Just finished giving Ess a bath and putting her to bed. Her adorable, beautiful pink cheeks were sweating a bit at the playground this evening, as it is in the 80s and quite humid. Not much wind. She ran and ran and we walked behind her, steering her out of harms way and keeping her from the things for which she wasn’t yet ready. Now, the sun is setting on this summer evening, one of the longest of the year, and I sit out on the patio, watching the sun set, next to our tomato plants, herbs, and kale. Everything around me is growing and alive and I love moments like this because I can actually convince myself that all the trouble of maintaining all of our stuff and our finances, all that stuff I trouble myself with isn’t what is important. This perspective above the forest doesn’t last long until I fall back to be blinded by the trees. Weekdays seem to be more foresty, weekends more elevated.
It’s a tightly knit community in the dental world, so it wasn’t long until I found out that one of the orthodontists to whom I refer, the one who treated my bite when I was younger, one of those adults who was present, though just in the periphery, of both my adolescence and early adulthood, suddenly passed away. He was 59. Pancreatic cancer. And these things come in clumps: Mykala just buried her grandma Irene. And I loaded up Daring Fireball and right there, pancreatic cancer took someone’s wife. She was 36.
I don’t know, I just can’t make any sense of any of it. Free will. Do we have it? Do we exist in any way after we die? What am I doing here? Religion just utterly falls down for me with these questions. Everyone standing around at Irene’s funerary service saying she’s in a better place. It’s too simple, too sure, too clear-cut, too… dismissive of this huge, impossible mystery. What if it is Occam’s Razor? That the simplest explanation… that all my memories, all my life, all my hopes, everything that makes me me, disappears when I stop breathing, what if that’s it? Then what the hell am I doing each day? Paying back loans? So I can do what? A blink-and-you-miss-it existence. I see those folks, two generations behind me, feeling like their years are dragging on, ready to be done. To me, life feels like it stretches ahead so far, AND it feels like nothing at all. It is nothing at all. Billions of years of the universe and then another little blip of a human. Sitting there, hopelessly occupied by minutia, distracted by entertainment, troubling with trifles, while the galaxy expands, the stars turn, and the indifferent universe carries on.
We were out on a family bike ride, and I was explaining to Ess that when the three of us are together, no matter where that is, that is home. Ess listened closely, and now whenever she sees the bikes in the garage, she says “home.” I didn’t mean to teach her the wrong word for going on a bike ride, but it is too sweet for me to correct.
Ever since seeing (and maybe slightly before this) hours-old Canadian geese goslings on a walk, Ess has associated walking with bird watching. She calls all birds “ducks” which we’re working on, but in the meantime, there’s no surer way to settle her down than to talk about a walk in her near future, and seeing ducks. When we’re walking out to the pond, there’s a certain point, about a quarter mile away, that Ess gets really excited anticipating ducks. The other day she goes DUCKS! YAHHHH-DUCKS while sticking her little fists straight out from herself in rigid-body excitement. On the way home, we always make sure to stop and see a stone lawn-decoration duck family Ess calls the tone ducks.
Ess spends her last ten minutes with us precisely the same every night, and the last thing I get to do is carry her to her room, lie her down in her crib, and say “I love you. Goodnight.” Most times she waves and says “buh bye” to mama on her way to her room, sometimes she’s a little weepy, sometimes she’s so tired I hold her head up with my shoulder as I carry her. But the other night, we had changed one little thing to make way for the roofers: we removed a glass-covered picture from the wall so it wouldn’t break during roofing. When I put Ess down, she immediately said “moon moon” and pointed to the empty spot on the wall. Her attention to detail is remarkable. I have no idea if all toddlers are like this, but Ess likes things to happen a certain way and lets us know. I scampered to the desk in the hall, got her moon picture, and hung it back up.
Ess doesn’t have her T sounds yet, so when she says “pink water bottle” it comes out “pink wahgle boggle.” She loves that water bottle, so we get to hear this a lot.
They’re re-roofing the house today. Ess was transfixed by the trucks coming and going and cranes lifting. She stood at the window and watched, the stillest I’ve seen her be while awake and healthy. “Beep beep” went the truck, “bach-up, bach-up” went Ess, shuffling backwards away from the window.
Mother’s Day: today, the last thing Ess did before we took her upstairs for bed was carefully remove each Winnie the Pooh character from her wooden puzzle and tuck them in under the couch pillow. Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl.