Although I had lived in many places by that point and had had more homes than years in my age, it was made very clear to me that moving overseas was going to be different. From what everyone told me, I expected to be moving to Mars. What I remember noticing, though, is not what I would notice now. I remember being awakened on our first morning in the city by a truck going down the mews behind our hotel and being transfixed not by the fact that the cars drove on the opposite side of the street, but by the license plates, which looked nothing like the license plates I had seen before. I also remember the smooth and colorful pebbles in the hotel garden, which looked nothing like the New England stones I had used for hopscotch back home. What was most interesting to me about our eventual home there was not that it was built in the 18th century, but that it was so close to the zoo that we could hear the wolves howling at night. Not that the favorite cousin of the Queen Mother lived next door, but that she had a squirming pile of little dachsunds and walls covered in pictures of horses. Not that the building had been intended for a palace, but that the dining room wallpaper was fuzzy and the windowsills were big enough to curl up on with a pile of books and a cup of tea.

Such changes in viewpoint are also brought on by having a small child around. This is probably one of the greatest clich�s of parenthood and also one of its greatest truths. With AJ, I have the chance to reconsider my surroundings from the bottom up. He notices everything: how the tree outside his window looks like the letter Y, how the grass changes color as you walk towards the stream, how smooth the acorns in the yard are, how the woods smell different than the lawn. I am a pretty observant and reflective person, but there is no one as observant as someone experiencing something for the first time. And AJ is still young enough that almost everything is a first in his memory.

He is utterly enthralled with the Christmas lights sprouting on every block. We drove around for a half an our last night shortly after dusk while he sat in the back seat saying over and over again, �Wow, Mommy, look at that!� And this morning, when I opened the garage door with the inside remote instead of using the keypad by the door itself, he exclaimed, �Look, Mommy, the door opened by himself!� And as he walked into the garage, I heard him say, �Thank you, door!�

It�s a magical world.

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