Joy
“Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily.”
— Why Kindergarten in Finland Is All About Playtime
Out for a Walk
52° and time for a walk with mama.
“Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily.”
— Why Kindergarten in Finland Is All About Playtime
52° and time for a walk with mama.
I don’t know if my beliefs about material possessions are innate or learned, but I do know that I believe one of the best ways to honor the incredible material wealth we have is to meticulously clean and maintain our objects. I suppose I may be trying to back out some profound explanation or justification for the amount of time I spend maintaining the things around me, but either way, I abhor the thought of disorganization or disarray or disrepair.
So, that’s one of the reasons I enjoy exercising: I’m maintaining myself. After all, I have four limbs and a torso that, if given a chance, can do things. Can play a song, write this post, repair a tooth. And there’s that abhorrence of disrepair.
There’s another reason for exercise: to be able to keep up with my daughter. Someday soon, I’ll be chasing her around. Teaching her to ride a bicycle. I don’t want to be the guy in the commercial for Advil going “just a second, honey, I have to take some painkillers before we go on a hike.”
I thought about that today as Ess and I took a walk with my mom. When Essie was getting fussy in her stroller, my mom just took off in an effortless sprint to distract Ess and get her thinking happy thoughts again. I chased after my mom, who just had her sixtieth birthday, and we breezed along the twilight streets, back to Essie’s home. That, I thought, is a pretty good reason to maintain oneself.
I took a picture a little over ten years ago and I want you to take a look not at the foreground (hi, Steve and John!), but rather at the background. See that maple tree back there? That’s in my parent’s neighbor’s yard. The Nelson family: Ken, Reenie, and Ken Jr. (‘Kenny’ to me and Katy). Kenny and I grew up next-door neighbors, and his parents lived there next to mine since 1991. Almost a quarter of a century, now.
Anyhow, the tree in that background, it is now a big tree. Yet, in my mind, it will always be the size it is in that picture; so, no matter how many times I drive up to my parent’s to drop Ess off, I’m always surprised: who put this giant tree in the Nelson’s yard? When did it have time to grow that big? Where have I been?
And now, I find out that Ken Sr. just passed away from ALS. I can not know what Reenie and Kenny are going through. But I do know that Ken faced death squarely, peacefully, with a centeredness that I know I have not yet found in myself.
We’ve had our last conversation, exchanged our last neighborly wave, and I ask myself the question: when did a life have time to wind to a close? Where have I been?
Essie has a classic Fisher Price Ferris Wheel:
… and when you wind it, a music box plays an old tune called “The Good Old Summertime”:
When your day’s work is over
And you are in clover
And life is one beautiful rhyme
No trouble annoying
Each one is enjoying
The good old summertime
The wheel spins and the music plays, both turning and turning. As the space between the notes lengthens, you can tell the spring is unwinding and the music is slowing, but you never know precisely which note will be the last.
Here’s a favorite of Essie’s right now: “up-up-up” or sometimes just “pah-pah-pah” is all you hear. She does this while sitting on the ground, possibly looking up at you, with her arms above her head. Hasn’t failed her yet: someone is going to pick her up. She has us well-trained.
“What Old Age Is Really Like” by Ceridwen Dovey in The New Yorker:
As Helen Small writes in ”The Long Life,” her study of the literature and philosophy of old age, “declining to describe our lives as unified stories … is the only way we can hope to live out our time other than as tragedy.” Lively describes the frustrations of autobiographical memory in old age. “The novelist in me—the reader, too—wants shape and structure, development, a theme, insights,” she writes. “Instead of which, there is this assortment of slides, some of them welcome, others not at all, defying chronology, refusing structure.”
My habit when writing here is both a narrative of self-improvement and inexorably toward “profound” conclusions. There are countless posts where I imply that I’ve finally “figured out” why I can’t relax or why I have not been enjoying myself or how I need to just stop and smell the roses. Such neat writing is in error. It would be better to vividly illustrate my failings and vividly illustrate my experiences, leaving aside conclusions, unifying themes, profound insights. After all, narrative arc is difficult enough, much less drawing one without the benefit of time having passed. It would be like writing the story of your sailing based on the turn you took out of port.
Ceramic tile is probably not the first project for a homeowner do-it-yourselfer to attempt. I’ve spent the last two weeks investigating the feasibility of such a project. I had to figure out:
And all that was just to try to figure out what it would cost to do the tile ourselves. The 56 item spreadsheet I’ve assembled calls for material from Home Depot, Lowes, Hejny Rental, Amazon, Minnesota Tile and Stone, and Contractors Direct. I’m close to actually having a number for the cost. So now I have a ton of respect for tile and stone wranglers. This requires an immense amount of attention to detail. I still don’t know if we’re going to do it.
A startling, yet simple realization this morning: someday, somewhere, someone is going to be mean, or condescending, or hateful to our Ess. I don’t know, can’t know, can’t guard against when; and the circumstances around such a thing are impossible to anticipate, infinite in variety. And what’s more, apprehension and concern from me are neither beneficial nor constructive. So that will be tucked away. My job, then, is to love Ess into being, to (someday sooner than I want to admit) rest my hands on her shoulders and look her in the eye and tell her I’ll see her at home again, before she travels places I can not follow and takes risks from which I can not protect her.
I am only beginning to realize the intensity of a parent’s love.
There is so much I have experienced but haven’t written down since I last posted here. Let’s get to it.
Ess had four shots (one in each limb) and we confirmed at her regularly scheduled doctor visit that she is a healthy young lady.
She took her first step on September 12, but still prefers crawling. She loves the letter “B” and when we change her she finds the two big “B”s on the wall of her room (they spell BABY) and says “buh.” She finds our belly buttons. She honks my nose and I say “hoooonk” like a fog horn. Then she honks her own. She knows “moon” and says “mooOOon” with the ‘n’ on the end dropped to near silence. She’s getting so much better at sitting in her high chair at meals and eating with us. She saw the beginning of the very rare super moon total solar eclipse! The next one will be when she is 19 years old. 19! I can’t even imagine. Ess still loves planes: she never misses the chance to search for and point at one when she hears it in the sky. As such, when she and Mykala came to visit me over lunch at Eagan today, she marveled at the veritable stream of airplanes lifting off from MSP into the air over our blanket in the park. She dances. She hugs the cat and rests her head on him, delighted to catch him before he trots off.
Oh, and biking. Ess loves being on the bike in the carrier on Mykala’s handlebars. She just LOVES it. I keep thinking I’ve written about this here before, but somehow I’ve managed to just miss getting that down. I actually teared up a bit I was so happy after our first family bike outing. And Ess; you, being you, aren’t interested in the foot stirrups. Instead, you throw your feet onto your mom’s handlebars and point and babble and smile. The other day, we were biking to Emily and Nick’s house, the sun was setting behind us, the day was perfect, and suddenly you threw your big helmeted head skyward and got a huge smile on your face — THERE was your mama! She’s been pedaling you forward the entire time! I’ll leave the symbolism as an exercise for the reader. I love you, and I love summer biking… and the two together are so much more than the sum of their parts. Such special time.
So, slowly, slowly, we are learning to be parents. The amount of non-negotiable, spoken-for time in our days has risen to I bet something like 96% — there simply isn’t that down time we became accustomed to as young adults with few worries. This is a season of our lives, and restricted freedom requires some getting used to. We’re still learning. It helps that Ess exhibits such a zest, such a strong spirit, such a will. We marvel at her leaps and bounds and her changes and growth. We marvel at what it is like to see our traits combined into one little person.
And will is something worth returning to: Ess is learning “no” right now. It is a profound thing to realize that sometimes we can not have what we want, when we want it. As parents, we neither enjoy nor seek out the opportunity to demonstrate this lesson, but we must, usually in the name of safety. The words I find myself using to explain to Ess why I am carrying her away from something (as practice for when she fully understands what we are saying) must be thought through, and even though they use small simple words, the ideas are profound: (1) not now, (2) first, this (3) wait. By learning what (1) and (2) and (3) mean, how to deal with them, how to grow beyond them but knowing when to surrender to them is part of becoming human. So we try to communicate that to Ess, even though she’s only 14 months young. And sometimes, we just need to save her from bumping her head.
We celebrated my mom’s/Nannie’s 60th birthday with a trip to the American Swedish Institute. It was a beautiful house, elevator accessible, which helped with Ess in the stroller; but still she’s not much of a guided tour baby. So, we toured on our own, checking out the home and grounds. Also, Ess does not enjoy shoes or socks, as she is demonstrating in a dormer window at the mansion of the Swedish Institute:
I am lucky, simply very very lucky. There is so much sweetness.
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