It’s a sunny 42° outside and Mykala graciously extended what was already a long week of parenting through this morning so I could go workout at Lifetime. I came back and jumped into the unfolding morning: Marge had juice spilled on her and Mykala had already washed her; she was damp and drying. Ess had dismantled a few areas of the house, and was ready to play more. Mykala had to leave. With the cutest little repetition of “bye” you could possibly imagine, Essie wished Mykala well, and then it was the two of us.
I love how I can ask Ess to do things: put the magnet on the cabinet, let’s count the socks and then put them in the basket, those clothes are already dry so lets take them out of the dryer. Oh, and: don’t climb in the dryer, even though it looks fun.
Then, we came across a rogue pair of Dad socks, and Ess knew she wanted to put them in the dresser. She walked right over there with me, and I picked her up, and she dropped them right into the drawer. It is such fun to feel our communication developing. Ess can’t yet form sentences, but her cognition, understanding, and even sense of comic timing are remarkable.
Essie selected the still-damp Marge and a rabbit to take a nap with, and she drifted off after a few minutes of frustrated cries. She’s napping now as I write this in the sun of our dining room, sipping some coffee Mykala made and eating my morning oatmeal. “A Baroque Christmas” is playing in the background. I feel I will look back at this time, rough edges worn away by the retelling, with great fondness.
Currently sitting next to Mykala, listening to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in my headphones, finalizing the video transcoding additions I’ve made to the site. She’s watching a little light television, eating popcorn. Our first round of Christmas decorations is lending a soft light to the living room as candles flicker. George is waiting to eat some popcorn, sitting on the Christmas plaid wool blanket on the footstool. Essie is upstairs, sleeping soundly after an evening of joyfully running around. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow.
Called Mykala today over my lunch hour and the phone picked up, but instead of Mykala, I got: “bahbuhdee BAH… buhdee… Dada. DAHDAH.” My heart felt like it was going to melt.
To translate: Ess has a book that she reads with Nannie about hedgehogs, and they go to the playground. On one page the hedgehogs go swinging, they go back and forth. Nannie rocks Essie back and forth for this page, and Ess loves it so much that she has begun to do it on her own and when something, anything resembling a pendulum, is swinging, she says BAH buhdee. I’ll try to catch a video of it. Try.
So we tried a Facetime chat, and Ess went “MMMMWAH” on the phone screen, which, I mean c’mon… you can’t ask for a single thing more from life when that’s how your daughter is feeling.
Essie just started her own game of peek-a-boo with me; she is standing behind her highchair and peeking out at me with a huge smile. So so sweet. Some of her current abilities and habits to record right now:
Holding steady at 10 teeth. Upper molars pushing on gums but not present.
Language going faster than walking, but…
Just (and I do mean “just”, as I am writing this) stood up all on her own, took five steps forward, then gently sat down, and clapped for herself. Then, she stood up, and walked the length of our dining room table to a chair at the other end. First steps on September 12, and well on her way to walking on Halloween!
When asked what a frog says, Essie responds “bibbit, bibbit.” Cutest sounds we have ever heard.
Nodding “yes” and shaking her head “no.”
Chases the cat, saying “mao mao mao.” We asked her for months what the cat says, and she said “mao”. But, now when we ask how to say cat, she says “mao”. We’ve taken an adorable language misstep.
Essie recognizes mama and “dahd” in photos.
Showing her pictures of herself frequently elicits “babybabybabybaby”.
Loves to do things and bring things. We can ask her surprisingly complex sentences whose syntax we have not taught her at all, which she has apparently simply absorbed. So, “can you bring the boy with the hat to mama?” And she’ll go find her Little People boy with a hat, and bring her to Mykala.
Hats are “ats”. “Atatatat.”
Pumpkins are “puhnka”. She’ll find a picture of one in a book and I hear her going puhnkapuhnkapuhnka. But, what surprised me most, is she paged through the book to find a frog, and then sure enough I hear her going bibbitbibbitbibbit.
Does not love sitting on my lap while I play piano, but frequently wants to be picked up when I’m playing so I can get her something down from on top of the piano (where some of her toys and puzzles live). I don’t mind being a means to an end, but Mykala hears very few complete piano songs these days.
There’s more, but I’m going to go play “walk around” with Ess.
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.
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.
