My six year old son has lost four teeth in the last two weeks. When he grinned at me this evening, I asked him how he can chew! "Everyone asks that!" I was told.
The boys are happy, chattering, and in my four year old's case, constantly tumbling, climbing, jumping and moving...except when asleep or watching something stimulating on television, such as Scooby Doo.
The end of the year passed without much notice by me. I do not believe I have ever been to a New Year's Eve party. If so, I do not remember it. No waiting for the ball to drop. No saturnalia, music and booze. No midnight kiss. As a kid, we would stay up past midnight and listen to the Top 100 Countdown of the songs of the year, hosted by Casey Casem (who does the voice of Shaggy, incidentally, on Scooby Doo). My parents would usually go out, and we would get hyped up on caffeine and candy, blow up balloons, dance around. At some point, probably when I was twelve or thirteen, we turned to ritual (as humans do) and burned the previous year's calendar, month by month, reliving the appointments, holidays and birthday dates in a highly symbolic act. I speechified on the passing of time, emotion clogged in my throat.
Last night I was alone, watched a quirky movie (You and Me and Everybody Else), felt slightly annoyed at the guy in some other apartment who kept yelling profanities in a deep bellowing voice, then went to bed. I awoke long after midnight when I heard men talking outside my bedroom window, but thought little of it, thinking them denizens of the neighbor's party. Then, insistent knocking and pounding on the neighbor's back door. I went into the kitchen and saw a cop in the back yard stretching out yellow crime scene tape. Then heard another say, "we got her...Sarge, Sarge, we got her..." In front were about four police cars, one with flashing lights. The neighbor didn't seem to actually be there. The police were still there when I went back to bed and fell back to sleep. I have no idea what happened, but I haven't seen my neighbor all day. What a way to greet 2009.
I woke late and it still felt like 2008, but it didn't feel like Thursday. It felt like Saturday, except that I was alone, no kids. After the sun set I drove to Lawrence, worrying over the car, bills, my job, various relations. I put in a CD of Abbot Meletios Webber that I downloaded from the net in which he started to describe the nature of addiction, but forgot to continue listening to it after pumping gas, drove in silence.
My kids met me at the door. They never say hello. They always begin with whatever the big news is. Dylan rode his new bike today, and Jonah rode his (Dylan's old bike). Dylan lost two more teeth. Jonah created an outline of his hand, he "drawed it", of which he was proud.
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Saturday, October 11, 2008
October Festivities
I picked my six year up from school on Friday. We are sharing the weekend together, since my four year old is presently with his grandmother. My son informed me immediately that he wanted to have a face painting that evening at the school carnival, so we hung out together in Lawrence for a few hours.
We went to the park, and he dutifully played alone on the equipment, racing along the bars, sliding down the slides with such a serious intent it seemed to approach reverie. I glanced at the old man sitting on the bench beside me reading, The Philokalia. We both watched the kids play, and said nothing.
After a while, he left, and my son and I gathered what was left of our wits, and made our way to the school carnival. He seemed to enjoy himself, taking a turn at various booths, saying hello to schoolmates, eating cotton candy and later pizza. A shy kid, he rolled his shoulders and danced during the cakewalk, which I thought was rather funny.
In line for a long inflatable trampoline obstacle course with final wall and slide to the bottom, a little girl in an adjacent line sought his attention by repeatedly calling his name. She said, "I'm going to race you!"
He just glanced at her, ignored her.
I bent low and asked him, "is that little girl in your class?"
He said, "no, she's in the classroom next to mine. She's in second grade."
I said, "Ah, I see."
She kept glancing at him, trying to position herself to race him, glancing his way, not allowing anyone to cut in line, and he was oblivious.
When we reached the front, the woman taking the tickets asked him, "are you by yourself, or racing someone?"
He said, "by myself."
It wasn't a rejection, I'm sure, but the little girl looked exasperated.
Today we went to the Kemper Museum of Art, and upon gazing at our first canvas, my six year old son said, "I could do that! That looks like something I did!" And it did, a fingerpainting.
Later at Crown Center we passed through the pumpkin patch and the larger, more expensive Fall carnival being hosted there, and made it unintentionally just in time for a marionette show. he ran and sat down up front, and since there wasn't room for me, I sat at a table some distance from him. My view of the stage was obscured by a pillar, so I watched audience reaction, comprised mostly of adults with their children attendant on the floor in front or on their laps; I watched, and it was not all that different as an experience as watching the children play the previous day.
For all the celebration, it was not an autumnal day. I am in any case, having grown up in central California, not all that used to such a marked expression of seasonal fervor. I didn't grow up ever having much of an Autumn in the first place, but it seems like October festivities occurred much closer to the end of the month to coincide with Halloween.
The days, however, are sweet, filled with new light and vague expectation.
We went to the park, and he dutifully played alone on the equipment, racing along the bars, sliding down the slides with such a serious intent it seemed to approach reverie. I glanced at the old man sitting on the bench beside me reading, The Philokalia. We both watched the kids play, and said nothing.
After a while, he left, and my son and I gathered what was left of our wits, and made our way to the school carnival. He seemed to enjoy himself, taking a turn at various booths, saying hello to schoolmates, eating cotton candy and later pizza. A shy kid, he rolled his shoulders and danced during the cakewalk, which I thought was rather funny.
In line for a long inflatable trampoline obstacle course with final wall and slide to the bottom, a little girl in an adjacent line sought his attention by repeatedly calling his name. She said, "I'm going to race you!"
He just glanced at her, ignored her.
I bent low and asked him, "is that little girl in your class?"
He said, "no, she's in the classroom next to mine. She's in second grade."
I said, "Ah, I see."
She kept glancing at him, trying to position herself to race him, glancing his way, not allowing anyone to cut in line, and he was oblivious.
When we reached the front, the woman taking the tickets asked him, "are you by yourself, or racing someone?"
He said, "by myself."
It wasn't a rejection, I'm sure, but the little girl looked exasperated.
Today we went to the Kemper Museum of Art, and upon gazing at our first canvas, my six year old son said, "I could do that! That looks like something I did!" And it did, a fingerpainting.
Later at Crown Center we passed through the pumpkin patch and the larger, more expensive Fall carnival being hosted there, and made it unintentionally just in time for a marionette show. he ran and sat down up front, and since there wasn't room for me, I sat at a table some distance from him. My view of the stage was obscured by a pillar, so I watched audience reaction, comprised mostly of adults with their children attendant on the floor in front or on their laps; I watched, and it was not all that different as an experience as watching the children play the previous day.
For all the celebration, it was not an autumnal day. I am in any case, having grown up in central California, not all that used to such a marked expression of seasonal fervor. I didn't grow up ever having much of an Autumn in the first place, but it seems like October festivities occurred much closer to the end of the month to coincide with Halloween.
The days, however, are sweet, filled with new light and vague expectation.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Days Are Passing
Reading yesterday the book, View from 80 by the late poet Malcolm Cowley, he mentioned the common perception that years fly by more quickly the older you get, and that from age 79 to 80 passes like a week for a child. There would seem to be a combination of double perceptions at work here, since time for a child (at least for me when I was a child) often seemed elongated and possibly endless. "How long is five hours?" I remember asking my mom.
We were visiting my great-grandparents who were very old (at the time they were in their late 70s). Their house smelled of powder and yellowing paper, and old wood furniture that has been overused. I recall distinctly pondering the blue veins that were prominent in their hands, the dark splotches covering their knuckles. They both lived into their nineties pretty much self-sufficiently. I was bored. They talked, motivated by my dad's questions, about how they met near the turn of the previous century, how he worked on the train, how they lost control of a Model T. Their voices were brittle. My heart felt pressed. I wanted out, to go and watch television, to be in the fresh sun, to eat junk food and drink Coca Cola.
"How long are we going to be here?" I asked my mom.
"A while," she said.
"How long is that?"
She likely guessed, but I took it as prophecy, "five hours."
The hours stretched, and seemed long, like hours you might experience at work. I found a dead bird in the front yard, and somehow associated this with impatient waiting. "Don't touch it," I was told, "you might get sick." And so for years I imagined that the bodies of birds somehow carried some sort of toxic poison that could infect you by touching them. I wasn't a particularly bright child. So intermingled in my subconscious is the short flight of a dead bird, the toxicity of passing time, the boredom of age and of impatience.
So now I wait as well. On the horizon I have a meeting that I am waiting for that tends to trump other things. In November, Shannon will be here. I anticipate this the way I used to wait for Christmas, but have greater hope than I ever had for the things I might unwrap.
The days also sometimes seem to shuffle sideways when you are trying to make ends meet, as the common parlance has it. I am trying to write more, force myself to write even amid all that I lack and all that I have (such as numerous vain worries).
I work, I come home, rest. Write. Go to church, pray. Play with my kids. It is all moving along forward towards some indistinct culmination, something maybe tinged with hope, other than certain age or death, an expectation. Maybe this is the impulse behind authentic ambition.
We were visiting my great-grandparents who were very old (at the time they were in their late 70s). Their house smelled of powder and yellowing paper, and old wood furniture that has been overused. I recall distinctly pondering the blue veins that were prominent in their hands, the dark splotches covering their knuckles. They both lived into their nineties pretty much self-sufficiently. I was bored. They talked, motivated by my dad's questions, about how they met near the turn of the previous century, how he worked on the train, how they lost control of a Model T. Their voices were brittle. My heart felt pressed. I wanted out, to go and watch television, to be in the fresh sun, to eat junk food and drink Coca Cola.
"How long are we going to be here?" I asked my mom.
"A while," she said.
"How long is that?"
She likely guessed, but I took it as prophecy, "five hours."
The hours stretched, and seemed long, like hours you might experience at work. I found a dead bird in the front yard, and somehow associated this with impatient waiting. "Don't touch it," I was told, "you might get sick." And so for years I imagined that the bodies of birds somehow carried some sort of toxic poison that could infect you by touching them. I wasn't a particularly bright child. So intermingled in my subconscious is the short flight of a dead bird, the toxicity of passing time, the boredom of age and of impatience.
So now I wait as well. On the horizon I have a meeting that I am waiting for that tends to trump other things. In November, Shannon will be here. I anticipate this the way I used to wait for Christmas, but have greater hope than I ever had for the things I might unwrap.
The days also sometimes seem to shuffle sideways when you are trying to make ends meet, as the common parlance has it. I am trying to write more, force myself to write even amid all that I lack and all that I have (such as numerous vain worries).
I work, I come home, rest. Write. Go to church, pray. Play with my kids. It is all moving along forward towards some indistinct culmination, something maybe tinged with hope, other than certain age or death, an expectation. Maybe this is the impulse behind authentic ambition.
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