Yesterday I sat down at our piano, a piano purchased by my mother’s mother. It is a lovely Baldwin Hamilton upright with acceptable action, lovely bright sound, surprising resonance. I play it when I can, though Ess sometimes asks me to stop. The point of this story, though: I didn’t have to earn it. It was given to me. In the care of my mom’s sister, who was moving, it found its way to me because I still played piano.
While the Jetta was in for a long repair, I borrowed my dad’s car to get to work, but also carpooled with him on Wednesdays. And he tells me about his parent’s estate. After raising twelve kids, with only his dad working (who had a high school education), when his mom died, there was still an estate left to the surviving children. This was an important infusion into my parent’s college fund for my sister and myself.
So I’m sitting there playing the piano and thinking I’m just about the luckiest damn person in the world. I’ve been given an incredible amount by my parents; and their parents set them up to be able to give me those things. Look at it all; an embarrassment of riches. I sit upon a vast inheritance of privilege, money, education that spans generations on BOTH sides of my family. I’ve never thought that good things happen to people for a reason, and thinking this through is a firm reminder that I have no credit to take for where I’ve landed. I was started with a lead-off from third base; all I had to do was run home.
This was humbling, in a good way.
I kept playing piano, thinking: I don’t feel I deserve what I’ve received because there’s no actual way I could. I’m not deserving, I’m lucky. So, the only way I can acknowledge the extent of my luck, the only way I can truly be respectful of the sacrifices made to put me where I am, is to pass on as much as I can to Essie.
At the precise moment of epiphany, there was no ray of light coming in through the clerestory window to splash onto the piano keys. Instead, George barfed immediately after I had that thought.
We’ve gone from pumpkin to Elsa to octopus to bat back to pumpkin. Pumpkin for a while. Now, we’re at penguin: Essie wants to be a penguin for Halloween. Since she has, essentially, no concept of time, we are struggling to articulate the importance of sticking with the costume once it has been ordered. When time has no meaning, Halloween is in the nebulous future, and there will always be time to order a different costume.
But here we are, the penguin costume ordered. Ess was telling me all about the hand-holes in the flippers. You know, so you can trick-or-treat.
Ok, I’m about to start posting an 11-month backlog of pictures and videos. By way of explanation: I usually am off by about three months, maximum, on posting stuff we have captured with our phones. But, last fall everything came together for us to invest in a Synology DS1517+, a network-attached file server. It took me months to set the entire thing up to my liking, including storing our Photos and iTunes libraries on sparse bundles. In the meantime, posting here was on hold as those libraries were in flux.
I actually ended up writing an app (README here) to automatically mount and unmount these disk images on demand.
Why take all this time? Ok, well Apple devices no longer have upgradeable storage, and the company knows their customers are accumulating vast quantities of pictures and videos, generated by phones. Every computer you have is filling up with your precious memories. So, you have two options if you want to stick with Apple (which I do; their stuff is nice): (1) pay a hilarious premium for large on-device storage or (2) pay monthly for cloud storage. Well I despise the rent-seeking going on in the tech industry so that takes out (2) and I refuse to feel like a sucker and go with (1). So, secret option (3) is to roll your own giant, network attached, locally available storage. Synology, ahoy!
So, that’s all set up now. Resuming picture posting… now.
Last night, there was time enough to go see Eighth Grade with Mykala. Time enough to go home and take the tire off the bike, drive it to the store, and buy its replacement. Time enough to put it on. Time enough to pedal through the dense, warm evening to pick-up Ess from my parent’s. Time enough to visit once I got there. Time enough to pedal us home, singing “This Land Is Your Land” most of the way.
So I was telling Ess that I forgot a library book at work today, and she’s thinking this through.
“So I should’ve looked through my stuff before I left work!”
“Yeah, you should have, Dada.”
“I have to keep track of my stuff.”
“And at work if you are not doing that, you might drop a tooth on it or get it dirty.”
Right now, you’ve been asleep for twelve hours in a row, and your parents are awake and puttering around, kind of wondering what to do with all this sleep we’ve gotten. Wondering when you’re planning on getting up.
It is our nine-year wedding anniversary. The dew points were near 80° today. I worked in Minneapolis, brought flowers home for Mykala. We had a summery dinner of vegan smoked apple sausage sage Field Roast sausages with potato salad and beans and then watched a little of Frozen and all of The Wrong Trousers and some of Chicken Run to stay out of the heat. Essie has awoken this morning and this afternoon with a head soaked in sweat — we assumed it was the heat, but tonight she told us she was scared of having dreams again. She’s becoming a master delayer, but this was clearly a very real fear. Mykala talked and talked with Ess, told her stories, helped her imagine us out together as a family on a beautiful day, riding bikes, having snacks, flying kites. Ess eventually picked out an octopus to take to bed in addition to her usual cadre.
I never imagined a nine-year wedding anniversary like this; never imagined it would be this lovely, sweet, romantic, low-key, memorable.
Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone
like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean
“treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes
people who are used to being treated like an authority
say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and
they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I
won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re
being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
